Türkiye
where Asia meets Europe
12,000 years of history.
You can walk through all of it.
Built 6,000 years before Stonehenge.
Göbekli Tepe · Şanlıurfa
The oldest life-size statue of a person.
Urfa Man · Şanlıurfa Museum
The oldest woven cloth. The oldest bread.
Çatalhöyük · Konya
The oldest known swords.
Arslantepe · Malatya
The oldest Indo-European words ever written down.
Merchant tablets of Kültepe · Kayseri
A marriage contract with a surrogacy clause.
Kültepe · Kayseri
Capital of an empire that rivalled Egypt.
Hattusa · Çorum
The oldest surviving peace treaty.
Hittites and Egypt, from Hattusa
The first coins.
Lydia: Sardis and Ephesus
Two of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Temple of Artemis, Ephesus; Mausoleum, Bodrum
The first historian.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Bodrum)
A Roman spa town on white terraces.
Hierapolis & Pamukkale · Denizli
Parchment is named after this city.
Pergamon · İzmir
A king who set his statue among the gods.
Mount Nemrut · Adıyaman
Walk the marble street to the Library of Celsus.
Ephesus · İzmir
Over 1,800 years old. Still putting on concerts.
Aspendos · Antalya
Lifted out as dam water rose over her city.
The Gypsy Girl of Zeugma · Gaziantep
The oldest known machine with a crank and connecting rod.
Roman sawmill · Hierapolis
A monastery built into a cliff.
Sumela · Trabzon
For nearly 1,000 years, the largest church on earth.
Hagia Sophia · İstanbul
Churches inside the rock. Balloons above it.
Göreme · Nevşehir
A city of churches at the edge of a gorge.
Ani · Kars
Walk where it happened.
Ancient cities, temples, rock tombs and underground towns across Türkiye, with where to stay, how long to allow and the story of who built each one.
Places worth the journey
Each one has how long to allow, where to stay and its tale. All 57 places →
No place matches that. See all places or search all 2,706 sites.
Göbekli Tepe
Round enclosures of carved T-shaped pillars, built from about 9600 BC by people who had not yet taken up farming.
Hattusa (Hattuşa)
Capital of the Hittite empire in the second millennium BC, its walls running for kilometres over the hills, with the Lion Gate and the Sphinx Gate.
Ephesus (Efes)
One of the great cities of Roman Asia: the Library of Celsus, a vast theatre and marble streets lined with terraced houses.
Nemrut Dağ
On a summit about 2,150 m high, King Antiochus I of Commagene raised his tomb mound between colossal statues of gods and of himself; their heads now sit on the ground.
Troy (Truva)
Layer upon layer of cities, from about 3000 BC to Roman times, cut through by Heinrich Schliemann’s trench in the 1870s.
Göreme / Cappadocia rock sites
Valleys of fairy chimneys and rock-cut churches, many painted with Byzantine frescoes; the open-air museum gathers some of the finest.
Myra
Lycian rock tombs carved to look like timber houses, beams and doors included, above a large Roman theatre.
Aspendos
Its 2nd-century Roman theatre is among the best preserved anywhere, stage building included, and is still used for performances.
Ani
A medieval Armenian capital of churches and walls on a plateau above the Arpaçay gorge, on today’s border with Armenia.
Pergamon
Capital of the Attalid kings, with a theatre that falls down one of the steepest hillsides of the ancient world.
Hierapolis
A Roman spa town on top of the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale, entered along a road lined with tombs.
Çatalhöyük
One of the largest Neolithic towns known, lived in from about 7100 BC: houses packed wall to wall and entered through the roof, plastered and painted inside.
Kaunos
A Carian harbour city across the reed beds from Dalyan.
Tlos
One of the oldest Lycian cities, on a crag above the Xanthos (Eşen) valley.
Xanthos
The leading city of ancient Lycia, and with the Letoon a World Heritage Site since 1988.
Letoon
The sanctuary of Leto and her children Apollo and Artemis, the religious centre of the Lycian League.
Patara
Lycia’s main port, behind one of the longest beaches in Türkiye.
Kekova / Simena (Kaleköy)
A sheltered bay where earthquakes dropped part of a Lycian town into the shallows.
Andriake
Myra’s harbour.
Limyra
A Lycian royal seat at the foot of the mountains, with a Roman theatre and a hillside of rock tombs.
Phaselis
A port city founded by settlers from Rhodes, with three harbours and a paved main street running between them under the pines.
Kibyra
A hill city above the Gölhisar plain in Burdur, once the head of a league of four cities.
Assos
A city on a volcanic hill facing Lesbos, with the Doric Temple of Athena on top and a small harbour far below.
Pergamon Asklepion
A healing sanctuary below the acropolis, where patients slept in the hope of a curing dream.
Sardis
Capital of Lydia and of King Croesus, where some of the first coins were struck.
Bin Tepe Tumuli
The Lydian royal cemetery: more than a hundred burial mounds on the ridge north of Sardis.
Priene
A small Hellenistic city laid out on a grid, on terraces under a sheer cliff.
Miletus
Once a harbour city, now far inland because the Büyük Menderes (Maeander) silted up its bays.
