Türkiye Geography

Turkey covers about 783,000 square kilometres across two continents, with the small European portion of Thrace separated from Anatolia by the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles — a strategic waterway it has controlled for five hundred years.

The Anatolian plateau

The interior is a high plateau between eight hundred and twelve hundred metres, dry, treeless and continental, ringed by mountains that keep the sea air out. Lake Van in the east is the largest lake in the country and strongly alkaline; Lake Tuz in the centre is a salt flat for much of the year.

Mountains

The Pontic range runs along the Black Sea coast and the Taurus along the Mediterranean, meeting in the east where the land rises to Mount Ararat at 5,137 metres, the highest point in the country and a dormant volcano.

Four coasts

The Black Sea coast is wet, green and steep, with tea and hazelnut terraces. The Marmara is the industrial heart. The Aegean is indented with bays and islands and holds most of the classical sites. The Mediterranean, the Turquoise Coast, has the clearest water and the Taurus rising directly behind it.

Cappadocia

Volcanic ash from Erciyes and Hasan Dağı laid down soft tuff, which erosion has carved into pinnacles and valleys. Because the rock is soft enough to cut with hand tools and hardens on exposure, people have been carving houses, churches and whole underground cities into it for two thousand years.

Earthquakes

The North Anatolian Fault runs across the country from east to west and is among the most active on earth. The 1999 İzmit and 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes were both catastrophic; the latter killed more than fifty thousand people.