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Van

Van is defined by its enormous soda lake — at 3,755 square kilometres one of the world's largest, its alkaline water a vivid shade of turquoise that photos fail to capture honestly — and by the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island, whose tenth-century relief carvings of biblical scenes make the boat trip across the lake essential. Van Castle, built by the Urartians in the ninth century BC, surveys the lake from a volcanic outcrop where the Urartian kings carved inscriptions in cuneiform celebrating their victories. Van cats — the famous white, odd-eyed breed — originated here and are celebrated with a statue on the waterfront.

Karabük

Karabük's main claim on traveller itineraries is Safranbolu, one of Turkey's best-preserved Ottoman towns and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994, its hillside of timbered mansions, hans, and a domed market intact enough to require no imagination to transport you to the seventeenth century. Saffron — safran in Turkish — was once the primary trade good here, lending the town its name and a golden thread to its history, though the spice trade has since declined. The Yörük village of Konak, nearby, preserves traditional Anatolian rural architecture in a setting surrounded by pine forest.

Adıyaman

Adıyaman is dominated by the singular spectacle of Mount Nemrut, where the megalomaniac first-century BC king Antiochus I of Commagene had himself depicted alongside Zeus, Apollo, and Tyche in colossal stone heads that still gaze east and west from a summit tumulus at 2,150 metres. Sunrise over the stone gods — heads slightly tumbled by two millennia of earthquakes — is one of Turkey's most iconic images. The province also holds the Atatürk Dam, one of the world's largest earthfill dams, impounding a reservoir that submerged ancient settlements and reshaped the Euphrates.

Erzurum

Erzurum is the capital of Turkey's frozen east — at 1,950 metres, it is the highest major city in the country and famous for winters that can drive temperatures below minus thirty. The Çifte Minareli Medrese, its twin turquoise minarets flanking an intricately carved portal, is the finest example of Anatolian Seljuk architecture in any city outside Konya. Palandöken ski resort, overlooking the city's sprawl, offers some of the driest powder snow in Europe thanks to the continental climate of the eastern plateau.

Sakarya

Sakarya tumbles down from the Bolu mountains to the eastern Marmara shore, its fast-flowing rivers popular with white-water kayakers navigating Geyve Gorge. The province's market gardens supply Istanbul with much of its fresh produce, and the small city of Adapazarı — rebuilt after the devastating 1999 quake — is known for a surprisingly good local kofta tradition. Lake Sapanca, shared with Kocaeli, is the main drinking water reservoir for Istanbul and a blue jewel framed by beech forest.

Samsun

Samsun is the Black Sea's largest city and the place where Atatürk landed by boat on 19 May 1919 to ignite the Turkish War of Independence — a date now celebrated as Youth and Sports Day across the country. The city is a busy port and university town with an unexpectedly lively restaurant and nightlife district along the Sahil Boulevard, set against an almost continuous backdrop of dark sea and forested mountain. The Amisos Hill excavations on the city's eastern edge reveal a Hellenistic commercial centre that once exported Black Sea grain to Athens.

Adana

Adana is southern Turkey's biggest and most confident city, built on the flat Çukurova plain where the Seyhan River runs green between broad agricultural fields — the cotton and citrus breadbasket of the Mediterranean. The Adana kebab — a long kofte of spiced ground lamb on a skewer, grilled over charcoal — has conquered every Turkish city but tastes best here, eaten standing at a brazier on the Seyhan River bridge. The Taşköprü, a sixteen-arch Roman bridge across the river, has been in continuous use for nearly two thousand years.

Burdur

Burdur holds the Turkish Maldives: Lake Salda, a high-altitude crater lake of startling turquoise water and white magnesite shores that looks implausible against the rocky Anatolian plateau. The provincial capital sits beside Turkey's third-largest lake, Burdur Gölü, a saline bird sanctuary on the central migration corridor where flamingos and white-headed ducks winter in the thousands. Sagalassos, high on a mountain shelf above the Burdur plain, is one of the best-preserved Hellenistic and Roman cities in the eastern Mediterranean.

Rize

Rize is the capital of Turkish tea — every hillside above the Black Sea is terraced with the dark green camellia plants introduced from Georgia in the 1930s, and the province now produces virtually all of Turkey's enormous domestic consumption. The city's tea gardens are open to visitors and the çay picking season, when women in floral headwraps harvest the tender top leaves, is one of the most photogenic agricultural scenes in Turkey. The Fırtına Valley behind Çamlıhemşin is a gateway to the Kaçkar Mountains, Turkey's most spectacular alpine wilderness.

