Artvin & Çoruh Valley

Someone arriving in Artvin for the first time asks not where the city was built, but how it holds on. On the slopes of the deep canyon cut by the Çoruh, houses climb upward, standing on one another’s shoulders; streets turn into stairs, stairs into slopes, and slopes melt into the sky… Anyone who sets out to find flat ground in this city will, I suspect, soon give up looking.