Old Van

Foundations of the city destroyed in 1915, now an open field below the citadel

Walk down the back of the Van Fortress rock and you reach a wide, level plain dotted with low stone foundations and the ruins of two large mosques — the Hüsrev Paşa and Kaya Çelebi mosques, both Ottoman, both still partly standing. This is the site of Old Van: until 1915, a city of around 80,000 people, predominantly Armenian, with two cathedrals, dozens of churches, and a famous bazaar.

The site is open and free. The foundations of streets and houses can still be traced in the grass; in places, scattered pieces of carved stone and pottery come up out of the ground. It is a quiet, melancholy place that no one explains to you on site — which makes some advance reading useful before you visit.

things to do history landmark
A story
Until 1915, Van was a thriving Armenian-majority city with churches, schools, markets, and several thousand stone houses crowded below the fortress. During the Armenian genocide and the fighting that followed, the entire old city was burned and dynamited. The new city was rebuilt several kilometres east, and the old site was deliberately left empty.