59784 nightfall. The border town of Kars lies in the eastern edgelands of Turkey, as Anatolia rises up to meet the border with Armenia. It has long elicited in me a feeling of remoteness and melancholy, no doubt the effect of the many romantic travelogues I read as a youth. In these, the town invariably played the character of a wistful, unsettling stopping point on the way to greater adventures.

Kars serves as a stopping point for us, too, on our way to the ruins of Armenian Ani (about which more herein elsewhere). We arrive late, but after dinner, I find my pre-adolescent remembrances of those travelogues surging, and so I wander the depopulated streets with my camera, finding views, as I struggle to recall the feelings the name of Kars once brought up in me.