TWO women in their 60s, one boasting a shock of bleached hair, the other in a loose headscarf, are dancing alongside a teenage girl in a white tube top. Families crowd behind tables weighed down by narghile pipes, glasses of overpriced beer and plates of sliced carrots and cucumbers. When a popular song comes on, a little boy begs his mother to join him on the dance floor. The venue is an underground nightclub in Van, a dusty, unremarkable city in Turkey’s south-east. But everyone inside, from the DJ to the barmaids to the patrons themselves, is from Iran.Rocked by a series of terror attacks, a failed coup attempt and an ongoing crackdown by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, Turkish tourism has been suffering. Foreign arrivals slumped from 36m in 2015 to just 25m last year. Westerners were especially likely to stay away. Though business has picked up this year, many hotels in Istanbul and along the Mediterranean have had to slash prices to stay afloat.In Van, about an hour’s drive from the Iranian border, things could not be more different. In the first nine months of 2017 the city welcomed a record 388,000 visitors from Iran, up from 264,000 during all of last year, an influx nearly the size of its own population. Local hoteliers cannot keep up with demand. On a weekday in September, your correspondent had to ring 14 different hotels and the city’s lone youth hostel before finding a bed for the night, and that only thanks to a late cancellation. So many Iranians poured into the city earlier this summer that the governor had some of them put up in student dormitories and others in private homes. When an Iranian musician banned from performing in his home country arrived for a concert, he was greeted by an audience of 5,000 compatriots. “At times you feel like a foreigner in your own city,” jokes an official at the local chamber of commerce. With the visitors leaving behind tens of millions of dollars, mostly in cash, no one seems to mind. The city recently started to offer Farsi language courses to local business owners.Even as Turkey struggles to lure back tourists from Europe and America, visitors from the Middle East are coming in droves. Over 2m Iranians are projected to travel to Turkey this year, a new record. More tourists than ever are arriving from countries like Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.The Iranians who flock to Van—one of the few parts of the south-east spared the clashes between Kurdish insurgents and Turkish troops that have ravaged the region since 2015—do so for a number of reasons. Some come for the sights, including the vast lake that borders the city, the 1,100-year-old Armenian church built atop one of its isles and the remarkable cats, known for their white fur and odd-coloured eyes, which inhabit the area. Others come for the shopping malls, stuffing their suitcases with trousers and polo shirts that cost a small fraction of what they do in Iran.Many, though, come simply (and often literally) to let their hair down. Late into the night, streams of unsteady patrons, including elderly couples and women in heavy make-up and miniskirts, stream in and out of basement nightclubs, many of which cater exclusively to Iranians. On warmer days, the revelry continues on boats dotting the lake. Drinking and public dancing are forbidden by the mullahs running Iran. The headscarf is mandatory for women above the age of seven. In Turkey, a predominantly Muslim but constitutionally secular country, no such restrictions exist. Van itself enjoys a reputation as a relatively freewheeling town in an otherwise conservative part of the country. Bahar, a housewife vacationing in Turkey for the first time, says she and her teenage daughter had been anxious about heading out for a night on the town without wearing the hijab. “It turns out it’s no problem,” she says. “We feel relaxed here.”Yet the tide of Islamism that flooded Iran four decades ago is now on the rise in Mr Erdogan’s Turkey. Soaring consumption taxes and restrictions on marketing are turning alcohol into a luxury. Schools that specialise in teaching Islam are mushrooming. References to Darwin and the theory of evolution have been removed from the curriculum. The secular Iranians on the streets of Van dismiss the idea, sometimes invoked by Mr Erdogan’s harsher critics, that Turkey is on the verge of becoming a theocracy. But they too say the omens are worrying. “The ruling mentality is similar,” says Majid, a teacher from Tabriz, across the border, relaxing at a local restaurant with his family. The more Turkey starts to resemble Iran, he says, the less it will appeal to Iranians.