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    If you ever have the chance to visit the Eastern part of Turkey you must visit Van. It is a city situated in the Van Province and it hides an old, rich and complicated history.   The place is known as the first largest city and the capital of the URARTU population since the first millennium BC, and also being the centre of of the Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan in the 9 th century BC.   Armenians, Persians, Ottomans, Assyrians, Yezidis, Kurds and Gypsies – all of these ethnicities lived here together from time to time, fighting for autonomy.   Van has often been called "The Pearl of the East" because of the beauty of its surrounding landscape. An old Armenian proverb in the same sense is "Van in this world, paradise in the next." This phrase has been slightly modified in Turkish as dünyada Van, ahirette iman or "Van for this world, faith for the next."(Wikipedia : Van- Turkey).   There was a lot of war for power ...

      If I would not get the opportunity to see Hakkari through an Youth in Action project, I probably would have never visit ed this blessed town, settled in the middle of the mountains. Hakkari is a place situated in the South East corner of Turkey, close to the border with Iraq and Iran.   It is composed of a Kurdish and Assyrian population and has approximately 57,844 people.     The history of this place takes your breath away. It was a refuge for the persecuted Christian Assyrians who ran away   in   the mountains to protect themselves against the Timurlane occupation (Turko-Mongolian   emir) in the 14 th century. Then in the 19 th century, they   were conquered by the Kurdish people and were turned into slaves or executed. There were also many conflicts between the Kurdish population an d the O t toman (later, Turkish) control. Hakkari was considered and it is still seen as an unsafe p...