Yalnızçam Mountains

Yalnızçam, “the lonely pine”… Who gave a mountain this name, and is that lonely pine still there, or did it leave its name behind and go long ago? We don’t know. But the faint sadness in the name hardly feels out of place when you look at these ridges between Ardahan and Artvin; for here nature shows its generosity and its solitude with equal candor… Perhaps that pine chose to stand alone on the summit and loved to defy the wind; who knows…