Eskişehir

Eskişehir is the country's most youthful and self-consciously hip city, its central Porsuk Stream channelled between café terraces where university students punt gondolas past art-deco facades in an improbable approximation of Venice. The old Odunpazarı quarter is a UNESCO-nominated grid of restored Ottoman timber mansions now housing galleries, boutiques, and meerschaum workshops — the province is the world's primary source of this chalky white carving stone. Eskişehir also sits astride Turkey's high-speed rail network, making it an easy half-day from both Istanbul and Ankara.

Artvin

Artvin tumbles through some of the most dramatic landscape in the entire country — deep river gorges, glacially carved valleys, and the forested ridges of the Kaçkar Mountains create a scenery closer to the Caucasus than to most people's image of Turkey. The ancient Georgian monastery of Dörtkilise and the fortress village of Şavşat cling to hillsides above rivers running jade-green with glacial melt. Artvin's chestnuts, hazelnuts, and honey are prized across Turkey, and its Black Sea rain-shadow forests hold wolves, brown bears, and Caucasian lynx.

Mersin

Mersin is Turkey's largest Mediterranean port and a modern, outward-looking city that most travellers bypass in favour of Antalya — their loss. Kızkalesi, the Castle of the Maiden, rises directly from the sea just off the coast on a tiny island connected to a matching clifftop fortress by a ruined causeway, creating one of the Mediterranean's most photogenic scenes. Silifke to the west guards the entrance to ancient Cilicia, where Alexander and Roman legions marched through the same narrow coastal corridor.

Malatya

Malatya is Turkey's apricot capital, its sun-drenched plateau growing the most prized dried apricots in the world — the translucent amber fruits exported to every continent. Aslantepe, an early Bronze Age mound on the outskirts of the city, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site revealing four thousand years of Anatolian occupation in a single stratified hill. The province also provided the eastern Euphrates crossing point for Silk Road caravans, and its caravanserai ruins still stand along the old mountain routes.

Balıkesir

Balıkesir straddles the boundary between European influence and Anatolian depth, encompassing the Aegean island-scattered coastline around Ayvalık — where old Greek mansions have become boutique hotels overlooking olive-silvered hills. Inland, the snow-capped peaks of Uludağ fade into fertile valleys producing Turkey's finest olive oil. Cunda Island, just off Ayvalık, serves the freshest mezze in the north Aegean.

Manisa

Manisa unfurls across the fertile Gediz valley beneath the towering shadow of Sipylus Mountain, whose ancient rock-cut figure — possibly the world's oldest carved monument — stares out above the plain in mute antiquity. The provincial capital was an Ottoman prince's training ground; its Muradiye mosque complex is one of the most elegantly proportioned in Turkey's Aegean interior. Every spring, the Mesir Festival distributes sweet paste from the Sultan Mosque's minarets, a pharmacological tradition dating to the sixteenth century.

Sivas

Sivas commands the high plateau of central Anatolia where trade routes from Ankara, Erzurum, and Malatya have converged since antiquity, and its Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is arguably the most astonishing piece of medieval Islamic architecture in the world, its portals carved in a riotous filigree that looks more like lace than stone. The city also holds the memorial to the 1919 Congress of Sivas, a pivotal moment in the founding of the Republic. In winter, snowfall blankets the entire plateau in isolation that emphasises how immense and empty Anatolia's interior can be.

Sinop

Sinop occupies Turkey's northernmost point, a teardrop-shaped peninsula jutting into the Black Sea where the ancient city served simultaneously as a major port and one of history's most storied prisons — the philosopher Diogenes was allegedly born here and promptly chose to live in a barrel. The city's Byzantine walls and Alaeddin Mosque rise above a harbour of wooden fishing boats, and the Hamsilos fjord just west is one of the Black Sea coast's most dramatic natural formations. Fresh hamsi anchovies, the staple of Pontic cuisine, are pulled from these waters and fried or pickled at every restaurant in town.

Amasya

Amasya is one of the most cinematically beautiful cities in Turkey — painted Ottoman timber yalıs reflected in the green-flowing Yeşilırmak River, with Pontic royal rock tombs carved directly into the cliff face above, illuminated at night in an amber glow. For centuries it was a training ground for Ottoman princes, and the city retains the refinement of its former importance in its mosques, caravanserais, and astronomical clock tower. A slow walk along the riverside boulevard, dodging swans and student cyclists, is one of Anatolia's finest urban pleasures.

