Kars Castle

“The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver.” With this sentence Orhan Pamuk opens his novel ‘Snow’, in Turkish ‘Kar’, bringing his hero Ka to a city beneath the snow: Kars. Kar, Ka, Kars… Isn’t it astonishing that a writer, even while playing with words, could capture a city’s soul so closely? Perhaps not; for Kars needs only one word to describe itself: kar, snow.