Turkey travel tips

Best time to visit Turkey

Every guide's best months, checked against its own thirty-year rainfall: a filled month is recommended, a hatched one has over 250 mm of rain. Most of Turkey agrees on Apr, May, Jun, Sep, Oct.

best month · over 250 mm · the letters are the months, January to December.

The guides in Turkey

IstanbulTurkeyTwo continents, three empires, one enormous cityCappadociaTurkeyTwo hundred balloons at dawn over a landscape carved from volcanic ashAntalyaTurkeyA Roman old town on a cliff, with the Taurus mountains behind the beachBodrumTurkeyA white town around a crusader castle, and a gulet waiting in the bayPamukkaleTurkeyA hillside of white mineral terraces, with a Roman spa city on top of itEphesus & SelçukTurkeyThe best-preserved classical city on the Mediterranean: a marble street down to a library facade, a theatre for twenty-five thousand, and a country town beside itFethiye & ÖlüdenizTurkeyA working harbour town with Lycian tombs above the rooftops, the most photographed lagoon in Turkey next door, and paragliders coming off a 1,900-metre ridge all dayÇeşme & AlaçatıTurkeyA windsurfing bay, a stone village of blue shutters and bougainvillea, thermal beaches and the smartest summer crowd in TurkeyKaşTurkeyA white town on a cliff over water clear enough to see the wreck below it: the diving capital of Turkey, a sunken city offshore, and Greece twenty minutes awaySideTurkeyA Roman temple on a headland with the sea behind its columns, a theatre for fifteen thousand, and a beach either side of the ruinsAlanyaTurkeyA Seljuk castle on a rock between two beaches, a red tower over the old dockyard, and the longest warm season on the Turkish coastMarmarisTurkeyA yacht harbour in a pine-covered bay, the start of every blue cruise, and a bar street that is the loudest on the AegeanİzmirTurkeyTurkey’s third city and its most relaxed: a seafront promenade that walks for kilometres, a bazaar older than the republic, and Ephesus an hour down the lineÇanakkaleTurkeyThe town on the Dardanelles where the ferries cross to Europe, with Troy on one side and the Gallipoli battlefields on the otherOlympos & ÇıralıTurkeyRuins in a river valley that comes out on a pebble beach, treehouse pensions in the orange groves, and a hillside that has been on fire since antiquityDalyanTurkeyA river town under Lycian tombs cut in the cliff, with mud baths upstream, a turtle beach downstream and boats instead of roads between themMount NemrutTurkeyStone heads of gods and a forgotten king on a 2,150-metre summit, watched at sunrise by everyone who made the drive up in the darkTrabzonTurkeyA Black Sea port under tea plantations, with a monastery glued to a cliff face an hour inland and green hills that look like nowhere else in TurkeyAssosTurkeyA temple to Athena on a cliff over the Aegean, a fishing harbour of stone houses underneath it, and Lesbos close enough to count the lightsBursaTurkeyThe first Ottoman capital under a mountain that skis in winter: green mosques, a silk bazaar, thermal baths, and the dish the whole country argues aboutSafranboluTurkeyAn Ottoman merchant town kept whole: white timber houses down a gorge, a caravanserai to sleep in, and the saffron it is named forKonyaTurkeyThe city of Rumi: the green dome over his tomb, the whirling dervishes who still turn here, and a Seljuk capital under the modern onePataraTurkeyEighteen kilometres of empty sand behind a ruined Lycian capital, with loggerhead turtles nesting on it and a rule that keeps the beach closed at night because of themDatca & KnidosTurkeyA long thin peninsula of almond trees between two seas, with an ancient city at the end of it where the Aegean meets the MediterraneanMardinTurkeyA city of honey-coloured stone stacked up a hill over the Mesopotamian plain, with Syriac monasteries around it and Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish in the same streetŞanlıurfa & Göbekli TepeTurkeyThe oldest temple in the world on a hill outside a pilgrimage city of carp pools, covered bazaars and the best kebab in TurkeyGaziantepTurkeyThe food capital of Turkey: pistachio baklava by the kilo, a museum of Roman mosaics that stops people mid-sentence, and a bazaar of coppersmithsVanTurkeyA city on the biggest lake in Turkey, under a rock fortress with cuneiform on it, with an Armenian church on an island and a breakfast that runs to twenty platesAmasyaTurkeyOttoman houses reflected in a green river, with the rock tombs of Pontic kings cut into the cliff above them and a castle on topAnkaraTurkeyThe capital Atatürk built on the steppe: the museum that holds Anatolia’s whole prehistory, his mausoleum above the city, and a castle with a village inside it