Afyonkarahisar

Afyonkarahisar rises around a dramatic volcanic monolith topped by a Hittite and Ottoman fortress that has watched armies pass for three thousand years — Afyon was also the site of the decisive battle that ended the Turkish War of Independence in 1922. The province produces the country's finest kaymak clotted cream and an outsized share of Turkey's legal opium, grown in regulated poppy fields whose pale lavender blossoms cover the plateau each spring. Thermal springs at Sandıklı and Gazlıgöl have been used since Roman times and still draw visitors seeking sulphurous relief.

Isparta

Isparta is the rose capital of Turkey, its fields of Damascene oil roses blooming pink every May and June in a colour that saturates the entire valley and fills the air with scent for weeks. The lake-studded plateau — Eğirdir Gölü is one of Turkey's largest and cleanest freshwater lakes — offers kayaking, hiking, and remote island camping at a fraction of the Aegean coast's prices. Süleyman Demirel University keeps the city young and lively throughout the academic year.

Kastamonu

Kastamonu is a beautifully preserved Ottoman town of half-timbered konak mansions on a hillside beneath a Byzantine castle, quietly going about life as it has for centuries. The province is famous for being where Atatürk launched his hat reform in 1925 — banning the fez in favour of European-style brims — making it a symbolic flashpoint of the Republic's secular revolution. Ilgaz Mountain National Park nearby offers hiking through virgin pine forest and reliable snow from December to March.

Tekirdağ

Tekirdağ stretches along the European shore of the Sea of Marmara, its fertile Thracian plain producing grapes for rakı and sunflowers that turn entire hillsides gold in July. The coastal city of the same name was once an important grain port and retains handsome Ottoman architecture around its historic harbour square. Rakı distilleries here welcome visitors into their copper-pot rooms where the national spirit has been made the same way since the nineteenth century.

Bitlis

Bitlis climbs the slopes of the Güzeldere Pass, one of the great historic mountain gateways between the Anatolian plateau and the Lake Van basin — caravans, armies, and pilgrims have struggled through this gorge for millennia. The town of Ahlat on Lake Van's western shore preserves the most atmospheric Seljuk cemetery in Turkey, its carved mushroom-shaped tombstones scattered across a meadow above the water like a stone forest. Lake Van itself, the world's largest soda lake, turns an extraordinary pale violet in certain lights and supports a unique endemic species of fish, the pearl mullet.

Ordu

Ordu spreads along a crescent of Black Sea coastline beneath densely forested mountains, its hazelnut and tea gardens terracing the slopes in a brilliant permanent green. The city's cable car climbs to the Boztepe summit for a panoramic view of the coast and the endless dark-blue sea. Çambaşı plateau, high above the clouds at 1,800 metres, is a popular winter ski destination and summer camp for the coastal heat, connected to Ordu by a spectacular mountain road.

Aksaray

Aksaray sits at the western gateway to Cappadocia on the ancient Silk Road route between Konya and Kayseri, and its Sultanhanı caravanserai — the largest in Turkey — still stands as a testament to the Seljuk imperial infrastructure that once ensured safe passage for merchants across the Anatolian plateau. The Ihlara Valley, a narrow canyon carved through volcanic rock where early Christians painted hundreds of cave churches in the eighth and ninth centuries, lies within an hour's drive. The Tuz Gölü salt lake's southwestern shore is in Aksaray province, a surreal landscape of white crystalline flats at sunset.

Kütahya

Kütahya is Turkey's ceramic heartland, its bazaars stacked with cobalt-and-white Iznik-style tiles and hand-painted bowls that have been produced in local workshops for six centuries. The city's fortress, Ottoman mosques, and the great bazaar make it a worthwhile stop on the route between Istanbul and Cappadocia. Gediz district produces dark, concentrated wines from high-altitude vineyards that are finally earning international recognition.

Kahramanmaraş

Kahramanmaraş is famous across Turkey for two things: its spicy, intensely flavoured red pepper paste, and its dondurma ice cream — the stretchy, mastic-thickened variety that vendors tease tourists with in an elaborate theatrical ritual. The city sits at the southern foot of the Ahır Mountains and was rebuilt substantially after the catastrophic February 2023 earthquake that devastated southern Turkey; its history of resilience long predates that disaster. The surrounding plateau produces Maraş pepper, essential to Turkish cuisine, and some of the country's best sheep's-milk cheese.

