Van, Turkey

Overview

Van is a city in eastern Turkey, on the eastern shore of Lake Van. Its position beside the lake connects the modern city to one of the ancient Near East’s major political centers. The kingdom of Urartu was based on Lake Van, and its capital, Tushpa, stood at the site of Van’s fortress. The city later formed part of the history of ancient Armenia. These successive histories remain visible in the names attached to the area: Urartu in Assyrian records, Ararat in the Hebrew Bible, and Van in the modern city and lake.

Van also occupies a distinct place in Jewish history. It was among the Armenian cities with a substantial ancient Jewish population, sustained in part by Jewish immigration during the Hellenistic period. When the Persian ruler Shapur II campaigned in Armenia in 360–370 CE, Jews from Van were deported to Iran. In the recorded deportations, Jews formed the majority of the exiles from Van. The city’s history therefore links the development of Armenian urban life to Jewish settlement and to the forced movements of people between Armenia and the Persian Empire.

In later centuries, Van remained important to Armenian cultural memory and became part of the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish republic. The Armenian genocide during the First World War, the city’s position within Kurdistan, and a destructive earthquake in 2011 are central to its modern history. Van’s ancient fortress, the lake and Armenian monuments nearby make that history part of the city’s present landscape.

Geography

Lake Van defines the city’s setting. Van stands on its eastern side, with the fortress rock and the older settlement near the shore. The lake and surrounding highlands made the area a recognizable center long before the emergence of the modern city. Ancient accounts of Urartu consistently place its political heart around Lake Van, while descriptions of biblical Ararat refer to a wider mountainous land. The lake is consequently more than a feature beside Van: it is the geographic point through which several names and periods of the region’s history can be connected.

Eastern Anatolia’s mountains also shaped movement through the area. The historical lands called Armenia extended far beyond the borders of the present Republic of Armenia, and much of that older geography lies within Kurdistan in Turkey. Van belongs to this wider Armenian and Kurdish highland setting. Its position helps explain why accounts of the city lead outward to northern Iraq, Iran and the routes between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Names used for these larger regions changed over time; the location of Lake Van and the city beside it remained a point of reference.

The lake setting also preserves a record of Armenian Christianity. The Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island, built in the tenth century, is a prominent monument in Lake Van. Its restoration and reopening in 2007 brought attention to an Armenian building whose significance extends beyond the city. Together with the fortress at Van, the church illustrates the depth of settlement around the lake and the distinct periods represented in its surviving architecture. Both sites connect present-day Van to the older Armenian and Urartian worlds without making those periods interchangeable.

Ancient and biblical history

The kingdom of Urartu emerged around Lake Van during the ninth century BCE. Known as Bia(i)nili in its own records and Urartu in Assyrian sources, it grew from smaller kingdoms into a major rival of Assyria. Tushpa, at Van, served as its capital. Fortification of the capital and expansion across the highlands gave the kingdom a political reach much wider than the lake basin. The city’s importance in this period came from its role at the center of a state, rather than from the later borders of Turkey or Armenia.

Urartu’s history is documented in Assyrian records and inscriptions from the region. Its rulers expanded while Assyria was weak, but renewed Assyrian power brought major reverses. Around 743 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III defeated a Urartian army and then besieged Tushpa without taking it. Sargon II’s campaign of 714 BCE captured Musasir, an important religious center, and further weakened Urartu’s position. The kingdom continued after these campaigns. By the sixth century BCE, however, its former territory had passed into a different political order. These changes explain why the same landscape appears under different names in records from successive empires.

Ararat is the biblical name associated with Urartu. Genesis 8:4 places Noah’s ark on the “mountains of Ararat”; II Kings 19:37 and Jeremiah 51:27 also use the name. In these passages, Ararat refers to a land or mountainous area connected to the ancient kingdom based on Lake Van. Genesis names mountains in the plural, rather than identifying one particular peak. Later traditions associated the account with a specific mountain, but the biblical name also preserves a memory of the wider Urartian region. Reading Ararat as a regional name clarifies the connection between the biblical texts and Van’s ancient setting.

Van subsequently lay within the history of ancient Armenia. The names Ararat and Armenia could coexist in descriptions of the same broad highland world, even as political rule and the populations of its cities changed. Under Armenian dynasties, urban centers retained elements of Hellenistic culture and participated in networks linking Armenia to neighboring kingdoms. Van was one of those Armenian cities. Its later Jewish population must be understood within this history of settlement and movement, rather than as a separate episode detached from the city’s ancient past.

Jewish history

Van had a substantial Jewish community in antiquity. Jewish settlement in Armenian cities developed through immigration during the Hellenistic period and continued under later Armenian rulers. The growth of cities and trade provided settings in which Jews established communities. Van is named among the cities associated with this ancient population. Its Jewish history belongs to the broader history of Jews in Armenia, while the account of the fourth-century deportations identifies Van specifically.

