I'm a little late, but anyway - I spent a couple of weeks in 2009 travelling around Eastern Turkey with a mate and visited Ani. Now I've seen a fair amount of impressive ruins in my time - Tunisia, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel - but I have to say Ani was one of the most haunting and evocative places I've ever been. We wandered around the site - which is not small - for a couple of hours, and the only other people we saw in that time were three other tourists and a bored teenage boy steering around a few hungry looking cows. There were stone blocks strewn around with ornate carvings, which in the UK would be in a museum, but instead the cows tramped amongst them chewing the grass. Across the border in Armenia - visible from the site - a bulldozer cleared an area for Russian gun emplacements, to add to those already installed. At one point we wandered into a half ruined church and as we did so a crow somewhere up in the roof started calling out.. It echoed around the ruin and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

Later on the wind picked up and storm clouds started to appear, and somehow that seemed a fitting end to my visit to this once great place, now reduced to desolation.

And I had to take a picture of the famous church of course! http://imgur.com/DPSiDLW