Turkey's eastern border city of Kars reminds many book enthusiasts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's book Snow and its first paragraph, which reads: "The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow." 

Pamuk's poetic description is befitting to the landscape of Kars, a vast expanse of land ringed by low lying hills. 

Come November, the temperatures in Kars fall to below 0 degrees Celsius, and this year a heavy yet early snowfall has carpeted the city, as if a white blanket has been wrapped around it. 

Here are some pictures from Kars that are soothing to the eyes.