Ani

Ani stands on a high, triangular plateau in eastern Anatolia, and the first thing to understand about it is the silence. Here, between deep river gorges, lay the capital of Bagratid Armenia from 961 to 1045 - a city that under King Gagik I may have held around 100,000 people, rivalling the great cities of its age. Its nickname, "the city of 1,001 churches", is a poetic exaggeration, but not by as much as it sounds: archaeologists have counted some fifty churches, more than thirty cave chapels and twenty smaller chapels. Today the grass plateau is empty, and the churches stand alone and far apart, the colour of rust and honey against a huge sky.

The architecture is the reason to come. The Cathedral, completed around 1001 by the architect Trdat, uses pointed arches and ribbed vaulting that anticipate the Gothic of western Europe by generations - a building that looks far younger than it is. The Church of the Holy Redeemer, built around 1035 to house a fragment of the True Cross, was a nineteen-sided drum crowned by a dome until a storm in 1957 brought half of it down - what remains is a cross-section of a building, sliced cleanly through as if for an architecture lesson. The small Church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents, of 1215, keeps the finest wall paintings on the site, whole fresco cycles still holding their colour under the open sky of the plateau. The Menuchihr Mosque, associated with the Shaddadid ruler Manuchihr and dated by most to between 1072 and 1086, stands for the city's later history; scholars still argue whether it began life as a mosque or as an earlier Armenian palace.

Ani's fall was slow. It passed to Byzantium in 1045, was taken by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan after a 25-day siege in 1064, was sacked by the Mongols in 1236 and shaken by an earthquake in 1319; as trade routes shifted, the city emptied, and by the seventeenth century it was abandoned. The long line of walls on the northern side survives, and visitors still enter through the Lion Gate. The deep gorge of the Akhurian (Arpaçay) river forms the edge of the site, and the border with Armenia runs along it, so the far bank is another country. UNESCO inscribed Ani as a World Heritage Site in 2016.

Getting there

Ani lies about 44 km east of Kars, the nearest Turkish city, at an elevation of around 1,340 metres; the nearest airport on the Turkish side is Kars Airport (KSY), about 40 km away. A good road runs from Kars to the village of Ocaklı, from where a short lane leads to the entrance; most visitors come by taxi or on a tour from Kars and return the same day.