Kayalıdere, known as the Kale Şehri, the castle city, is an Urartian settlement on a small hill on the shore of the Alpaslan-2 reservoir, in the village of Kayalıkaya, about twenty kilometres from Varto and forty from the centre of Muş. Its huge stone blocks are what catch the eye, and the castle remains are in sound condition; the city is dated to the reign of the Urartian king Sarduri II, between 764 and 735 BC.
The site was found in 1965 in an excavation by the British Institute of Archaeology under Seton Lloyd and C. A. Burney, and the work uncovered a castle, a temple, a wine cellar and burials.
The temple has a stone-paved courtyard. What was found in it — small bronze lion figurework, buttons, arrowheads, bronze pins and pieces of a belt decorated with a lion hunt — is not kept here: it is displayed at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara.
Getting there
- Access
- On the shore of the Alpaslan-2 reservoir, about twenty kilometres from Varto in Muş.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Muş as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -6.8 °C in January to 25.1 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June and September; rainfall is heaviest in March (109 mm) and lightest in August (6 mm). Long-term means for 1964-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