Giresun

Giresun is the province that gave hazelnuts to the world — the ancient Greeks called the nut 'karyon Pontikon', the nut of the Pontic coast, and the entire Black Sea hillside here is still one continuous hazelnut canopy. The coastal city occupies a dramatic headland fortress site above a castle island, and the Giresun Adası — barely 600 metres offshore — was venerated in antiquity as a sanctuary of Ares. Waterfalls cascade through the steep hinterland valleys, and the Kümbet Plateau is a pastoral high-altitude summer destination for local trekkers.

Ağrı

Ağrı is defined by a single landmark visible from a hundred kilometres: the perfect twin-peaked cone of Mount Ararat, at 5,137 metres the highest mountain in Turkey and the legendary resting place of Noah's Ark, its snowy summit perpetually cutting the horizon above the surrounding plateau. The province is a high, arid borderland where Kurdish nomads have moved their flocks along seasonal routes for millennia. Işak Pasha Palace, an ornate late-Ottoman complex at Doğubeyazıt, presides over a rocky volcanic spur above a plain that feels like the edge of the world.

Çorum

Çorum is home to Hattusa, the wind-swept Hittite imperial capital on a ridge of central Anatolia where the Great Temple, the Lion Gate, and the enigmatic Yazılıkaya rock sanctuary have been excavated from the grass since the nineteenth century. The UNESCO-listed site illuminates a Bronze Age superpower that signed history's first recorded peace treaty with Ramesses II of Egypt. Alacahöyük, just south, is older still — its Sphinx Gate decorated with some of the earliest relief sculpture in Anatolia.

Erzincan

Erzincan sits in a broad valley between the Euphrates headwaters and the volcanic Munzur range, a fertile corridor that has been ravaged by earthquakes throughout its history — the 1939 tremor killed 33,000 people and remains Turkey's deadliest on record. The valley produces Kemaliye's honey, renowned across Turkey, and the Munzur canyon cuts through limestone walls to create one of eastern Anatolia's most dramatic gorge landscapes. The Kemah Gorge fortress, perched above an improbable bend in the Euphrates, has guarded this strategic valley since Urartian times.

Siirt

Siirt rises above the Botan River valley, a tributary of the Tigris, in a landscape of limestone ridges and fertile alluvial flatland where fig, pistachio, and cotton grow within sight of the Kurdish highlands. The ancient city's great mosque, originally built in the twelfth century with materials from Roman-era structures, has been restored and expanded many times but retains its original minaret of exquisite brick filigree. Siirt's büryan kebab — whole lamb slow-roasted in a clay-lined pit — is considered by serious kebab enthusiasts to be among the finest meat preparations in Turkey.

Uşak

Uşak sits at the junction of the Aegean and interior Anatolian zones, its highlands producing some of Turkey's finest hand-knotted carpets in a tradition going back four centuries. The province became internationally notorious in 1966 when the 'Lydian Hoard' — the burial treasure of a fifth-century BC Lydian king — was looted from tumuli near Güre and smuggled to New York's Metropolitan Museum, finally returning home in 1993 after a landmark repatriation case. The local Karahallı district makes excellent regional wines from ancient grape varieties.

Zonguldak

Zonguldak is Turkey's coal province — the cliffs of the Western Black Sea coast conceal the country's most important hard-coal seams, mined since the mid-nineteenth century in a tradition of underground labour that shaped the region's working-class identity. The Ereğli district, ancient Heraclea Pontica founded by Greek colonists in the seventh century BC, still shows its mythological roots: the cave of Heracles' descent to the underworld is visible just outside town. Coastal fishing villages between the mine towns offer some of the least-touristed Black Sea scenery in the country.

Kırşehir

Kırşehir anchors the dead centre of Anatolia, its modest city best known as the birthplace and shrine of Ahi Evran, the thirteenth-century patron saint of craftsmen who founded the Akhism brotherhood system that organised Ottoman trade guilds. The Cacabey Mosque, built in 1272, contains one of Anatolia's earliest astronomical observatories adapted from the mosque's central dome. The province's rose fields around Güzelyurt produce attar for Turkey's perfume industry, a fragrant footnote to its austere steppe landscape.

