Places worth the journey
Each place has how long to allow, the nearest town to stay in, the trip it is on and its tale. Pick a kind of place, search, or tap a pin.
No place matches that. Try all 2,706 ancient sites.
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.
Myra
Lycian rock tombs carved to look like timber houses, beams and doors included, above a large Roman theatre.
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.
Troy (Truva)
Layer upon layer of cities, from about 3000 BC to Roman times, cut through by Heinrich Schliemann’s trench in the 1870s.
Assos
A city on a volcanic hill facing Lesbos, with the Doric Temple of Athena on top and a small harbour far below.
Pergamon
Capital of the Attalid kings, with a theatre that falls down one of the steepest hillsides of the ancient world.
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.
Ephesus (Efes)
One of the great cities of Roman Asia: the Library of Celsus, a vast theatre and marble streets lined with terraced houses.
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.
Hierapolis
A Roman spa town on top of the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale, entered along a road lined with tombs.
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.
Aspendos
Its 2nd-century Roman theatre is among the best preserved anywhere, stage building included, and is still used for performances.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Göbekli Tepe
Round enclosures of carved T-shaped pillars, built from about 9600 BC by people who had not yet taken up farming.
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.
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.
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.
Ani
A medieval Armenian capital of churches and walls on a plateau above the Arpaçay gorge, on today’s border with Armenia.
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.