Ishak Pasha Palace: Turkey's Most Remote Ottoman Palace

Most Ottoman palaces were built where the power was. This one was built where the money passed through. İshak Paşa Sarayı stands on a rock shelf above Doğubayazıt in Ağrı province, a few kilometres from the Iranian border, looking down on the caravan road that carried silk west for a thousand years. Whoever held this ridge taxed that road.

It is the kind of building that does not photograph well from close up and is unforgettable from a distance: a walled complex of pale stone on an empty slope, with the Ararat massif behind it and nothing else in sight.

A hundred years to build

Construction began in 1685 under Çolak Abdi Pasha of the Çıldıroğulları, a hereditary Kurdish dynasty who governed the region on the Ottomans' behalf. It was finished in 1784 by his descendant İshak Pasha, whose name it carries. An inscription over the harem door carries that date.

A century of building by a provincial dynasty on the edge of three empires produced something no imperial architect in Istanbul would have drawn. The plan is Ottoman. The decoration borrows from Persia. The stone-carving and the cupolas are the work of Armenian and Georgian craftsmen, and the whole thing sits in a North Mesopotamian tradition that has nothing to do with the Bosphorus. UNESCO, which placed it on its tentative World Heritage list in 2000, describes exactly this mixture as the reason it matters.

What to look for

The palace had its own central heating system, running hot air through channels in the walls and floors. At 2,000 metres in a place where winter temperatures drop far below freezing, this was not a luxury, and in the eighteenth century it was remarkable anywhere.

Look for the ceremonial gate, the most elaborately carved surface in the building; the mosque, whose dome is intact and whose acoustics still work; the library; the harem courtyard; and the tombs. There was a bakery, a dungeon and water piped in from the hills. It was designed to function as a small town under siege.

The roof, and an honest warning

The palace was a roofless ruin for most of the twentieth century. Restoration work in the 2000s added a modern roof and a wood-and-glass shelter over parts of the complex, intended to stop further water damage.

It has divided opinion ever since. It does protect the stonework. It also changes how the building reads: some interiors now feel enclosed and contemporary in a way they never were. Go knowing this, and you will not be disappointed by it. Go expecting an untouched ruin and you will spend the visit comparing it to the photographs in your head.

How to visit

Check current opening hours and the entry fee before travelling; both change, and winter hours are shorter. Bring a layer more than you think you need, because the wind on that shelf is constant and the altitude makes it cold even in summer.

Almost nobody comes here for the palace alone. It sits naturally on a route with Lake Van, the Ishak Pasha ridge, the Ani ruins and the Armenian church on Akdamar Island, which is how our Eastern Anatolia tour is built. The distances out here are long and the roads are quiet; that is part of what makes it feel the way it does.

One last thing worth saying plainly. People still ask whether eastern Turkey is safe to travel in, and the honest answer takes more than a sentence, so we wrote it out in is eastern Turkey safe. The short version is that Doğubayazıt sees visitors all season and the practical difficulties here are distance and weather, not danger.