Best Things to Do in Turkey

Balloons lift off in the dark and are up as the sun clears the horizon, usually for 60 to 90 minutes over the Goreme valleys, with a hundred or more envelopes in the air on a clear morning. Turkey’s civil aviation authority grounds the fleet for wind, most often between December and March, and a grounded flight is normally refunded or moved rather than lost. Operators set a minimum age, commonly around six, and everyone signs a waiver. It is the largest single activity cost of most Turkey trips, so get a current quote.

Built as a cathedral in 537 and converted to a mosque in 1453, Hagia Sophia was a museum from 1935 until 2020 and is a working mosque again today. Non Muslims are welcome outside the five daily prayer times. Tourists now use a separate paid ticket for the upper gallery, where the Byzantine mosaics are, while the prayer hall below stays free. Cover shoulders and knees, women should carry a scarf, and shoes come off at the door. Go at opening or in the last hour, or you will queue.

Sultan Ahmed Mosque, finished in 1616, takes its nickname from the tens of thousands of hand painted Iznik tiles lining the interior. The outside is grey stone and six minarets; the blue is all indoors. It is still in daily use, so it shuts to visitors during prayers and entry is free. The open square in front is the old Hippodrome of Constantinople, the Roman and Byzantine chariot racing track, and the Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III, the bronze Serpent Column brought from Delphi and the walled obelisk still stand along its spine.

Home to the Ottoman sultans for close to four centuries, Topkapi is a sequence of courtyards and pavilions rather than one building, which is why it takes longer than people plan for. The treasury holds the Topkapi Dagger and the Spoonmaker’s Diamond, and the Harem, the sultans’ private quarters, is a separate ticket worth adding. It sits a five to ten minute walk from Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, so all three fit one long morning in Sultanahmet.

Justinian’s sixth century water cistern sits under the street two minutes from Hagia Sophia: 336 marble columns holding up a low brick vault, standing in shallow water and lit from below. The two Medusa head bases at the far end were reused from an older Roman building, one upside down and one on its side. It is cool even in August, takes about forty minutes, and is the obvious thing to slot in while the mosques are closed for prayer.

When the sultans left Topkapi in 1856 they moved here, and the contrast is the point. Dolmabahce is European rather than Ottoman, Baroque and Neoclassical, 285 rooms strung along a long Bosphorus facade, with one of the largest Bohemian crystal chandeliers in the world over the ceremonial hall. Ataturk died in a first floor bedroom in 1938 and the clock in that room still reads 9.05. Entry is by guided tour on a fixed route, the Harem is a separate ticket, and photography inside is restricted.

The commuter ferries are the cheapest good view in Istanbul. Boats leave Eminonu, Karakoy and Kabatas on the European side for Kadikoy and Uskudar on the Asian side, a twenty minute crossing paid for with the same Istanbulkart you use on the tram and metro, at a small fraction of what a tour boat charges. Longer sightseeing cruises run north up the strait past the wooden waterfront mansions and under both suspension bridges. Buy a tea on board and sit outside.

The Genoese built this stone tower in 1348 and it still gives the clearest single view of the old city, the Golden Horn and the strait from one circular balcony. The queue at the top is the price, so go early. The streets below are as much of the reason to come: Karakoy and Galata are Istanbul’s coffee, design and dessert quarter, and the climb up from the Karakoy ferry pier, or the short Tunel funicular, drops you straight into them.

Roofed and trading since the 1460s, the Grand Bazaar runs to 61 covered lanes and more than 4,000 shops selling carpets, lamps, gold, ceramics and leather, and the first price quoted is an opening position rather than a price. The Beyazit-Kapalicarsi tram stop puts you at a main gate. Fifteen minutes downhill, the smaller Spice Bazaar is better for what you will actually carry home: pistachio baklava, Turkish delight, saffron, dried figs and apricots.

Istiklal Caddesi is a 1.4 km pedestrian street running from Taksim Square down to Tunel, close to Galata Tower, and it is the busiest stretch of pavement in the country: bookshops, cinemas, music shops, bakeries and the nineteenth century Cicek Pasaji arcade off to one side. The single track red tram trundles the length of it, which is a short novelty ride rather than transport. Give the street an hour or two in the evening when the buskers are out, not a whole day.

A hammam is not a spa massage. You sit in a hot marble room until you are sweating, then lie on the heated central slab while an attendant scrubs you down with a coarse kese mitt, works up a lather with olive oil soap and rinses you with bowls of water. It runs about 45 minutes and men and women use separate rooms or separate hours. The historic Ottoman bathhouses in Sultanahmet and Cagaloglu charge for the architecture; a neighbourhood hammam does the same job for a fraction of it. Everything you need is provided.

