Van is a city in eastern Turkey’s Van Province, located on the eastern shore of Lake Van. The city has a long history as a major urban area. Archaeological excavations and surveys carried out in Van province indicate that the history of human settlement in this region goes back at least as far as 5000 BC.
The Tilkitepe Mound, which is on the shores of Lake Van and a few kilometres to the south of Van Castle, is the only source of information about the oldest culture of Van. It has been a large city since the first millennium BC, initially as the capital of Urartu in the 9th century BC and later as the center of the Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan.
Urartu (Assyrian: māt Urarṭu; Babylonian: Urashtu), corresponding to the biblical Kingdom of Ararat or Kingdom of Van (Urartian: Biai, Biainili) was an Iron Age kingdom centered on Lake Van in the Armenian Highlands. The heirs of Urartu are the Armenians and their successive kingdoms. In the trilingual Behistun inscription, carved in the order of Darius the Great of Persia, the country referred to as Urartu in Babylonian is called Armenia in Old Persian.
It remained an important center of Armenian culture until the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The province’s Armenian population was devastated during Armenian Genocide by the Young Turks. The end of World War I forced the Ottoman army to surrender its claim to Van, although it stayed in Turkish hands following the Turkish War of Independence. Today, Van has a Kurdish majority and a sizable Turkish minority.
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