In 360–370 CE, Shapur II’s Persian conquest brought mass deportations from Armenian cities to Iran. Jews from Van were among those removed. The chronicler Faustus Byzantinus recorded Van in his account of the deportations and gave aggregate figures of 83,000 Jewish families and 81,000 Armenian families deported from five cities. Those totals are exaggerated and should not be treated as a census. The comparison within the account nevertheless identifies a significant feature of Van’s population: Jews formed the majority of the recorded exiles from Van, as they did from Eruandashat and Nakhichevan.

The distinction between the figures and the event matters. Faustus’s totals cannot establish the precise number of people living in Van or the exact number deported from it. They do record a deportation that affected Jews alongside other inhabitants of Armenia, and they place Jews in the majority of Van’s exiles. Shapur II’s campaigns thus mark both a rupture in Van’s Jewish community and a connection between that community and Jewish settlement farther east. Accounts of the period describe deportees being moved into the Persian Empire, including its Iranian interior.

Van’s experience also shows why the ancient Jewish history of Armenia cannot be reduced to communities within the borders of today’s Armenian state. The cities named in the deportation accounts belonged to a historically wider Armenia. Jewish life followed the region’s cities, political changes and routes of migration. Later medieval descriptions present a different pattern, with smaller Armenian cities and less room for distinct Jewish communities. The ancient record of Van remains significant because it names both the city and the Jewish majority among those expelled from it during Shapur II’s campaigns.

Modern history

Van’s modern history took shape under Ottoman rule and through the upheavals that accompanied the empire’s end. The city was part of the Armenian homeland represented by the Lake Van area and its monuments. During the First World War, the Armenian genocide transformed that setting. Armenians from Van were among those deported; a photograph from the summer of 1915 records bodies of deportees from Van who died of disease near Etchmiadzin. The destruction and displacement of Armenian communities changed the human landscape around the lake as well as the city’s place in Armenian memory.

The establishment of the Turkish republic placed Van within the modern Turkish state. Its older fortress and Armenian monuments remained, while the political and demographic setting around them changed. The Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island is a visible example of that layered history. Restored and reopened in 2007, it preserves a major work of Armenian architecture beside a city long associated with Armenian history. Attention to the church also reflects the continuing importance of how historical places are protected and understood.

Van has faced natural disaster as well as political upheaval. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the area on 23 October 2011, killing more than 600 people, injuring more than 4,000 and leaving thousands of buildings uninhabitable. Relief and rebuilding drew support from beyond the city. The Turkish Jewish community, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee contributed to a replacement primary school in a village near Van. Dedicated in 2012, the school was named for Selahattin Ülkümen, a Turkish diplomat who saved Jewish families during the Second World War. The project connected the city’s recovery to an act of Jewish and Turkish civic cooperation.

Earthquake risk remains part of life in the wider province. A 2020 earthquake centered across the Iranian border caused deaths and injuries in Van province’s Başkale district. Such events underscore the practical importance of the region’s terrain to contemporary Van. The city’s identity rests on ancient sites and historical memory, but its residents also face the immediate work of maintaining homes, schools and services in an earthquake-prone area.

Security

Van lies within the wider geography of Turkey’s conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. That conflict has involved Kurdish political rights, armed activity and Turkish security policy over decades. It has also affected municipal government. After the March 2019 local elections, Turkish authorities removed the elected mayors of Van and two other majority Kurdish cities and installed appointed officials. The removal made Van one of the places where national security policy and local political representation met directly.

Events beyond Van influence this security setting. Turkey has treated the PKK’s presence in Iraq and organizations linked to it in Syria as connected parts of a regional problem. It prohibited the PKK-linked Democratic Union Party from advancing west of Kobani, while the party’s effort to join its Syrian cantons could advance the PKK’s goals in Turkey. These developments do not make Van a Syrian battlefield. They show why security policy in eastern Turkey is discussed alongside developments across Turkey’s borders.

A renewed peace effort altered the regional discussion in 2025. On 27 February, imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan called for the organization to disarm and dissolve. The Kurdistan Regional Government offered to help advance Turkey’s peace process, reflecting the conflict’s effects in Iraq as well as Turkey. The PKK later announced that it would disband and, in October, said it was withdrawing fighters from Turkey. These announcements marked steps in a process whose consequences extend across the region. For Van, they form part of the national setting in which Kurdish political participation and local government operate.

Present day

Present-day Van is both a Turkish city and a place with a longer history than the state borders around it. Lake Van, the fortress of ancient Tushpa and the Armenian church on Akdamar Island give residents and visitors access to distinct periods in one geographic setting. Urartu explains the city’s early political importance; the biblical name Ararat preserves a connection to that kingdom; Armenian history records the city’s later cultural setting; and the deportations under Shapur II document a substantial Jewish community.

Those histories also call for precision. The biblical “mountains of Ararat” describe a region, not a named peak in the Genesis passage. Faustus Byzantinus’s totals for fourth-century deportees are exaggerated, even as his account identifies Jews as the majority of the exiles from Van. The Armenian city of antiquity and the city in Turkey today occupy the same Lake Van setting across very different eras. Van’s significance lies in that continuity of place and in the many peoples whose histories meet there.