Akdamar Island

The ferry cuts through Lake Van's alkaline blue and the church appears — a single stone building on a treeless island, its walls covered in carved biblical scenes so detailed they read like a stone comic strip. Almond trees bloom pink around it in spring. The silence, broken only by gulls and the slap of lake water on volcanic rock, is absolute.

Akdamar Island sits in the southwestern reach of Lake Van, Turkey's largest lake, and holds the Church of the Holy Cross, built in 921 AD by the Armenian King Gagik I of Vaspurakan. The church's exterior is carved with an extraordinary cycle of reliefs — Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale — that represent one of the finest surviving examples of medieval Armenian sculptural art. The interior preserves fragmentary frescoes depicting Christ and the apostles. Restored and reopened for occasional services in 2010, the church is now a museum. The island's almond orchards, planted centuries ago by the monks who lived here, still flower each spring, framing the church in pale blossoms against the deep blue of the soda lake.