Sixteen days from Istanbul to Cappadocia: Turkey is much bigger than it looks

Istanbul Airport is forty kilometres out on the European side, with the M11 metro running from under the terminal to Gayrettepe in half an hour and a change onto the M2 from there. Sabiha Gökçen on the Asian side is cheaper to fly into and a great deal further away.

Do one thing with the first evening and let it be the Süleymaniye. Sinan built it for Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1550s on the crown of the third hill, and the terrace outside is the finest free view in the old city: the Golden Horn below, Galata opposite, the Bosphorus opening out to the right.

Eat in the little streets of student canteens on the north side of the mosque complex, which have been feeding people on that site since it was built.

Hagia Sophia first and early. It was completed in 537 and for a thousand years it held the largest enclosed space on earth, and the pendentives that carry its dome onto four piers are the reason every large Ottoman mosque afterwards looks the way it does. It has functioned as a mosque again since 2020 and visitors pay for the upper gallery, which is where you want to be anyway.

Topkapı next, and it takes longer than people plan for. The Harem is a separate ticket bought at a separate door inside the second court, so buy both online the night before. Do the Harem first if the day is busy, then the treasury, then the kitchens, and finish on the terrace at the far end looking down the Bosphorus.

Keep the Basilica Cistern for late afternoon. It is underground, cool, and the one thing here that is no better at eight in the morning.

The Sultanahmet Mosque closes to visitors around each of the five daily prayers, so check the board at the courtyard gate before joining a queue. Inside, twenty thousand İznik tiles run up the walls and into the semi-domes, which is where the English name came from.

Then uphill into the Grand Bazaar, which is four thousand shops under one roof arranged by trade rather than by owner. Locals do not buy here and the prices reflect that, so treat it as a building rather than a shop, and go through to the Nuruosmaniye gate where the antique dealers are.

In the afternoon take the tram and then the ferry up to Dolmabahçe, the palace the Ottoman court moved into when Topkapı started to feel medieval. Two hundred and eighty five rooms of European furniture and chandeliers, and a garden on the water. It is the best possible contrast with the morning.

Six hours southwest from the Istanbul otogar, crossing the Sea of Marmara at Gelibolu or coming round through Bursa depending on the operator. Buy the ticket the day before and take the free servis out to the terminal.

Çanakkale sits on the narrowest part of the strait, about a kilometre and a half across, which is why every empire that ever wanted this water fortified it. The Naval Museum is built around Çimenlik Castle, put up in 1452 to command the crossing and still in service in 1915, with a replica of the minelayer Nusret afloat outside it.

On the waterfront there is a wooden horse. It is the prop from the 2004 film, donated to the town, and it is the single most photographed object in Çanakkale, which says something about the relationship between the ruin down the road and the story attached to it.

A long day, and the reason two nights here works. Troy is thirty kilometres south and the first bus goes early. What you see is not one city but nine built on top of each other over about three thousand years, which is confusing on the ground and completely clear from the walkway they have built above it. Schliemann dug a trench straight through the middle of the mound in the 1870s and it is still there, and still called the Schliemann trench.

The museum beside the site opened in 2018 in a rusted steel cube meant to look like something just dug up, and it holds far more than the site does. An hour and a half inside, minimum.

In the afternoon, take the ferry across to Eceabat and go up the peninsula. Anzac Cove is a strip of shingle under crumbling cliffs where the Australian and New Zealand landings came ashore on 25 April 1915, and the cemeteries above it run up the ridge. It is quiet, well kept and best visited without a commentary.

Five and a half hours down the coast through Ayvalık and Bergama, with the Aegean on the right for most of it. Izmir's otogar is a long way out; take the servis in.

Izmir is a working port city rather than a monument, rebuilt after a fire in 1922 destroyed most of what was here, and the pleasure of it is the waterfront in the evening, when the whole city walks it.

Konak Square at its centre has an ornate clock tower of 1901, given to the city for the sultan's twenty fifth year on the throne, and a small tiled mosque beside it. A kilometre south, the Asansör is a lift built in 1907 by a Jewish merchant to carry people fifty eight metres up the cliff between the waterfront and the streets above it, and it still runs. Go up at sunset.

Eighty kilometres north, an hour and a half by dolmuş or a hire car for the day. Pergamon was one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world and its remains are split across three sites in and above the modern town.

The acropolis is the reason to come and the cable car takes you to the top of it. Most of what stands is 2nd century BC, laid out along a ridge with a library that was said to rival Alexandria's and a theatre cut into the hillside at an angle so steep that looking down the rows is unpleasant. The great altar that stood here is in Berlin; the terrace it sat on is not, and standing on it is still worth the climb.

Down in the valley, the Asklepion was a healing sanctuary approached along a colonnaded way, one of the best preserved of the three hundred known across the Roman world, and Galen trained here. The Red Basilica in the middle of the modern town is a colossal brick hulk built around 130 AD as a temple to the Egyptian gods and later turned into a church.

Four hours east and inland to Denizli, then twenty minutes north by dolmuş to Pamukkale village. Denizli's otogar has a departure roughly every half hour and the connection is easy.

Save the terraces for the end of the afternoon. They are a hillside of white calcium carbonate deposited by hot springs over thousands of years, in tiers of shallow pools, and you walk up them barefoot on a marked path with warm water running over your feet, because shoes damage the surface. Carry your shoes, allow forty minutes for the climb, and go up rather than take the road round.

