After Aghtamar, the city of Van itself. And first of all, of course, the Van Museum, where twenty-three rooms hold the entire history of the region, from the Palaeolithic to the Republic.
At the entrance there is an impressive chronological chart: epochs, powers, cultures, artefacts. Admirably clear. Here is the history of Van as the museum tells it:
- Palaeolithic (500,000–11,500 BC)
- Neolithic (11,500–5400 BC)
- Chalcolithic (5400–3200 BC)
- Early Bronze Age (3200–2000 BC)
- Middle Bronze Age (2000–1400/1300 BC)
- Late Bronze to Early Iron Age (1300–900 BC)
- Urartu (850/840–600 BC) — a formidable kingdom centred precisely here, at Tushpa, now a district of Van
- Achaemenid Empire (546–331 BC)
- Parthian Empire (247 BC–AD 224)
- Armenian kingdom of Tigranes the Great (95–55 BC)
- Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 395) — as an influence on the region
- Sasanian Empire (224–642)
- Byzantine Empire (395–1453) — formal overlordship in certain periods
- Umayyad Caliphate (661–750)
- Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258)
- Vaspurakan (908–1021) — an Armenian vassal kingdom centred on the shore of the lake
- Shah-Armens (1100–1207)
- Ayyubids (1207–1229) — a Kurdish dynasty
- Ilkhanate (1257–1344) — Mongol rule
- Jalayirids (1335–1432)
- Emirate of Hakkâri, founded by Izz al-Din Shir (1315–1507)
- Kara Koyunlu, the Black Sheep (1375–1467), and Ak Koyunlu, the White Sheep (1467–1503) — Oghuz Turks, named for the device on their banners
- Safavids (1503–1555)
- Ottoman Empire (1514/1555–1923) — Van became a frontier province
- Republic of Türkiye (from 1923)
A Chart is Also a Dictionary
Behind every one of those names lie volumes of history: wars, migrations, rises and extinctions. But read the list slowly and it turns into something other than a queue of landlords. It becomes a record of what people called themselves, and of who they wished to be taken for.
Consider the Shah-Armens. A Turkic dynasty out of Ahlat, at the western end of this same lake—styling themselves, in Persian, Shāh-i Arman: Shahs of Armenia. Turks ruling with a Persian title over an Armenian country, and advertising the fact in their own name. Three languages in one word, and not one of them apologising.
Consider the Black Sheep and the White Sheep. Two Oghuz confederations who took their names from the beasts on their standards, in the plainest way imaginable, and who between them ran this region for well over a century. There is something bracing about a dynasty content to be known as the black sheep.
And consider Van itself. The name is generally traced to Biainili, which is what the kingdom we call Urartu called itself. “Urartu” is what the Assyrians called them—an outsider’s label that stuck, as outsiders’ labels do. The insiders’ name lost almost every sound it had over three thousand years and came out the other end as one syllable, attached to a lake. The empire is gone; its self-description is still on the road signs.
The Arithmetic of a Wall Chart
There is also the matter of proportion, which no timeline can help giving away. Half a million years of Palaeolithic get one band. Urartu gets two and a half centuries and the name of a whole civilisation. The Republic gets one line and a century, and stands at the end like a full stop.
And between the last two bands there is a seam. The Ottoman band runs to 1923; the Republic begins in 1923; and the years in the middle—when this city was besieged, burned and emptied of most of the people who had built the churches on the lake—do not get a band of their own, because a chart of powers and cultures has no notation for what happens to a population. That is not a fault peculiar to Van. It is what timelines are for: they are continuous by design, and continuity is the one thing that did not happen here.
Which is, in the end, why the museum works. Twenty-three rooms of pots, weapons, coins, texts and clothing—things made by hands, not by dynasties. The chart tells you who was in charge. The objects tell you who was here.
Go, by all means. It is a place where the past genuinely comes back to life.
