Van Fortress

Van Fortress crowns a long limestone ridge on the eastern shore of Lake Van, just west of the city of Van in eastern Turkey. This was Tushpa, the capital of Urartu, the kingdom that rose in the highlands around the lake in the ninth century BCE and rivalled Assyria for two centuries. The oldest structure on the rock, a wall of huge stone blocks at its western foot, carries inscriptions of King Sarduri I, who founded the citadel in the second half of the ninth century BCE.

Urartian kings carved royal tombs into the rock, chambers cut deep into the cliff, and inscriptions recording their campaigns. After Urartu's fall, the region passed into the Iranian world: the highlands became part of the Median and then the Achaemenid empire, as the satrapy of Armenia. On the southern face of the rock, about twenty metres above the ground, is a smoothed panel bearing an inscription of Xerxes in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It records that his father, Darius, had ordered the niche cut but left it without writing, and that Xerxes had the inscription carved.

Over the following centuries the rock was held by Armenian kings, Arabs, Seljuks, Kurdish emirs, Safavids and Ottomans, who rebuilt its walls and added mosques and towers. At its southern foot lay the old walled city of Van, with its churches, mosques and markets, home to Armenians, Kurds and Turks. In 1915, during the First World War and the deportations and massacres of the Armenian population, the old city was destroyed. Today its site is an open field of ruins, and the fortress above is visited for its views over the lake.