Turkey
Akdamar Island
A tenth-century Armenian church carved with biblical scenes floats alone on an island in Lake Van.
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 and holds the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, built between 915 and 921 AD by the architect-bishop Manuel for the Armenian king Gagik I of Vaspurakan. The exterior carries an extraordinary cycle of carved reliefs, Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, among the finest surviving medieval Armenian sculptural art, and fragmentary frescoes survive inside. Restored between 2005 and 2007 and opened as a museum, it heard an Armenian liturgy again in 2010, the first in 95 years. The almond orchards planted by its monks still flower each spring against the deep blue of the soda lake.
Solo
Standing alone before a thousand-year-old church on an island in a soda lake, reading biblical stories carved in stone, is the kind of solitary encounter with history that redefines a trip.
Couple
The ferry crossing, the island's quiet and the carved church create an atmosphere of reverent intimacy. Come in spring, as the almond trees bloom around the walls.
- The Cathedral of the Holy Cross, built 915 to 921 AD, wears carved biblical reliefs on its outside walls, a cycle unique in Armenian religious architecture.
- The carved church and the ruins of its monastery are the only buildings on the island.
- In 2010, an Armenian service was held here, the first time in 95 years, attended by thousands.
- The island's shoreline is smooth volcanic rock and white mineral deposits; the monks' almond trees still bloom each spring.
Tandırda Van balığı, the lake fish cleaned with the head left on, salted, then baked.
Van otlu peyniri, sheep's milk curd layered with sirmo and heliz herbs and aged in brine.
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