Note 2 — Chapter II · TO LAKE VAN

The little township does not possess more than about a hundred houses; yet it is the seat of a Kaimakam whose administrative area includes Patnotz, and meets the boundary of the vilayet of Van. It stands on rising ground, at some little distance from the bank of the river, facing the lofty hills which rise on the opposite shore, and push the Murad towards the west. It is about equidistant from Karakilisa and from Patnotz, a ride of some twenty-three miles from the first, and of twenty-eight miles from the second. The inhabitants are for the greater part Karapapakhs, imported into the district after the last Russo-Turkish war. They can now boast of some 400 houses in the caza, or a population of about 3000 souls. Agriculturists by profession, and by temperament robbers, they appear to be in an extremely prosperous state. Their aged chief conversed with me, and imparted several particulars which I had not known before. He told me that they had emigrated from the province of Chaldir, being dissatisfied with the Russian Government, who had not treated them well in the matter of lands. The Sultan had received them back, settled them in these fertile regions, and allotted to them as much ground as they required. I questioned him with some care about the original seats of his tribe; he was emphatic that they had always lived in Chaldir.2 Taylor tells us that they became possessed of the villages and lands in that province, and in the neighbouring province of Kars, which had been abandoned by the Armenians who followed the army of Marshal Paskevich upon his evacuation of Turkish territory in 1829. According to the chief, their original possessions in Transcaucasia extended from Daghestan to Chaldir. The tribe supplies a regiment of Hamidiyeh for this caza; the head men were resplendent in their new uniforms, of which they seemed very proud. Both here and at Karakilisa I was impressed by the diversity of type which is found among them. Mingled with physiognomies of purely Tartar or Persian character were faces which, with their lighter hair and fairer complexion, might have belonged to a group of Circassians. With the exception of the shops, single-storeyed stone buildings, the houses in Tutakh are the usual loose agglomerations of earth and rough stone. The great majority of the population in the caza are Kurds; a scattering of Armenians are entirely at the mercy of their rapacious Mussulman neighbours.