Erzurum
Eastern Anatolian City At About 1,900 Metres With Seljuk And Ilkhanid Medreses On The UNESCO Tentative List, And The Palandoken Ski Mountain Above It · Erzurum, Erzurum
Erzurum sits at nineteen hundred metres on the eastern plateau and is the coldest city in Turkiye - temperatures below minus thirty have been recorded - which shapes everything about it. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was rich enough to build, and what survives is a concentration of Seljuk and Ilkhanid stonework that few cities can match: the Cifte Minareli Medrese with its twin brick minarets and a portal carved with a tree of life, the Yakutiye Medresesi of 1310, and the three Seljuk tomb towers standing together nearby. The Great Mosque of 1179 is plain, enormous and dark. In the bedesten they still sell oltu tasi, a black jet mined nearby and carved into beads. And directly above the city is Palandoken, the most snow-sure ski mountain in the country, with the lifts starting where the suburbs stop - which is an arrangement that almost no other city anywhere in the world can offer.
Cifte Minareli Medrese, Yakutiye, Erzurum, Erzurum, Erzurum, Turkiye
The city is open at all hours; the medreses and the citadel keep daytime hours with a weekly closing day, and the Great Mosque is a working mosque. Palandoken runs roughly December to April depending on snow, with lifts on published hours. Winter here is severe and some sites shorten their days considerably. The bedesten trades through the day.