Forgotten Georgian church
The ostensible reason for taking the long 25km drive along an unasphalted road from Kağızman to Çengili is the ruined Georgian church that looms above the village. In reality you might want to make this journey anyway just to relish the stunning scenery along the way.
The road starts to climb and weave its way through hairpin bends almost as soon as you leave Kağızman and at once the vista of magnificent mountains and vast, empty landscape, emerald green in early summer, opens out to win your heart.
You pass through three small villages along the way: Karakuş, Akören and Taşbilek. Çengili is the last and the largest.
All the villages seem to belong to a Turkey that has vanished from the rest of the country. Houses are built of fieldstone with mud roofs. Courtyards are fenced in with stones topped off with the manure patties used for fuel; pyramids of patties are also piled up inside the courtyards. Vast herds of cows and sheep roam the edges of the villages, together with chickens, geese and turkeys. You’ll even see groups of donkeys, a rare sight elsewhere these days.
The downside of the rusticity is that the villages lack plumbed-in water so you’ll see the distressing sight of women with water containers yoked across their shoulders as they wend their way to the local çeşme (fountain).
The church at Çengili makes a striking, almost grotesque sight, soaring above the village and skewed at a slight angle. It’s an austere 13th-century structure, easy to label Armenian but actually Georgian as evidenced by the inscription above and beside the entrance. Décor is limited to the tops and bottoms of the columns and the windows. In 2011 it was being used as a cowshed.
The road to Çengili continues over a hill beyond the village and ends at Çengili Gölü, a peaceful, limpid lake, reed-fringed and with absolutely no development (or shade) of any kind around it.
Transport info
Without your own car you will need to hire a taxi in Kağızman to get to Çengili and, perhaps, to Kecivan Kalesi (Castle) too.