Known For : Hagia Sophia Sultan Ahmed Mosque Topkapi Palace

Kahvalti is a spread, not a plate: white cheese and aged kasar, olives, tomato, cucumber, honey with clotted kaymak, jam, boiled eggs, menemen scrambled with peppers, borek pastry and a basket of bread, with tea refilled until you stop it. Order serpme kahvalti and it arrives for two. It is also the easiest meal in Turkey for a vegetarian, leaving out the sucuk sausage, and it is why Turkish lunch tends to be small.

Best Time: March to November

102 Istanbul Attractions

Simit rings off a red cart, balik ekmek grilled fish sandwiches from the boats at Eminonu, doner carved to order, lahmacun rolled up with lemon and parsley, gozleme griddled while you wait, and kumpir, a baked potato loaded with everything, over at Ortakoy. Finish with kunefe or pistachio baklava. Street food is where Turkey is genuinely cheap: a filling meal costs a small fraction of a sit down restaurant bill, and a guided food walk in Karakoy or Kadikoy is a good first evening.

Turkish coffee is ground to powder, boiled in a small cezve and served unfiltered, so you stop drinking before the last centimetre of grounds. Order it sade, orta or sekerli for unsweetened, medium or sweet. Tea is the bigger habit: cay comes black in a tulip glass at every shop, ferry and bus stop, all day, and turning down the first one is unusual. Nargile cafes are the evening version of the same social ritual. Turkey also makes good wine from native grapes around Cappadocia and Thrace, though heavy duty makes it dearer than you would expect.

The sema is a Sufi worship ritual of the Mevlevi order, founded by the followers of Rumi, and not a folk dance: the semazen turn on one foot with one palm raised and one lowered, in white robes and a felt hat that stands for a tombstone. Istanbul’s Galata Mevlevi House runs ticketed ceremonies for visitors, which is the convenient version. In Konya, where Rumi is buried, the ceremony at the Mevlana Cultural Centre is free and is the real thing. Photography is usually restricted and nobody applauds.

Cappadocia’s rock is volcanic tuff, not limestone: compacted ash from the Anatolian volcanoes, soft enough to dig with hand tools and firm enough to hold a roof. At Goreme, Byzantine monks cut a whole monastic settlement into it, mostly between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Around a dozen chapels survive inside one walled valley, and the frescoes in the Karanlik Kilise, the Dark Church, kept their colour precisely because so little daylight ever reached them. It is a UNESCO site, takes about two hours, and the Dark Church needs an extra ticket.

Derinkuyu drops about 85 metres through eighteen levels, with stables, wine presses, a church, ventilation shafts and round stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside. Byzantine Christians used it as a refuge during Arab raids, and eight levels are open. Kaymakli nearby is shallower, wider and usually less crowded. The passages are low, narrow and steep in places, with a fair amount of walking bent double, so skip it if confined spaces bother you.

Cappadocian villages have lived in cut rock for centuries, and in Goreme, Uchisar and Urgup many of those houses are now hotels. A cave room means thick stone walls, an arched ceiling, cool air in summer and warmth in winter, and usually a terrace facing the valley for the morning balloon launch. Rooms genuinely inside rock have small windows and little daylight, so check what you are booking, because plenty of places sell a stone built room as a cave. It costs more than a standard hotel in the same town and is the splurge most people say was worth it.

The valleys between Goreme, Cavusin and Uchisar are the part of Cappadocia you see neither from the museum nor from the air, and the usual way to cover them in an evening is a two hour quad tour through Love Valley, Rose Valley and Sword Valley, timed to finish at a viewpoint. If you would rather walk, the same valleys are threaded with marked footpaths and the Rose Valley trail is a comfortable two hours on foot. Quads run in convoy on loose gravel, get very dusty, and most operators want to see a driving licence.

Ephesus was a Greek and later Roman port city of perhaps a quarter of a million people, and what survives is the most complete classical streetscape in the Mediterranean: marble Curetes Street, the two storey facade of the Library of Celsus, a theatre that seated around 25,000, and the terrace houses with their mosaics under a separate roof and ticket. Of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, a single reassembled column now stands in a field nearby. Selcuk is the base, Kusadasi the cruise port, and there is almost no shade, so go early.

Known For : Pamukkale Natural Park Travertines Pamukkale Hierapolis

Pamukkale means cotton castle, and the terraces are travertine: calcium carbonate left by hot mineral springs running down the hillside for millennia. This is limestone chemistry and has nothing to do with the volcanic rock of Cappadocia. You climb the slope barefoot, which is compulsory, over warm wet stone, and only some pools hold water at a time because the site is rotated to protect it. At the top sits Hierapolis, a Roman spa city with a large theatre and a long necropolis, plus the Antique Pool where you can swim among fallen columns for a separate fee. Midday sun washes the white out, so come late afternoon.