Yozgat

Yozgat occupies the remote Bozok Plateau of north-central Anatolia, a high, treeless upland where the Phrygians, Hittites, and Galatians all left their traces in buried settlements and roadside mounds. The Büyük Nefes Çayı river valley cuts through the province's southern rim in a series of dramatic gorges, and the Yozgat Pine Forest — one of the most popular picnic grounds in central Anatolia — brings residents of the capital out from Ankara on summer weekends. Yozgat Clock Tower, built in 1875, stands in the modest city square as the province's most recognisable landmark.

Tokat

Tokat's most famous building is the Gök Medrese, a magnificent Seljuk theological school whose vivid turquoise tilework and twin minarets loom above the old bazaar quarter with unexpected grandeur. The surrounding province is prime castle country — hilltop fortifications dot every ridge of the Yeşilırmak valley, testament to the centuries of Byzantine-Seljuk-Mongol pressure that shaped this corridor. Zile district preserves the site of Zela, where Julius Caesar famously dispatched his three-word war bulletin after defeating Pharnaces II.

Bingöl

Bingöl sits at the convergence of the Bingöl Mountains and the headwaters of the Peri River, a remote highland province where eagle owls nest in canyon walls and brown bears roam forests barely touched by modern roads. The province takes its name — 'thousand lakes' — from the glacial tarns scattered across its summer plateaux, and the Solhan thermal springs attract visitors seeking relief in waters that bubble from the earth at near-boiling temperature. Despite its isolation, Bingöl preserves a rich tradition of dengbêj vocal storytelling, the Kurdish oral poetry tradition inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Çankırı

Çankırı is one of Turkey's most under-visited provinces, an upland landscape of Phrygian-eroded valleys and salt caves that opened to visitors only recently. The Tuz Gölü — the vast salt lake shared with Ankara and Aksaray — reaches into the province's southern tip, and in summer it turns an extraordinary pink from the halophyte algae that thrive in its brine. The provincial capital's rock salt mines have been worked since antiquity and still produce Turkish salt.

Batman

Batman takes its name from the Batan stream but has become known worldwide for the legal dispute in which the city's mayor sued Christopher Nolan over the Batman franchise — one of the stranger moments in intellectual property history. The province occupies the upper Tigris corridor where Hasankeyf, an ancient city of cave dwellings and Islamic monuments above the Tigris, was partially submerged by the Ilısu Dam in 2020 after fierce international opposition. The relocated Zeynel Bey Tomb, physically moved to preserve it from the rising waters, stands as a symbol of the impossible choices forced by infrastructure development.

Osmaniye

Osmaniye fills the narrow gap between the Taurus Mountains and the Nur range, the strategic Amanus corridor where Alexander the Great passed through to his decisive confrontation with Darius III at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC. The Karatepe-Aslantaş open-air museum preserves a late Hittite fortress whose bilingual inscriptions in Phoenician and Luwian — discovered in 1947 — played a crucial role in deciphering the Luwian hieroglyphic script. The province's rugged mountains shelter wolf packs and the last wild goats of the Amanus range.

Tunceli

Tunceli — also known by its Kurdish name Dersim — is Turkey's least populated province, an isolated highland massif where the Munzur and Peri rivers carve dramatic gorges through Jurassic limestone. The Munzur Valley National Park shelters the Caspian snowcock, the Anatolian leopard's last Turkish stronghold, and rivers cold enough to support trout despite summer heat at lower elevations. The province's Alevi Kurdish population practices a syncretic form of Islam whose rituals, music, and calendar are distinct from both mainstream Sunni and Shia traditions.

Muş

Muş spreads across the Muş Plain, one of the broadest valleys in eastern Anatolia, a vast agricultural floor ringed by peaks including the Bingöl and Bitlis ranges. In May the plain erupts in wild tulips — the species from which European garden tulips descended — creating sweeping natural colour displays before the summer heat browns the grass. The Muş Archaeological Museum holds finds from the ancient Urartian presence that once ruled this lake-country corridor.

Gümüşhane

Gümüşhane translates as 'silver house', and the province's mountains were indeed mined for silver, lead, and copper from Byzantine times until the twentieth century — the old Greek mining town of Argyroupolis is now the modern city of Gümüşhane. The Karaca Cave system, open to visitors, contains some of the most spectacular stalactite formations in Turkey, rivalling anything in the Mediterranean karst landscapes. The Limony Valley near Torul is a dramatic canyon where citrus orchards somehow survive in a sheltered microclimate despite the surrounding alpine conditions.

