I see from the BBC that the Turkish government has spent about £800k renovating the magnificent Akhtamar Church on Lake Van.

I was lucky enough to visit Akhtamar in October 2002. It was late in the month and the tourist parties were already thin on the ground . As no-one else turned up at the pier where the boat was waiting to go out to the island, I paid the full fee (I think the equivalent of about £15) for the trip across. The deserted little island wasn't in great nick, with a surprising amount of litter about, but unimaginably peaceful on the last warm day of autumn, surrounded by the cobalt blue waters of that magical lake and the towering mountains of Turkish Kurdistan.

The stone carvings on the church itself were simply magnificent. The pictures on the BBC story do not do them justice, and my own photographs were still film and print jobs. The church itself was strewn with rubble, grafitti and animal droppings, and looked distinctly unsafe.

There has been a lot of bad news from Turkey recently, so let's hope this heralds a normalisation of official Turkish-Armenian relations; vital diplomatically for Turkey and vital economically for Armenia.