Türkiye Discovery Guide

Turkey sits on two continents and has been the hinge between them for three thousand years, which is why it holds more genuinely first-rank sites than almost any country in the world.

Istanbul alone would justify the trip: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi, the Grand Bazaar and the Bosphorus, in a city that was the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires in succession. Beyond it, Cappadocia’s volcanic rock has been carved into churches and underground cities and is now flown over by hundreds of balloons at dawn.

The Aegean and Mediterranean coasts hold Ephesus, Pergamon and Aphrodisias alongside beaches and gulets; Pamukkale’s white travertine terraces sit below a Roman spa city; and in the south-east, Göbekli Tepe is a carved stone sanctuary from 9500 BC that forced archaeology to reconsider how civilisation began.

And the food is one of the world’s great cuisines, regional to a degree visitors rarely expect.

The standard two weeks

Istanbul for three or four days, fly to Cappadocia for three, then down to the coast — Ephesus and Pamukkale, or the Turquoise Coast around Fethiye and Kas. Domestic flights are cheap and make this straightforward.

If you came for the ruins

Ephesus is the famous one and deserves it. Aphrodisias has a stadium for thirty thousand and almost nobody in it; Pergamon has a theatre built into a hillside at an alarming angle; and Göbekli Tepe near Şanlıurfa predates pottery and agriculture.

If you want landscape

Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys, rock churches and underground cities that held thousands of people. The Lycian Way, a 760-kilometre waymarked coastal path past ruins and beaches. Mount Nemrut’s giant stone heads at dawn.

If you want the east

Far fewer visitors and a different country: Mardin’s honey-coloured stone above the Mesopotamian plain, Lake Van, Ani’s ruined Armenian city on the Armenian border, and the Black Sea highlands around Trabzon.

If you came to eat

Gaziantep for baklava and kebabs — a UNESCO City of Gastronomy — and Hatay for the most interesting cooking in the country.

Turkey has been rewritten deliberately at least twice in a century, and the tension between its Ottoman inheritance and its republican project is the central fact of its public life.

The name

In 2022 the government asked the United Nations to register the country as Türkiye in every language, replacing the various translated forms, and the request was accepted. It is the name Turks have always used for their own country, and the change was partly about the unfortunate English homonym. International bodies and many governments now use it; ordinary English usage is still mostly Turkey, and both are heard from Turks speaking English.

Hospitality as obligation

Tea will be offered constantly, in shops, offices and homes, and refusing outright is awkward. Invitations to eat come quickly and are sincere. Turks are genuinely interested in visitors and will ask direct questions that some find personal.

Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s image is in every classroom, office and public building, and the reforms he drove — the Latin alphabet, the legal codes, the calendar, the abolition of the caliphate — remade the country in a decade. Insulting his memory is a criminal offence.

Tea and the social hour

Turkey drinks more tea per head than any country on earth, served black in tulip-shaped glasses with sugar cubes, at every hour and in every setting. A transaction that does not begin with tea is a transaction conducted in a hurry.

Secular and religious

A constitutionally secular state with a largely Muslim population, and the relationship between the two has been the country’s defining political argument for a century. Visitors do better listening than contributing.

• Aegean Region
• Marmara Region

The pressure is concentrated: Sultanahmet in Istanbul, Cappadocia’s balloon launch sites, Ephesus at midday and Pamukkale’s terraces, where walking is restricted to a marked barefoot route precisely because the travertine is being worn away.

Going in April, May, September or October, and starting early, solves most of it. So does choosing the equivalent site nobody queues for — Aphrodisias instead of Ephesus, Sagalassos instead of Hierapolis.

Carpets and antiquities. Buy rugs from cooperatives and workshops where you can see the weaving, and never buy antiquities — exporting them is a serious criminal offence and visitors have been jailed for coins bought as souvenirs.

Turkey is water-stressed and large parts of the Aegean coast run on limited supply in summer; resort water use is a genuine local issue.

Avoid animal attractions offering photographs with wild animals, and choose gulet operators who do not anchor on seagrass, which is the habitat the Mediterranean depends on.

April to early June and September to October are the best windows almost everywhere: warm rather than hot, the sites bearable, and the sea swimmable by late May and still warm in October.

July and August are very hot — above 35°C on the coast and in the south-east, with Istanbul humid — and are the peak season on the coast, when Turkish and European holidaymakers arrive together.

November to March is cool and wet on the coast, cold inland, and genuinely snowy in Cappadocia and eastern Anatolia — Cappadocia under snow is extraordinary and the balloons still fly. Istanbul in winter is atmospheric and cheap.

Ramadan moves through the calendar by about eleven days a year. Most restaurants stay open in tourist areas, but the rhythm changes and the evening iftar is worth experiencing.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the country

Note that inflation has been high and prices for tourists are often quoted in euros or dollars; check what currency a rate is in before booking.