The majestic scenery of eastern Anatolia is the setting for this ambitious tour, which, while remaining firmly within the borders of modern-day Turkey, encompasses an extraordinary range of historic and contemporary cultures. From the broad river valleys of the south to the vertiginous Alpine passes in the north, this part of Anatolia has always been a crossroads, whether for Abraham, patriarch of the three Near Eastern faiths, as he followed the Fertile Crescent from Ur to Canaan, or for the Greek mercenaries hired to fight for the Persian king Cyrus, who had to make their way back to their homeland across the Anatolian plateau and the Pontic Mountains.

The tour journeys through the cradle of civilization between the Euphrates and the Tigris, where human settlement in the towns of Urfa and Harran goes back to the fifth millennium BC. It includes a Neolithic religious sanctuary, Urartian citadels and Roman frontier towns, Byzantine churches and Seljuk mosques and madrassas. It reveals cultures and civilizations which have almost disappeared from the historical record – early Christian monasteries of the Tur Abdin, Georgian churches of Tao-Klarjeti and the lost Armenian city of Ani. It even takes in the sites of two mediaeval coronations – of the Armenian king Gagik Artzruni on the island of Aktamar in 908 and the Byzantine emperor of Trebizond, Alexius III Comnenos, at the monastery of Sümela in 1349.

Far from being backward-looking, though, this tour offers a remarkable opportunity to meet people trying to forge their present-day identities: the Kurds of Diyarbakir, the Syrian Orthodox monks and nuns of the Tur Abdin and of course, the Muslim population of Turkey itself, whose efforts to work out what it means to live in a secular Islamic country are and will continue to be of huge significance for us all.

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