Ka is on a bus from Istanbul to Kars, a small Turkish city on the eastern border with Georgia. The bus driver struggles to drive through a blizzard. A week earlier, Ka left his residence in Frankfurt, Germany, to attend his mother’s funeral in Istanbul. Ka tells a fellow passenger that he is a journalist traveling to report on the municipal elections in Kars and the recent suicides among the town’s young women. This is not true: Ka is a poet, and his real reason for visiting Kars is to pursue a relationship with a former classmate, İpek, who recently divorced her husband.

It is snowing heavily the next morning when Ka awakens in his room at the Snow Palace Hotel, where he has heard İpek and her family live (İpek will later confirm that her family owns the hotel). Serdar Bey, the publisher of the local paper, Border City Gazette, gives Ka a tour of Kars. Ka visits the “poorest neighborboods” but is especially struck by the tragic suicide of one of the wealthier girls: Teslime, a 16-year-old girl who was pressured to remove her headscarf at school.