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Eastern Turkey

In eastern Turkey, even the police at the road checkpoints thank visitors for coming. The 2023 earthquake was devastating for this under-visited region and tourist support can help it rebuild. This area rivals Egypt for historical significance. The majority of travelers, who go to the west, are missing out – but you don’t have to. Read more in our eastern Turkey guide.

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Eastern Turkey

“This is an area that needs to be seen,” says Rahul Aggarwal, co-founder of our east Turkey experts, Travel the Unknown. “And once people see it, they want to see it again.”

He’s talking about taking a tour of eastern Turkey to visit the 70 percent of the country east of Ankara which is home to less than 45 percent of the population. Much of it dominated by a vast plateau, with scattered lakes, mountains and volcanoes.

The particulars of Turkey’s geography – as the country that connects Asia and Europe – has given it a central position on the world’s stage. This is the site of the world’s first city, the world’s first wine, and humanity’s earliest known place of worship– Göbekli Tepe, given UNESCO status in 2018.

Yet despite its historical prominence, very few people – indeed very few Turks – visit eastern Turkey, favouring instead the western coast, Izmir and Istanbul, and ancient Greek sites like Ephesus. The draw of the east is that, in this quieter region, you can face sites that make the ancient Greeks look thoroughly modern.

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Introducing eastern Turkey

Turkey’s history is a catalogue of shifting empires – from Armenian Kingdoms to Byzantines, Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans. The abandoned trade routes mark it as a place where cultures cross, and people connect.

Believers from three major world religions agree that it’s possible that Abraham was born in the city of Urfa, and that Noah’s Ark might have made landfall on Mount Ararat. It’s here that humanity was thought to come together for the first time, at Çatalhöyük, described as the world’s first ever city. You can visit, and see a settlement for 8,000 people, which research shows was accessed through ladders and skylights.

Then, in 2018, UNESCO gave World Heritage Status to Göbekli Tepe, putting it on the map. The site predates the world’s first city by some millennia, suggesting that man was potentially communing with deities long before communing en masse with his fellow man. It is an incredible 12,000 years old.

“It’s a ‘hairs on the back of your neck’ kind of experience,” says Rahul, who visited in 2022. He wasn’t alone – a record 850,000 visitors came to the site in 2022. For comparison, Ephesus in the west gets 2.5 million. Göbekli Tepe, is helping put eastern Turkey on the map.

“Turkey is in some ways quite similar to Egypt,” says Rahul. “It’s like an open-air museum – you can drive 15-20 minutes and see another ancient site.” Sixty kilometres down the road from Göbekli Tepe lies the archaeological site of Karahan Tepe. And if the former is considered under-visited, the latter is even more so. Excavations have found a similar wealth of very old structures at each site: mysterious animal sculptures, obelisks and T-topped columns. There are potentially yet more sites to uncover.

Rivers and dams

Turkey’s ancient sites are here in part because of its famous rivers. The Euphrates and the Tigris have their headwaters in eastern Turkey. The place between them, Mesopotamia, is part of the Fertile Crescent – home to some of the earliest civilisations. The slow, silty Euphrates and the faster Tigris run down through Turkey, and into Iran and Syria.

Turkey’s ambitious programmes for hydroelectricity and irrigation have turned these rivers into a series of dammed reservoirs – a large project that has moved towns and archaeological sites. You can still see the tops of spindly minarets poking out of flooded valleys. Turkey shapes its future – and moves its past to specially-built museums.

Visiting eastern Turkey after the 2023 earthquake

Unfortunately, Turkey is the meeting place for more than trade routes and rivers. Three tectonic plates meet in the region, making southern and central Turkey susceptible to earthquakes. The devastating February 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake – the largest to hit the country since 1939 – killed over 50,000 people and made up to 2.7 million people homeless.

After careful consideration, Travel the Unknown returned with travelers in April 2023.

“We’re really glad that we went ahead with the trip,” said Rahul, “Our travelers pointed out how many local people thanked them repeatedly for coming to Turkey when no one else was. Many of the police at checkpoints were thanking them as well. By shunning an area you’ve depriving already hard-hit communities and making it even harder to make an income.”

It’s like an open-air museum – you can drive 15-20 minutes and see another ancient site.

Why visit eastern Turkey?

This is a trip for people with vivid imaginations and a love of archaeology and history – Seljuk, Hittite, Turk, Byzantine and Armenian cultures can all be explored. As with many archaeology-focused tours, the interest is in the interpretation. A good guide can help you imagine what used to be here, where now only a few stones lie. These sites, whilst shadows of their former selves, still sit in dramatic landscapes.

Whilst driving around the eastern Turkey plateau can mean some long and featureless drives, it's not all sun-baked ruins. By touring the northeast of Turkey, you can also discover the leafy northern regions and Black Sea cities like Trabzon.

Where to go in eastern Turkey

A great tour route is one that swishes on a crescent-shaped route through the country, taking in the Black Sea Coast, Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia, following the country’s borders between the Black Sea and Gaziantep.

It’s the world close to these borders that give you the most interesting cultural tastes – close to Georgia you’ll find abandoned castles ruled by Georgian kings, and Armenian culture among forested hills.