Best Time: September

10 Pamukalle Attractions

Troy is nine cities stacked on one mound near Canakkale, occupied from around 3000 BC, and Homer’s war, if it happened at all, belongs somewhere in the sixth or seventh layer. Be clear about what you get: low stone foundations, a rebuilt stretch of wall and a wooden horse put up for visitors, not a standing city. The Troy Museum beside the site, opened in 2018, is excellent and is the real reason to come. It is a long way from everything else here, roughly five to six hours from Istanbul by coach, and pairs with Gallipoli rather than with Cappadocia.

Gobekli Tepe is about 11,500 years old, more than twice the age of Stonehenge and older than pottery, metal, writing and farming. Circles of T shaped limestone pillars up to five metres tall, carved with foxes, boars, snakes and vultures, were raised by people who had not yet settled into villages, then deliberately buried. Klaus Schmidt excavated it from 1995 until his death in 2014 and argued it was built for ritual, which overturned the assumption that religion followed agriculture. It is a UNESCO site about 15 km from Sanliurfa, under a canopy with a boardwalk, and takes an hour. Pair it with the Sanliurfa Archaeology Museum, which holds the finds.

In the first century BC, Antiochus I of Commagene built a tomb sanctuary on a 2,134 metre summit and ringed it with seated statues of Greek and Persian gods, his own likeness among them. Earthquakes took the heads off, and they now sit on the ground at eye level, which is why the photographs look the way they do. People come for sunrise on the east terrace or sunset on the west. It is a steep twenty minute walk from the car park, cold and windy even in July, and the road is usually shut by snow from November to April. Adiyaman and Kahta are the bases, and it is a flight plus a drive from Istanbul.

Kaleici is Antalya’s walled old town, a wedge of Ottoman timber houses, Roman fortifications and narrow lanes dropping to a horseshoe Roman harbour that now holds yachts. Hadrian’s Gate, built for the emperor’s visit in AD 130, is the main entrance and still has its original rutted paving. Most of the old houses are small hotels, which makes this the pleasant place to sleep on the Mediterranean coast instead of a resort strip, and it is the natural base for Koprulu Canyon, Aspendos and the Lycian sites.

Tandem flights launch from Babadag, just under 2,000 metres above the sea and one of the highest commercial paragliding launches anywhere, and the descent takes roughly half an hour over the coast before landing on the beach. A cable car now carries you most of the way up. This is a genuine adventure activity rather than a ride: flights are cancelled for wind, and there have been fatal accidents here, so check that the operator and pilot are licensed by the Turkish Aeronautical Association, ask how many hours the pilot has flown, and read what the insurance actually covers.

The Koprucay runs cold and clear through a limestone gorge in Koprulu Canyon National Park, about ninety minutes inland from Antalya. The standard commercial run is roughly 12 to 14 km of grade two water, an hour and a half to two hours actually on the river, with the rest of the day taken up by transfers and a riverside lunch. Grade two means splashy rather than technical and children are usually taken from about seven, but the water is snowmelt cold, helmets and buoyancy aids are compulsory and you should be able to swim. The season runs roughly April to October.

Kekova is a long uninhabited island off the Lycian coast, and along its northern shore the ruins of Dolichiste lie half submerged: staircases, doorways and house walls running straight into the sea after second century earthquakes dropped the coastline. Boats leave Ucagiz and Kas and glide slowly over it, though swimming and diving above the ruins are banned. Most trips also stop at Simena, a village on the facing mainland shore with a small Crusader castle and Lycian sarcophagi standing in the shallows, reachable only by boat. Demre, the ancient Myra, is half an hour away and has rock cut tombs and the church of Saint Nicholas.

The Lycian Way is a waymarked long distance footpath of about 540 km, running from Ovacik near Fethiye to Geyikbayiri near Antalya along old mule tracks, through pine forest, olive terraces, ruined Lycian towns and villages where you sleep in pensions. The full route takes around a month and real hill fitness. Most people walk a two or three day section instead, and the Fethiye to Faralya stretch above Butterfly Valley is the popular one. It is marked with red and white paint flashes rather than signposts, some sections are exposed above the sea, water points are far apart, and this coast is too hot to walk safely in summer. March to May and September to November are the seasons.

Anitkabir is the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic, and by a distance the most visited place in Ankara: a colonnaded limestone hall at the head of the Lion Road, a 262 metre ceremonial avenue lined with stone lions, set in a park planted with trees sent from dozens of countries. The changing of the guard draws a crowd and the museum under the terrace covers the war of independence. Entry is free. With the rest of a day, the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations and the old citadel quarter below it are a short taxi ride away.