My plane, having crossed Anatolia, West to East, it seemed to spend forever descending through the snow clouds over Kars. Then, all of a rush, we were swishing along the snow smothered landing strip. We pulled up beside a great green military plane and deplaned, as the Americanism has it. I took a taxi ride with a jumpy chauffeur into Kars for my hotel. I detaxied with relief at my little hotel.

Later that evening, I headed up to the higher streets overlooking the city- Ataturk, among them. Names that feature in Orhan’s Pamuk’s novel Snow (Kar), set in the much darker and downer Kars of the early 90’s. A little snowstorm was blowing and I stood on a street corner with my back to one of the old, sombre Baltic buildings just watching the swirl of the white stuff. (Joyce, in Araby, from Dubliners, refers to the ‘brown, imperturbable faces’ of the houses on Richmond Street, Dublin. Close. And very close in Kars). The Baltic buildings, mostly built with basalt, hark back to the Russian occupation of Kars (1878-1918).  They are the architectural jewels of Kars, studding the streets here and there with there, well, brown, imperturbable presence. Through the chill cold dark I could hear the Adhan, the call to prayer, at early evening as I walked along. A Kangal eyed me curiously as I made my way up the street. I was alone now, with not a sinner – or a saint – on the street. In the feeble, yellowish light of the streetlamps, the snow seemed like a special effect laid on for curious traveller.

I took a turn to the right and headed down a sloping sreet towards Kars Castle. At that part where the street surrenders to the plaza below the castle mount, I dug my hands into my pockets and decided it was time to head back to the warmth of the hotel. A little reality was enough for one day. It had taken the Ottomans a couple of centuries to cross from the eastern borders of Anatolia to the west (Istanbul). I had done it in two hours. I was culturelagged. I wondered idly how cold it was. Over the next few weeks, I would learn. The temperature would be between -10 and -20, during the night. On more than one morning, I walked out after Kahvalti (Turkish breakfast – another K) into -10. It was bracing and it was a treat, if you like that sort of thing, as my late mother liked to say. But when I found my breath almost freezing inside me, I took to wearing a duckbill Covid mask during my early morning walks. It warmed up the air before it was drawn down into my lungs. Or so it seemed anyway. And my face was less like a block of ice when I returned after my walk to the hotel.

One day, deciding to Google map instead of taking a taxi, I ploughed through another snowstorm to Kars museum on the outskirts of the city. One of the museum’s guides kindly opened the door and hooshed me inside to defreeze. In the warm world of the museum, I marvelled at the ancient artefacts of the Urartian culture  whose heyday was in the 8^th and 7^th centuries, BC. There would be more Urartian material in the Van museum a few weeks later. I thought of the renowned Irish Assyriologist Dr Edward Hincks and his paper on the Urartian inscriptions of Van, published in 1849. A Church of Ireland minister sitting in a manse in a coastal town in the North of Ireland, toiling over a dead language from a land he would never actually see.

When I had finished my visit, following the guide’s advice, I caught one of the stout little buses that trundle along the frozen streets of cars, back into the merkaz –  the centre of the town. Then I made my way towards the hotel, stopping only to wolf down a gorgeous local soup in a tiny little restaurant in the old market area. Soup, or so it seemed that day, is one of the perennial answers to snow. In this case Mercimek Çorbası – lentil soup flavoured with spices.

Back in the hotel, I mentally mapped a couple of Orhan Pamuk’s streets against my own memory. I was finally starting to get the hang of the few streets around the hotel in dazzling, disorientating neon-lit dark. Sometimes the feet remember more than the mind.