Living in our middle-class Moda neighborhood, surrounded by the beauty of the sea and indulged by the delicious varieties of food and drink so near at hand, tends to cloud our view of Turkey as a whole. That’s why it’s good from time to time to rebalance our perspective by spending a few days in a different part of Anatolia, one far from the cosmopolitan delights of the seaside towns and cities. For that purpose. the northeastern section of the country, especially the districts containing the cities of Erzurum and Kars, are an excellent choice. These are the borderlands where the landscapes of mountains and steppe remind us that over the centuries it was through here that the waves of Selcuk and Ottoman Turks and the Mongol hordes from Central Asia passed to conquer and settle Asia Minor.