The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: What Remains of the Ancient Wonder

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: What Remains of the Ancient Wonder Ancient writers ranked it among the Seven Wonders of the World, and some thought it the greatest of them. Today the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is a single patched-together column standing in a marshy field on the edge of Selçuk, usually with […]

The Basilica Cistern: Istanbul’s Underground Byzantine Reservoir

The Basilica Cistern: Istanbul’s Underground Byzantine Reservoir A short walk from Hagia Sophia, a plain entrance on Yerebatan Caddesi leads down a flight of stone steps into the largest of the city’s surviving covered Byzantine cisterns. The Basilica Cistern was never meant to be seen: it is a 6th-century reservoir, a hall of 336 columns […]

Topkapi Palace: Inside the Ottoman Sultans’ Court

Topkapi Palace: Inside the Ottoman Sultans’ Court On the headland of Sarayburnu, where the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara meet, Topkapi Palace was the home of the Ottoman sultans and the seat of their government for close to four hundred years. Mehmed II began it within a few years of taking […]

The Blue Mosque and the Hippodrome: Sultanahmet’s Imperial Heart

The Blue Mosque and the Hippodrome: Sultanahmet’s Imperial Heart On the crest of Istanbul’s historic peninsula, two very different empires share one long open space. Along one side runs the line of the Byzantine Hippodrome, where chariot teams once raced in front of up to 100,000 spectators. Rising above it is the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, […]

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: A Visitor’s Guide to Justinian’s Great Church

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: A Visitor’s Guide to Justinian’s Great Church For almost fifteen centuries Hagia Sophia has dominated the first hill of Istanbul, above the point where the Bosphorus meets the Sea of Marmara. Built for the emperor Justinian I and dedicated in December 537, it has been the cathedral of the Byzantine emperors, a […]

Seljuk Turks in Anatolia: History of the Seljuk Empire

The Seljuk Turks in Anatolia The Seljuk Turks were nomadic peoples who originated in the Central Asian steppes and entered into Anatolia in the 11th century. From here, until around 1300, they would rule an…

Pergamon and the Asclepion: Healing and Power in Ancient Turkey

Pergamon and the Asclepion: Healing and Power in Ancient Turkey Two thousand years before spa retreats and wellness clinics became a travel industry of their own, the sick and the anxious climbed a hillside above the Bakırçay plain in western Anatolia hoping a dream might tell them how to get better. That hillside belonged to […]

Şirince Village: Wine, Peaches and Traditional Turkish Life

Şirince Village: Wine, Peaches and Traditional Turkish Life High in the hills above Kuşadası, in western Turkey, the whitewashed and terracotta-roofed houses of Şirince spill down a mountainside surrounded by peach orchards and vineyards planted on terraces cut into the slope. Once a Greek Orthodox village known as Kirkinche, its stone houses and hillside church […]

Ruins of Troy: A Visitor’s Guide to the Nine Cities of Hisarlik

Ruins of Troy: A Visitor’s Guide to the Nine Cities of Hisarlik By Marco Stojanovik The ruins of Troy sit on a low mound called Hisarlik, on the plain near the mouth of the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey. What a visitor finds here is not the golden citadel of the Iliad but nine main cities […]

ANZAC Cove, Turkey: Gallipoli’s Landscape and 1915 Campaign

ANZAC Cove, Turkey: Gallipoli’s Landscape and 1915 Campaign ANZAC Cove is a small crescent of beach on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, barely wide enough to land a rowboat, hemmed in on three sides by ridgelines that climb almost straight up from the water. What happened here in April 1915 cannot be separated from this terrain: the […]

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: A Journey Through First World War History

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: A Journey Through First World War History The Dardanelles is a strait barely two kilometres wide at its narrowest point, yet for three thousand years it has shaped the fate of empires. In April 1915, this stretch of water and the ridges above it became the setting for one of the […]

Perge Ancient City: Exploring the Ruins of Asia Minor, Turkey

Perge Ancient City: Exploring the Ruins of Asia Minor, Turkey Long before Ephesus or Aphrodisias drew crowds of Roman travellers, Perge was already a working city in the plain behind Turkey’s southern coast, its acropolis settled since the Bronze Age. Few visitors today make the short trip inland from Antalya to see what remains of […]

Sultanhani Caravanserai: Trading on the Seljuk Silk Road

Sultanhani Caravanserai: Trading on the Seljuk Silk Road On the old highway between Aksaray and Konya, a fortress-like stone building rises out of the flat Anatolian plain with no city around it, because it was never meant to serve one. The Sultanhani Caravanserai was built for travellers passing through, and it still is. Merchants, pilgrims […]

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey Most Roman theatres survive as suggestions of themselves — a curved wall here, a few tiers of seating there, the rest carried off for building stone centuries ago. Aspendos theatre is the exception. Rising intact from the plain of ancient Pamphylia on Turkey’s southern coast, it is widely […]

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love Long before marble became a byword for European sculpture, the workshops of Aphrodisias were shipping finished statues across the Roman world. The city sat on a seam of fine-grained white and blue-grey marble, and the artisans who worked it built a reputation so strong […]

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi Long before Konya became a stop on the modern traveller’s map, it was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the adopted home of a Persian scholar named Jalal ad-Din Rumi. It was here, in the 13th century, that Rumi wrote the poetry that […]

Çatalhöyük, Turkey: One of the World’s Earliest Cities

Çatalhöyük, Turkey: One of the World’s Earliest Cities On the flat, wind-scoured plain south of Konya, a low mound rises just a few metres above the surrounding wheat fields. There is little to suggest, from a distance, that this unassuming rise conceals one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Çatalhöyük — sometimes […]

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey A short walk from the fortified capital of Hattusa in central Turkey, a natural cleft in the limestone opens onto one of the most unusual religious sites to survive from the Bronze Age world. Yazılıkaya, “inscribed rock” in Turkish, holds no temple walls or roof beams […]

Ancient Turkey Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 21-Day Route from Istanbul to Gallipoli

Ancient Turkey Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 21-Day Route from Istanbul to Gallipoli A well-built Turkey itinerary has to solve a problem most countries don’t present: how do you move through nine thousand years of settlement, from Neolithic Çatalhöyük to the trenches of Gallipoli, without the trip collapsing into a blur of ruins and hotel […]

Cappadocia’s Underground Cities: Ancient Refuges in Turkey

Cappadocia’s Underground Cities: Ancient Refuges in Turkey Beneath the fairy chimneys and honey-coloured valleys of central Turkey lies a second Cappadocia, one carved downward rather than up. Entire settlements — stables, kitchens, wine presses, chapels — were hollowed from soft volcanic rock centuries before anyone thought to build a house of stone above ground. At […]

The Hittite Empire: Exploring Ancient Hattusa in Central Turkey

The Hittite Empire: Exploring Ancient Hattusa in Central Turkey Long before Rome had a name, a fortified city on a windswept Anatolian plateau ruled an empire that faced down Egypt’s pharaohs as an equal. Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire, lay forgotten under wheat fields for nearly three thousand years until archaeologists began piecing its […]