Kars is a frontier city in northeastern Turkey, cold and austere, perched on a plateau at 1,800 metres. It spent decades as a Russian garrison town — the grid-plan streets and crumbling Baltic-style mansions still show it — and Orhan Pamuk set his novel Snow here, capturing the city's melancholy and isolation perfectly.
The real draw is Ani, the ruined medieval Armenian capital about 45 kilometres east on the border with modern Armenia. Once a city of 100,000 that rivalled Constantinople, Ani is now an eerie field of churches, walls, and broken palaces on a windswept plateau above the Akhurian River gorge. The Church of the Redeemer, split clean in half by lightning, is one of the most striking ruins in Turkey. The Cathedral, the Church of St Gregory, and the remains of the citadel are all worth the trip. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and rarely crowded.
Back in Kars, the castle above town offers good views, and the local speciality is kars gravyer — a hard cheese modelled on Swiss Gruyère, a legacy of the dairy traditions brought by Russian settlers. The city is also a starting point for the restored Eastern Express train route from Ankara, which has become popular in recent years.