Inside the great bend of the Kızılırmak river lay the Hittite kingdom, rival of Egypt in the second millennium BC. The road starts at Gordion, city of King Midas, and ends among the merchant archives of Kanesh.
Capital of Phrygia and city of King Midas, where Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot.
Roman Ankara.
🚗 82 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. Sleep in Ankara.
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.
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.
🚗 about 150 km from the day before, 2 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. Sleep in Boğazkale.
A town older than Hattusa, entered through a Sphinx Gate.
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.
🚗 about 24 km from the day before, 174 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. End in Kayseri.
Distances are straight lines between places, so allow more on the road. Times on site are our estimates.