The story
Van Culture Road Festival in Van
The Van Culture Road Festival is Van's stop on the Turkiye Kultur Yolu Festivali, held for the third time in 2026 as the tenth stop of that year's national calendar. Running nine days from 11 to 19 July and opened at the Van Museum, it staged around 163 events built around the city's roughly seven-thousand-year layered history beside Lake Van.
Van sits beside the largest lake in Turkey, a soda lake so alkaline that little survives in its waters beyond a single hardy fish species, in a region that officials at a recent festival opening described as carrying nearly seven thousand years of continuous settlement.