Çavuştepe Castle

Çavuştepe Castle stands about twenty-five kilometres southeast of Van, on two hills at the western end of Bol Mountain. It looks over the Gürpınar plain and the road passing through it. The Urartian king Sarduri II, who reigned from 764 to 735 BC, had it built, and in Urartian times it was called Sardurihinili, meaning the city of Sardur. Turkish archaeologists have dug here since 1961.

The fortress is about a kilometre long and is divided into an Upper and a Lower Castle, joined at the central main gate. Strong walls and two ditches cut into the rock protect it. The Upper Castle, to the east, has a large rock platform and a square-planned porticoed temple of Haldi, the chief god of the Urartians. The Lower Castle, to the west, is larger. It has workshops, stone walls four to five metres high, a palace, storage rooms, cellars, a kitchen, cisterns, and a second temple, this one to the god Irmushini, as well as a structure called Uçkale, thought to have served a religious purpose.

About a kilometre to the north lies the castle's necropolis, where four types of grave have been identified: chamber tombs, urn burials, sarcophagi and simple earthenware graves. Illicit digging before 2017 badly damaged this cemetery.