Konya

Turkey’s equivalent of the ‘Bible Belt’, conservative Konya treads a delicate path between its historical significance as the home town of the whirling dervish orders and a bastion of Seljuk culture on the one hand, and its modern importance as an economic boom town on the other.

Luckily the city derives considerable charm from this juxtaposition of old and new. Ancient mosques and the mazey market district, awash with Eastern smells, eager shopkeepers and Muslim pilgrims, rub up against contemporary Konya around Alaaddin Tepesi, where hip-looking university students talk religion and politics freely in the tea gardens.

Gaziantep (Antep)

Believe us: if one day there’s a Barcelona-like movida (a hedonistic and cultural revolution) in eastern Turkey, it will happen in Gaziantep. A fast-paced and forward-looking city, Antep vibrantly accommodates its traditional Mesopotamian culture with the buzz of thriving industry. One of the most desirable places to live in eastern Anatolia, Antep’s beguiling résumé includes clusters of old stone houses sprinkled around the city centre, an imposing fortress, a row of vibrant bazaars, a burgeoning café culture, the biggest city park in eastern Turkey, active pedestrianised streets and taste-bud-tingling cuisine. The old and the new combine to form an attractive, civilised and welcoming confection.

And if all you want is to please your palate, Antep could prove to be your Shangri-la: it is reckoned to harbour more than 180 pastry shops and to produce the best fıstıklı (pistachio) baklavas you can gobble down in Turkey, if not in the world.

Fethiye

Tucked into the southern reaches of an appealing broad bay, Fethiye is a very old town with few old buildings. An earthquake in 1958 levelled it and left only tombs from the time when Fethiye was called Telmessos (400 BC). It’s an incredibly relaxed place despite its size, often visited at the beginning or end of a gület cruise.
Fethiye’s inner bay is an excellent natural harbour, protected from storms by an island, Şövalye Adası; the much larger outer bay has 11 more islands. About 15km south is Ölüdeniz, one of Turkey’s seaside hot spots, and the Fethiye region has many interesting sites to explore, including the ghost town of Kayaköy (Karmylassos), just over the hill.

Dalyan

Once a somnolent farming town and now increasingly a package-tour colony, Dalyan has so far managed to keep some of its peaceful atmosphere. On top of those who choose to stay here, summer afternoons bring an armada of excursion boats from Marmaris and Fethiye carving a path through the reed beds of the Dalyan River (Dalyan Çayı) on their way to the ruins of ancient Kaunos (Caunos) and İztuzu beach. Above the river the façades of Lycian rock tombs gaze silently down on all this activity. Dalyan may be filling up with identical restaurants and the town centre has become another bland concrete agglomeration, but it only takes a few minutes’ walk to reach the charming old Dalyan of gardens and willow trees.

Central Anatolia

Central Anatolia is the heartland of Turkey, both geographically and culturally. Tribes, races and empires have been fighting over these dusty steppes and hills for centuries, dragging cities from obscurity to prominence, or from prosperity to destruction, sometimes spending decades battling over the same patch of ground. Civilisations were made or broken in the crucible of the Anatolian summer, leaving tantalising glimpses of themselves behind.
Today the evidence of history’s ebbs and flows is laid out all across the region like a giant crime scene, just waiting for the keen-eyed traveller to play detective. Follow the right traces and you’ll find Neolithic settlements rubbing shoulders with Hittite cities, and Seljuk pomp vying with Ottoman glamour, all founded on the forgotten ashes of a hundred more failed invaders.

Behramkale & Assos

Behramkale is a pretty little village that straggles up a hill towards the ruins of a famous temple to Athena. Assos is the name given to a cluster of half a dozen old stone houses-turned-hotels overlooking a picture-perfect harbour reached by a zigzag road down from behind Behramkale.
From the beginning of April to the end of August, avoid the weekends and public holidays if you can, when İstanbullus and İzmirlis pour in by the coachload to visit both the temple and the Hüdavendigar Camii mosque.

Ayvalik

Ayvalık (meaning Quince Orchard) is a seaside resort, fishing town, olive oil- and soap-making centre, and a terminus for boats to and from the Greek island of Lesvos. The coast is cloaked in pine trees and olive groves, and the offshore waters sprinkled with islands. But there has also been some unfortunate high-rise development, especially around Sarımsaklı.

Ayvalık is also proud of the fact that it was here that the first shot of the Turkish War of Independence was fired. Until after WWI the town was inhabited by Ottoman Greeks, but during the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, Ayvalık’s Turkish-speaking Greeks went to Greece, and Greek-speaking Turks came here from Lesvos, the Balkans and Crete. A few locals still speak Greek, and most of the local mosques are converted Orthodox churches: the Saatlı Camii was once the church of Agios Yannis (St John); Çınarlı Camii used to be the Agios Yorgos (St George) church