At the top the path emerges onto the plateau of Hierapolis, and the terrace edge facing west is where everybody stands as the sun goes down and the whole hillside turns orange.

The ruins on the plateau are a Roman spa city that grew up around the springs, and they are extensive: a main colonnaded street a kilometre long, a necropolis of more than a thousand tombs at the northern end, and a theatre in the middle.

The theatre is the best thing here, built into the hillside in the 2nd century with its stage building still standing to two storeys and carved reliefs across it. Go early, before the coaches come up from the coast.

The Antique Pool, which the signs call Cleopatra's, is a warm spring pool with fallen marble columns lying on the bottom of it, and swimming among them is exactly as odd as it sounds. It costs extra, it gets busy by eleven, and it is worth doing once. Afterwards, walk up to the Martyrium on the eastern hill, an octagonal building of the 5th century put up over the tomb of the apostle Philip, which nobody visits.

Four hours south from Denizli, climbing over the western Taurus and dropping to the coast, with the sea appearing suddenly at the end. Antalya's otogar is well outside the city and the tram runs in.

Kaleiçi, the walled old town, is a knot of Ottoman houses on a bluff above the Roman harbour, and it is where to stay and where to spend the first evening. Hadrian's Gate on its landward side is a triple marble arch put up for the emperor's visit in 130 AD, and the ruts worn into the paving under it are from Roman carts.

At the far end of the old town, the Hıdırlık Tower stands on the cliff edge: a Roman bastion of the 2nd century with a square base and a round upper storey, probably a tomb, possibly a lighthouse. The park beside it faces west and the sun goes down over the Bey mountains.

The classic day out from Antalya, running east along the coastal plain, and best done with a hired driver or on a group tour because the three sites are strung out over sixty kilometres and the buses between them do not connect well.

Perge comes first, fifteen kilometres out: a Roman city at its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, with a colonnaded main street a hundred metres wide with a water channel running down the middle of it, a stadium, a theatre and a monumental gate with round Hellenistic towers.

Aspendos, half an hour further, has the best preserved Roman theatre anywhere in the Mediterranean: the stage building complete, the seating intact, capacity in the thousands, and performances still put on in it. Finish at Side on the point, where five columns of a temple to Apollo have been re-erected on the tip of a peninsula with the sea on three sides.

A slower day, and a chance to make sense of the ruins from yesterday. The Antalya Museum has five thousand objects on display, most of them lifted from Perge, and the hall of Roman statuary from its theatre is one of the best rooms of classical sculpture anywhere outside Rome and Naples.

Back in the old town, the Fluted Minaret is the landmark of Antalya: a Seljuk mosque of 1230 with a thirty eight metre brick minaret ribbed like a bundle of reeds, rebuilt in the 1370s and standing above a small complex of tombs and a dervish lodge.

In the afternoon, take a bus out to the Düden Lower Falls, where the river comes off a cliff straight into the Mediterranean. There is a park above it and boats that go in under the spray from below.

Nine hours northeast, across the Taurus and up onto the Anatolian plateau. The overnight service leaves Antalya in the evening and puts you in Göreme not long after first light, which is the standard way to do it and gets you a full day out of the arrival.

Göreme is a village in a bowl of tuff cones, most of them hollowed out, a good many of them now hotels. Check in, sleep for a couple of hours if the bus did not let you, and book the balloon for tomorrow morning if you are going to; flights sell out days ahead in season and get cancelled for wind.

In the late afternoon, walk up Lovers' Hill on the edge of the village. It is a fifteen minute climb, it costs nothing, and it puts the whole valley in front of you at the hour the light is best. Everybody in Göreme is up there at sunset and there is still plenty of room.

The balloons launch about half an hour before sunrise and the pickup is in the dark. An hour in the air, drifting down the valleys and back up, with a hundred other balloons doing the same thing around you, and then breakfast in a field. It is expensive and it is the thing people remember.

Afterwards, the Göreme Open Air Museum, which is a monastic complex of rock cut chapels in a single valley, ten of them decorated, several with frescoes from the 10th and 11th centuries in remarkable condition. The Dark Church costs extra and has the best of them, preserved by having almost no windows. Go between the tour groups rather than with them.

In the afternoon go up to Uçhisar, four kilometres west, where a sixty metre pinnacle of rock has been tunnelled through in every direction and the top is reached by two hundred and seventy five steps. Walk back down to Göreme through Pigeon Valley, which takes about an hour and is signposted.

North of Göreme, Zelve is a monastic village cut into three converging valleys and lived in continuously until the 1950s, when the rock became unsafe and the last families were moved to a new village down the road. You walk through their houses, a mill, a winery and several churches, and it is much emptier than the Open Air Museum.

Paşabağ, next door, has the strangest rock formations in Cappadocia: cones with separate boulder caps balanced on them like mushrooms, some with hermit cells cut into the stems.

In the afternoon walk the Rose Valley, either from Çavuşin or from the Göreme side. An hour and a half of pink and cream rock with abandoned chapels cut into the sides of it, ending on a ridge at sunset, and hardly anybody on the path.

Flights out of Nevşehir and Kayseri run through the day and hotels arrange the shuttle, so a mid afternoon departure leaves a usable morning.

Spend it at Ortahisar, three kilometres from Göreme, which is what Göreme looked like before the hotels: a working village around its own rock castle, with old houses, a square with men drinking tea in it and no souvenir shops to speak of. Then take the shuttle and go.