Tours in Türkiye

How the country is laid out

Turkey covers 783,562 square kilometres, more than twice the area of Germany. Sea runs along three of its sides. A geographers' congress in Ankara cut it into seven regions in 1941, and the map it drew still holds.

• Black Sea. Steep, green and wet. Rize takes over two thousand millimetres of rain a year, and the hills grow tea.
• Marmara. The inland sea where Europe meets Asia, and the most crowded corner of the country.
• Aegean. A ragged coast of bays and olive groves, with the classical cities a short drive inland.
• Mediterranean. The resort coast, with the Taurus range standing directly behind the beach.
• Central Anatolia. A plateau near a thousand metres; Konya gets barely 320 millimetres of rain a year.
• East and southeast. The highest and least visited ground: Ararat at 5,137 metres, Lake Van, and Gobekli Tepe's carved pillars, raised before 8200 BC.

Crossing between them

Distance is what visitors to Turkey underestimate. Istanbul to Antalya is about seven hundred kilometres by road and an hour and a quarter in the air. Flying is cheap enough that almost nobody drives between regions.

• Planes. Several carriers work the domestic network, and Istanbul is where most connections are made.
• Coaches. The intercity network reaches everywhere and runs overnight, at a fraction of the air fare.
• Trains. Fast on a few corridors only. The Ankara to Istanbul high-speed line opened in 2014.

What the country puts on sale

The offer follows the same geography. The Aegean and Mediterranean coasts sell water and the gorges behind them; the plateau sells landscape and archaeology. A shared minibus seat costs about what a restaurant meal does, and a private car several times more.

Practical

• Two climates. The southern and western coasts are hot and dry from June to September, mild in winter. The plateau is properly cold from December to March.
• Shoulder months. April to June and September to October work everywhere at once.
• Money. Operators quote in euros because the lira moves too fast to price a season in. Cash in lira goes further in markets, where the first price is an opening bid.
• Tipping. Around a tenth of the bill in restaurants, a note for a driver or guide.
• Mosques. Visits pause for each of the five daily prayers, and longer around midday on Friday. Shoulders and knees covered, shoes off; scarves are lent at the door.
• Ramadan. Away from the resorts many kitchens stop serving in daylight, and the evening meal becomes the best of the year.