Tourists in Kars

October 4, 2023

Our first job this morning was to book our train tickets. It was just over two kilometers of walking to the station in slightly less rain than we were expecting. The friendly ladies at the ticket office sorted us out efficiently and we then headed off to a few tourist attractions.

An old steam locomotive on the station platform.

Kars is the cheese capital of Turkey. Interestingly, the Afrikaans word for cheese is kaas which sounds a lot like Kars, especially if the Afrikaans speaker is inebriated.

There are a lot of buildings from Russia's last occupation of Kars.

The place where the tour busses stop. The citadel and castle on the hill with the Kümbet Cami, previously the Church of the Apostles, on the right.

The Kümbet Cami, or Domed Mosque, was built as the Armenian Church of the Twelve Apostles by the Armenian King Abas in 932 CE. It has changed hands more often than an old penny (twelve, according to the care taker who gave us a guided tour) and has also been a Catholic Cathedral, a Georgian Orthodox Church and a Russian Orthodox Church as well as a Mosque controlled by different Islamic rulers. At one stage it was even a petrol depot and then a museum before reverting to a Mosque in 1993.

Here's a rundown of its history:
Armenian Apostolic Cathedral (until 1065)
Mosque under various Islamic regimes (1579–1877)
Russian Orthodox Cathedral (1877–1918)
Mosque (1918–19)
Armenian Apostolic Church (1919–20)
Mosque briefly (1920s)
Petroleum depot (1950s)
Kars Museum (1964–78)
Mosque (1993–present)

Some marble tiles under the carpets that were laid during its Russian phase.

The sacristy in the background. Russians added bits on and there was even a Catholic confessional tagged on.

A new mihrab now occupies the southern doorway.

It was a stiff walk up to the citadel and the castle. Not much worth looking at apart from the lovely views over the city.

We crossed over an old stone bridge on our way back to our apartment. Originally built in the sixteenth century and then rebuilt two hundred years later after the original washed away.

Early to bed tonight because we need to be at the railway station by seven thirty tomorrow morning. Predicted temperature for tomorrow morning ? Zero degrees Celsius.

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