Turkey recorded its highest temperatures for the past two months in the last week of July, but temps are still cold enough to don coats in Ardahan, one of the coldest places in the country.
Just as Turkey went through the hottest week, Ardahan’s Göle district saw temperatures dip below zero. Göle, located at an altitude of more than 2,000 meters, occasionally sees temperatures dropping minus 40 Celsius degrees (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit).
It was “dog days” elsewhere, but residents of Göle were reluctant to discard heaters as temperatures fluctuated between frigid to relatively cool. In a place of long winters and short summers, the summer breeze often turns freezing in the town. People with T-shirts are not an uncommon sight but almost everyone carries coats when they go out at night in case there is a steep drop in temperatures. Stoves still burn in the middle of coffeehouses, a frequent haunt of locals.
Yakup Ertan, a coffeehouse owner, told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Friday that they usually keep the heaters on until the last week of July. “We have visitors here from other cities and they can get cold easily, so we keep stoves on, whether it is summer or winter,” he said.
“It is cold but we are warm people,” Ferdi Altun, another local, jokes.
Further south, temperatures fluctuate above 40 Celsius degrees in the province of Gaziantep. As people seek relief from the heat, animals find shelter in pools. A pet hotel offers animals left by owners who headed to cooler cities an opportunity to cool off in pools, as the humidity rate also often rises to around 23%.
“They don’t want to leave the pools. The animals are not very aware of the impact of heat on them so we schedule pool time for each. In time, they learn when they will be taken to the pool and you can almost sense their excitement,” Tuba Başsevinç, proprietor of the hotel, says.