Didyma
The oracle temple of Apollo, one of the largest Greek temples ever begun, and never finished.
Aphrodisias
The city of Aphrodite, home of a celebrated school of marble sculptors working from quarries close by.
Laodicea on the Lycus
A rich Roman city across the valley from Hierapolis, known for its wool and named in the Book of Revelation as one of the Seven Churches of Asia.
Attaleia (Kaleiçi, Hadrian's Gate)
Antalya’s old town inside its walls, entered through the triple-arched gate put up for the emperor Hadrian’s visit in AD 130.
Termessos
A Pisidian city high in the mountains that Alexander the Great chose not to besiege.
Perge
A planned Hellenistic and Roman city with a colonnaded main street, a water channel running down its middle and a stadium.
Selge
A Pisidian city high in the Taurus, reached through the Köprülü Canyon over a Roman bridge.
Side
A peninsula city whose theatre and Temple of Apollo look over the sea.
Gordion
Capital of Phrygia and city of King Midas, where Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot.
Ancyra (Augustus Temple)
Roman Ankara.
Yazılıkaya
The Hittites’ open-air rock sanctuary just outside Hattusa: a procession of gods and goddesses carved into two limestone chambers, and King Tudhaliya IV held in the arm of his god.
Alacahöyük
A town older than Hattusa, entered through a Sphinx Gate.
Kültepe (Kanesh)
Kanesh, where Assyrian merchants traded tin and textiles around 1900 BC and left tens of thousands of letters and contracts, the oldest written documents in Anatolia.
Kaymaklı Underground City
An underground city of narrow passages, storerooms and rolling stone doors, cut into the soft volcanic tuff, where villagers could shelter from raids with their animals.
Derinkuyu Underground City
The deepest of Cappadocia’s underground cities open to visitors, several storeys down through the rock, with air shafts, stables, kitchens, wells and a chapel.
Aşıklı Höyük
A village of mud-brick houses by the Melendiz river, lived in from around 8400 BC, where people were among the first anywhere to keep sheep and goats in pens.
Iconium (Konya)
Iconium of Saint Paul’s journeys, then the capital of the Seljuk sultans of Rum.
Zeugma
A Roman city on the Euphrates whose villas were partly flooded by the Birecik dam in 2000.
Edessa (Şanlıurfa)
Şanlıurfa, the city tradition makes the birthplace of Abraham.
Karahan Tepe
Göbekli Tepe’s neighbour and contemporary, with a chamber of pillars cut out of the bedrock and a carved human head looking out from the wall.
Harran
An ancient city on the plain near the Syrian border, with conical beehive houses, the ruins of one of the oldest mosques in Anatolia and a tradition linking it to Abraham.
Arslantepe
A mound near Malatya with a palace complex of around 3000 BC, where the oldest known swords were found, together with thousands of clay sealings from its storerooms.
Amida (Diyarbakır walls)
Diyarbakır’s black basalt city walls, almost six kilometres around, with the Hevsel Gardens running down to the Tigris.
Dara
A Byzantine frontier fortress city founded around AD 505 to face Persia, with huge underground cisterns and a necropolis of rock-cut tombs outside the walls.
Akdamar Church
A 10th-century Armenian church on an island in Lake Van, its outer walls carved with scenes from the Bible.
Tushpa (Van Fortress)
Capital of the kingdom of Urartu, on a long rock above the shore of Lake Van, with royal rock-cut tombs and inscriptions in cuneiform on the cliff.
Çavuştepe
An Urartian fortress-palace on a ridge south-east of Van, with temple foundations, storerooms and inscriptions in Urartian cuneiform.
Ishak Pasha Palace
An Ottoman palace mixing Ottoman, Persian and Seljuk ideas, on a terrace above Doğubayazıt with Mount Ararat across the plain.
Istanbul’s historic peninsula
Byzantium, then Constantinople, then Istanbul: the peninsula between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara holds Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome, Topkapı Palace and the land walls.
Stay in one town, see a lot
Most people visit from a base. These towns put the most within a day trip. All 22 towns →
Stay in Selçuk
Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis, Şirince and Priene
6 places to see from hereStay in Antalya
Perge, Aspendos, Termessos, Side and the old town
7 places to see from hereStay in Göreme
Cave churches, valleys and two underground cities
4 places to see from hereStay in Şanlıurfa
Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe and the beehive houses of Harran
4 places to see from hereStay in Çanakkale
Troy, Assos and the Gallipoli peninsula
2 places to see from hereStay in Kaş
Myra, Kekova’s sunken city, Patara and Xanthos
8 places to see from hereTrips, day by day
Eight roads, planned as days with where to sleep.
12,000 years in seven chapters
Read the background before you go, then see where each chapter can still be walked through.
Before you go
Museum Pass Türkiye
One card for many state-run sites and museums. Prices and opening hours change, so check them on muze.gov.tr before you go.
April to June, September to October
Inland and south-eastern sites have little shade and can pass 40 °C in summer. Go at opening time or late in the day.
Sleep in one town, drive out
Most sites are outside towns and buses rarely reach them. Pick a base, then go by car, taxi or a local tour.