Kırklareli

Kırklareli occupies Turkey's forested northwestern tip, tucked against the Bulgarian border amid the ancient Istranca hills where deer and wild boar still roam cork-oak forests that once supplied Constantinople's shipyards. The province is quiet by Turkish standards but hides surprises: the Dupnisa Cave system and the vineyards around Lüleburgaz producing some of Thrace's most interesting reds. It is territory for slow travellers who want the Balkans without the crowds.

Hakkâri

Hakkâri is Turkey's wildest and most inaccessible province, pressing hard against the Iraqi and Iranian borders in a landscape of peaks exceeding four thousand metres, permanent glaciers, and river gorges navigable only on foot or mule. The Sat and Cilo mountain ranges are genuine alpinist territory with unclimbed walls and rarely trodden glaciers, and the few trekkers who reach here find a landscape of transcendent severity. The province's Yörük nomads still drive their flocks vertically between winter lowlands and summer highland pastures along routes unchanged for millennia.

Bilecik

Bilecik is a small, landlocked province at the historical heartland of the early Ottoman state — Söğüt, where Osman I established his tiny beylik in the late thirteenth century, sits here. The province's forested ridges conceal the Bozüyük thermal springs and the atmospheric ruins of Lefke, a Byzantine town whose walls still march across a hilltop. History enthusiasts tracing the Ottoman origin story find Bilecik an essential and often overlooked stop.

Bolu

Bolu presides over the heart of Turkey's western Black Sea mountains, where thick beech and oak forests blanket slopes above two of the country's favourite ski and nature resorts: Kartalkaya and Abant. The Abant Plateau, with its glacial lake ringed by forest, becomes a postcard scene regardless of season — blazing with autumn colour in October, silent under snow in January. Bolu's restaurants are famous for producing Turkey's finest professional chefs, and the city celebrates this with a gastronomy festival each autumn.

Karaman

Karaman takes its name from the medieval Karamanids, the Anatolian dynasty that was the last serious rival to Ottoman supremacy and whose territory centred precisely here. The province is the geographical transition between Konya's wheat steppe and the Taurus mountains' cedar forests, and the Aladağlar peaks on its eastern boundary offer serious alpine climbing. Binbirkilise — 'the thousand and one churches' — near Madenşehri is a haunting early Christian site: a ruined Byzantine monastic complex whose stone shells rise from the volcanic plateau like a stopped film reel.

Kırıkkale

Kırıkkale is primarily an industrial city — Turkey's ammunition and arms manufacturing centre — set on a plateau just east of Ankara, its economy built on defence industry factories established in the early Republic. The surrounding countryside along the Kızılırmak river offers good river-fishing and a handful of Ottoman-era bridges and caravanserais that belie the industrial character of the provincial capital. Few travellers pause here voluntarily, but the road to Kırıkkale from Ankara passes through countryside that is quietly representative of the Anatolian heartland at its most unaffected.

Yalova

Yalova is essentially Istanbul's garden — a small province across the Sea of Marmara where the city's stressed millions descend on ferries for weekend relief in the form of thermal baths, lakeside forests, and the National Botanical Garden, one of Turkey's finest collections of flowering trees. Termal, the spa resort in the hills above Yalova, has been used since Roman times and hosted Atatürk, who built a government mansion here for working retreats. The ferry crossing from Istanbul to Yalova offers the best views of the Marmara on any regular passenger route.

Bayburt

Bayburt is one of Turkey's smallest and least-visited provinces, perched on the high Çoruh River watershed where the landscape opens into a wide plateau before plunging into the canyons of Georgia. The city's imposing Bayburt Castle, first built in Urartian times and expanded by every subsequent ruler, dominates a cliff above the river and offers a view across a town that seems unchanged for a century. Zigana Pass, on the northern route to Trabzon, offers some of Turkey's most dramatic road scenery and is closed by snow for months each winter.

Şırnak

Şırnak is Turkey's most remote southeastern province, bordering both Iraq and Syria in terrain that ranges from the bare limestone Cudi Mountain — another proposed resting place of Noah's Ark — to the canyon of the Habur River where the Ibrahim Khalil border crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan sees a steady flow of trucks carrying Turkish goods south. The province is almost entirely Kurdish-speaking and has been deeply affected by decades of conflict in the southeast, but the landscapes around the Cizre lowlands and the Gabar Mountain are quietly extraordinary. Cizre itself, on the Tigris, is an ancient city whose waterfront position has made it a settlement since at least the third millennium BC.