Mount Ararat, a snowcapped hulk of volcano standing over 5,000m tall, slopes down to Armenia, Iran and Azerbaijan. The city of Mardin shares its architecture with its southern neighbour, Syria, which you can see from the city across the Mesopotamian plain. By the time you’ve reached Urfa and gone on to Gaziantep, you’ll have taken in myriad cultures without crossing any borders.

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Eastern Turkey highlights

Ani

Near the city of Kars, but even closer to the tensions at the Armenian border, this abandoned Armenian hilltop fortress town sits on the lonely steppe. Once known as ‘the city of a thousand churches’, in its long history the region in which Ani sits has been controlled by over 15 empires. Turkey is doing an inadequate job of preserving the Armenian heritage of the site. In spring, wildflowers gather and keep their fragile vigil in the surrounding grassland.

Gaziantep and the Zeugma mosaics

The Turkish sites most associated with classical civilisations are on the west coast – Ephesus and Troy. Yet one of eastern Turkey’s highlights is the mosaic museum at Gaziantep, considered to be one of the finest in the world. There are nearly 2,500 square metres of mostly Roman mosaics in this museum. They’ve been moved from the ancient city of Zeugma, which is now underwater, thanks to a dam construction on the Euphrates.

Göbekli Tepe

Discovered in the 1960s but only really achieving world renown in 2018, Göbekli Tepe is thought to be the site of the world’s first temple, yet its origins have baffled archaeologists. It would have taken a huge workforce to construct, yet, at 12,000 years old, it was built at a time when most of humanity lived in small groups. Only part of the area can be viewed, but a purpose-built museum at Urfa helps interpret what you’ve seen, and you can also walk among replica stones.

Kaçkar Mountains

The easternmost and highest point of the Pontic Alps and the wettest area of Turkey, the Kaçkar Mountains have forests, pastures and glacial lakes. Like much of northeastern Turkey, they were settled by Armenians and Georgians before the Turks. Today, they are a good hiking destination.

Konya

Much of the beautiful architecture in Konya comes from the Seljuk empire, including the burial place of Rumi, the Persian mystic. Followers of Rumi founded the Mevlevi order here and are also known as the whirling dervishes. Their unique rituals can still be watched in this deeply conservative and religious city. Nearby is another settlement – one in ruins – Çatalhöyük, considered to be the world’s first city.

Kurdish culture

Southeastern Turkey is a Kurdish region. The Kurds have for centuries been oppressed in Turkey. Learning Kurdish at school was banned, despite it being the language of 20 million people in the country. Up to the late 1990s, Kurdish separatist movements caused unrest. Today, eastern Turkey is a peaceful and trouble-free area, but Kurdish people remain a marginalised group in Turkey who are not necessarily free to express their culture.

Lake Van

Fishermen tow their laundry behind their boats in Lake Van, where the weird alkaline water acts like fabric conditioner. Washing beats fishing – there’s only one species of fish that survives in the salty water of Turkey’s largest lake. Take one of the popular boat trips out to the island of Akdamar to see its frescoed Armenian church, and spend time in historic Van, the city on its shore.

Mount Ararat

It’s easy to believe that Noah’s Ark could have beached itself on Mount Ararat if a great flood had covered the earth. The mountain’s sheer size and prominence – standing alone at over 5,000m, and covered in snow – eclipses anything in western Europe.

Sumela Monastery

One of eastern Turkey’s most visited sites, this Greek Orthodox monastery near Trabzon in the north east, is a feat of brave engineering. It sits wedged on a ledge in a cliff, at the mercy of rockfall, with a church built in the cave in its heart. The Turkish government allows Mass to be heard here once a year, but the site is primarily open to the public as a museum, where visitors can see the frescoed church and chapel.

Nemrut

The heads on the hill: in the 1st century BC a Hittite king built a self-aggrandising tomb and sanctuary to himself on the top of Mount Nemrut. He surrounded himself with sculptures of lions, eagles, and Greek and Persian gods which now sit near the top of the hill, looking out. The spot is very popular at sunset – it’s not every day you get to share a sundowner with Zeus.

Urfa

The city where the prophet Abraham was said to have been born, Urfa is still a religious place. It’s the nearest city to Göbekli Tepe, the lesser-known Karahan Tepe, and the historic town of Harran with its idiosyncratic beehive-shaped houses. Urfa’s impressive archaeological museum has a model of Göbekli Tepe’s stone circle, providing very useful context for the site. As for Abraham’s birthplace? It’s now a park with a sacred, carp-filled pool where people come to relax and chat.

What do eastern Turkey tours entail?

Going on a small group tour over two weeks gives you plenty of time to soak up the many archaeological and historical sites and museums. There’s also time to enjoy some of the more modern expressions of the region’s culture – Kurdish food and hospitality. Joining an organised tour makes it much easier to travel the large distances across the country and reach remote archaeological sites which are not well connected to urban areas. Traveling in a small group means that you can make the most of locally run accommodation where it is available without dominating smaller settlements. If you like food, you’ll be in mezze heaven. Long meals with lots of dishes are best enjoyed in the evening after a day of sightseeing. Vegetarians can be catered to but may find options get a little repetitive after a few weeks. Eastern Turkey is notably more conservative in dress and attitude than the west, and smaller communities are more conservative still than major urban centers– worth bearing in mind when it comes to what you wear. In Turkish, Kale means castle, not leafy brassica.