Hakkari, Turkey — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Hakkari known for?

Walking the ranges around the provincial centre is the main draw, and a visitor's time in Hakkâri Province is spent on that ground rather than in the streets of the town. Colemêrg is the Kurdish name for it. Hakkâri Province has a Kurdish majority, and the Kurdish name sits alongside the Turkish one.

Where is Hakkari?

Mountains take up most of Hakkâri Province. The ranges around the provincial centre are what a visitor comes for, and they set the terms for everything else here, from where the villages sit to how long it takes to reach one from another. Van Province lies to the north. Şırnak Province holds the ground on the west, and those two are the neighbours the record names on the land side of the province.

Eastern Anatolia is the wider setting. Hakkâri sits within that region, well inland, and the mountain country filling the province is of a piece with the ground beyond its boundaries rather than an isolated block. Settlement follows the terrain.

Eight municipalities carry the administration while 140 villages and 313 hamlets are spread through the rest, so most named places in the province are small ones set well apart. Distance is measured in effort here. A province built of ranges does not offer straight lines between its settlements, and getting from Hakkâri to a village on the far side is a longer business than a map alone suggests.

Colemêrg names the same centre. The Kurdish word and the Turkish one point at one town in the middle of that mountain country.

What is Hakkari like?

Two names belong to the same town. Hakkâri is the form used in Turkish and Colemêrg the one used in Kurdish, and both refer to the administrative centre that sits in the middle of the province's mountains. A Kurdish majority lives here.

That is the demographic fact recorded for Hakkâri Province, and the double naming of its centre follows from it. Neither name displaces the other. The mountains shape daily life.

Villages set through the ranges of Hakkâri Province are separated by terrain rather than by distance alone, and a settlement pattern of 140 villages and 313 hamlets keeps most named places small. Turkish does the administrative work. It is the language of the eight municipalities and of the paperwork moving through them, and it sits alongside the Kurdish identity that the majority of the province holds.

Walking is the shared thread. What draws outsiders to Hakkâri is the chance to go up into the ranges, and that same country is where the province's villages stand, so both parties cross the same ground. The ranges are the constant.

Colemêrg keeps its own name through all of it.

What is the history of Hakkari?

Names carry what the record keeps. Hakkâri and Colemêrg have both attached to the same centre, the first in Turkish and the second in Kurdish, and that pairing is the most durable thing about the place's identity. Mountains kept the province apart.

Ground of this kind, ranged in every direction and reached from Van Province in the north or Şırnak Province in the west, has never been easy country to cross, and the province's past is bound up with that difficulty.

What is the climate of Hakkari?

The mountains decide the weather. Hakkâri Province is high, ranged country in Eastern Anatolia, and altitude rather than any nearby sea is what governs conditions in the villages and on the walking ground above them. Height varies across the province.

What a walker meets on the ranges above Hakkâri need not match what the town itself gets, and planning for the mountains rather than for the centre is the sensible way round in Colemêrg's country.

How do you get to Hakkari?

Two provinces open the way in. Van Province lies to the north and Şırnak Province to the west, and those are the directions overland travel into Hakkâri comes from, since the province sits deep in the ranges of Eastern Anatolia. The centre is the terminus.

Hakkâri city is where an approach ends before anything else begins, and onward movement to the villages and hamlets is arranged out of the town rather than from anywhere else.