Ardahan

Ardahan is Turkey's coldest and emptiest province, a high plateau of grassland and volcanic hills pressed against the Georgian border where temperatures regularly hit minus forty in winter and summer lasts barely two months. The Kura River winds through the province in a series of dramatic basalt gorges, and Şeytan Kalesi — the Devil's Castle, a natural rock formation above the river — looks exactly as menacing as its name suggests. Ardahan is dairy country: the plateau's volcanic pastures produce milk for some of Turkey's finest butter and hard cheeses, exported quietly under other brand names.

Elazığ

Elazığ sits on the edge of the Euphrates reservoir country, its surrounding highland ringed by the vast Keban and Karakaya dams that transformed the Fırat valley in the twentieth century. Harput, the ancient hilltop city just above Elazığ, has mosques, a castle, and a stunning view across the reservoir that make it one of eastern Turkey's most atmospheric ruins. The province's organically grown Öküzgözü grapes produce rich, deeply coloured red wines that have earned Elazığ the informal title of Anatolia's wine capital.

Kocaeli

Kocaeli, known historically as Izmit, guards the eastern entrance to the Sea of Marmara where the Gulf of İzmit cuts deep into the hills. The province is heavily industrialised — Turkey's automotive and petrochemical heartland — but the lakeside resort town of Sapanca, cradled between forested peaks and a glassy freshwater lake, offers a genuine weekend escape from Istanbul just an hour away. The 1999 earthquake left its mark here, but the rebuilt city has grown into one of Turkey's most dynamic regional centres.

Kilis

Kilis is Turkey's smallest province by area, a sliver of olive-grove farmland on the Syrian border where the cuisine leans unmistakably toward the Arab-Mediterranean tradition: pomegranate molasses, kibbeh, and dishes of a complexity that reflects centuries of exchange with Aleppo just across the frontier. The old town centre has a well-preserved Mamluk-era bedesten and several Ottoman caravanserais that speak to Kilis's past importance on the trade route between Anatolia and Syria. The local Kilis olive oil — single-origin, cold-pressed — has EU Protected Designation of Origin status.

Iğdır

Iğdır occupies a warm, sheltered corridor between Mount Ararat and the Iranian border where the Aras River valley creates a climate pocket mild enough for cotton, pomegranates, and figs in a province otherwise surrounded by mountains and glaciers. The plain below Ararat has a mythological weight — this is the landscape in which the mountain has been embedded for every culture that has looked at it — and at dawn the summit's snow catches the first light in a rose-gold glow visible from Iğdır's streets. A small Urartian museum in the city holds finds from the ancient settlements that dot the valley.

Niğde

Niğde guards the southern approach to Cappadocia through a fertile valley beneath the massive bulk of Hasan Dağı volcano, itself a dormant giant that produced the ash layers underlying the fairy chimneys to the north. The Niğde Museum holds a remarkable Eski Gümüş monastery complex carved entirely from rock in the tenth century, its frescoes still vivid in underground chambers. The Aladağlar national park on the province's eastern edge is Turkey's most challenging alpine terrain, a granite massif of true technical routes for experienced mountaineers.

Düzce

Düzce sits on the Black Sea foothills east of Istanbul, rebuilt almost entirely after the devastating 1999 earthquake that followed Kocaeli's tremor by three months and caused comparable destruction in this smaller province. The rebuilt city is functional and modern, but the surrounding highlands — Kartalkaya ski slopes on one side, Yedigöller National Park's seven linked glacial lakes on the other — make Düzce a surprisingly appealing nature base for Istanbul day-trippers willing to push a little further than Abant. The Bolu River canyon just west offers white-water kayaking in spring.

Bartın

Bartın is a small Black Sea province of surprising scenic drama: the Bartın River flows through a canyon of limestone karst before reaching a sheltered estuary, and the gorge known as Varlık supports dense hornbeam forest that turns amber and burgundy in October. Amasra, a double-harboured ancient Greek trading post on a promontory of black rock, is one of the Black Sea coast's most charming small towns — its Byzantine-Genoese castle, fish restaurants, and pebble beaches drawing visitors who discover it often refuse to leave. The Küre Mountains National Park, shared with Kastamonu, protects some of the last old-growth beech forest in the western Black Sea region.