Ten days from Ankara to Antalya: Turkey without Istanbul, down the middle to the sea

The mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, begun in 1944 and finished in 1953, on a hilltop laid out as a ceremonial route: an avenue lined with stone lions in Hittite style, a vast paved court, and a hall of pale limestone with the sarcophagus at the end. The guard changes on the hour. The museum in the terraces below covers the independence war and the founding of the republic, and it takes as long again as the tomb.

Ankara's largest mosque was argued about for twenty years before anyone laid a stone: a modernist design was fought off by the conservatives, and what went up between 1967 and 1987 is classical Ottoman, four minarets and a great central dome, on a scale nothing in the city can match. Go up to the terrace for the view over the whole plateau city, and note the shopping centre in the basement.

Housed in a covered market and a caravanserai of the 1460s below the citadel, converted after the republic to hold what the excavations were producing. The sequence runs from Çatalhöyük through the Hittite empire and the Phrygians of Gordion to Roman Ankara, and the Hittite orthostats and the Phrygian metalwork are as good as anything in Turkey. Allow two hours and take the loop in order; it is built to be read that way.

The lanes inside the walls have a row of small restaurants in restored houses, several with roof terraces looking over the city. Order the Ankara tava, lamb and rice baked in a dish, and expect it to take a while.

The rock the city grew on, fortified since at least the Phrygians in the 8th century BC and rebuilt by everyone since, with a double ring of walls patched together out of Roman column drums and inscribed blocks. Inside the walls is a village of old houses, workshops and carpet shops. Climb the eastern tower for the view: the whole plateau, and mountains on a clear day.

Built in 1290 and repaired in 1330, this looks like nothing from the street and is extraordinary inside: a flat wooden ceiling carried on twenty four wooden columns with carved capitals, some of them reused Roman, and a mihrab of moulded tile. It was one of five wooden mosques in central Anatolia inscribed by UNESCO in 2023. Prayer times aside, you can walk in.

A mosque of 1428 built against the ruins of the Roman temple of Augustus and Rome, restored by Sinan in the 16th century and tiled in the 18th. On the temple wall behind it is the Monumentum Ancyranum, the most complete surviving text of the Res Gestae, in which Augustus set out what he had done with his life. The tomb of Hacı Bayram Veli, a 15th century Sufi poet, is beside it and busy with pilgrims all day.

A large bath complex begun under Caracalla around 200 AD and used for five hundred years, now an open field of foundations with the brick pillars of the hypocaust still standing in rows. The hot room is much bigger than the cold one, which tells you what winter on the plateau was like then and still is. Half an hour, and there is no shade.

Built between 1925 and 1928 as one of the young republic's first cultural buildings, and used from 1938 to 1953 to hold Atatürk's sarcophagus while Anıtkabir was finished. The collection is Turkish decorative art: carpets, tiles, calligraphy, woodwork, folk costume and a reconstructed dervish lodge. It is quiet, and it is the right preparation for Konya.

Five high speed services a day from Ankara, arriving at the station on the northern tram line about twenty minutes out of the centre. Book ahead at weekends. Seats on the left have the better view of the plateau.

Rumi, the Persian poet and Sufi teacher known here as Mevlana, came to Konya as a refugee from the Mongols and died here in 1273. The fluted turquoise tower over his grave went up soon after and the dervish lodge grew around it. The republic closed the Mevlevi orders in 1925 and the complex became a museum, which is what it is called and not how it is used. Socks rather than shoes, headscarves for women, and a room of illuminated Qurans off the courtyard.

The turning ceremony, performed as a religious rite and free to attend, at the cultural centre a few minutes east of the shrine. Saturday evenings all year, starting earlier in winter than in summer, and as often as twice a day in the week before 17 December. Arrive half an hour early for a seat, put the camera away once it begins, and stay to the end.

The mound at the centre of the city, occupied since prehistory, landscaped into a wooded park with a tram loop around it. On top stand the sultans' mosque, a wide plain hall of the 1220s raised on columns taken from Roman ruins, and the domed tomb beside it holding several of the Seljuk rulers of Rum. The fenced excavation on the north side is what is left of their palace.

A seminary of 1251, now a museum of Seljuk tiles, and the dome is the reason to go in: blue, black and white faience in interlocking stars, with a pool beneath it that once held the reflection. It is the finest interior of its period in Anatolia, it is small, and almost nobody is in it.

Lamb roasted for hours in a bread oven until it collapses, sold by weight and eaten on flatbread with raw onion. The places that do it well are a short walk from the mound and they finish when the tray is empty.

Built in 1265 and named for a slender minaret that a lightning strike brought down through the roof in 1901; the rebuilt stump is a standing joke. The carved stone portal, with bands of Arabic script knotted across the doorway, is one of the great pieces of Seljuk masonry, and inside is a museum of carving that includes the winged figures and double headed eagles taken off the city walls.

Four to five hours, several departures a day, booked at the bus station or online the day before. Pay a little more for one of the good companies and you get more legroom, wifi and a steward. Take water and something warm: the air conditioning is enthusiastic.

A triple arch of white marble built into the city wall for the visit of the emperor Hadrian in 130 AD, and the only surviving gate of the Roman city. It was walled up for centuries, which is why the carving on the coffered ceilings is so crisp, and the ruts worn into the ancient paving under the arches are the best thing in it.

A Roman tower of the 2nd century AD on the cliff at the southern tip of the old town, square below and round above, built as a bastion and probably used as a lighthouse. The park around it is where Antalya watches the sun go down over the bay and the mountains behind it, and it is free.

A Pamphylian city at its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and one of the most complete Roman street plans anywhere: a colonnaded avenue with a channel of running water down the centre, a Hellenistic gate with two round towers, an agora, baths, a stadium and a theatre, plus two later churches. St Paul preached here. Allow two hours, take water and a hat, and walk to the top for the plan of the whole city.

Piyaz, the local white bean salad with tahini, is the thing to order in Antalya, and the places doing it well are plain lunch rooms rather than anywhere with a view. Add köfte and you have eaten properly for very little.

One of the largest museums in Turkey and much better than its dull exterior suggests, with about five thousand objects on show and five times that in store. The sequence runs from the local prehistoric caves to the Ottomans, but the reason to come is the hall of Roman sculpture from Perge: emperors, dancers, gods, most of them lifted from the theatre. The tram stops outside.

A Roman theatre of the 2nd century AD seating around seven thousand, complete to the top row and still used for concerts, which is rare enough to be worth the trip on its own. Above and behind it lie the agora, basilica and nymphaeum of the city, and two kilometres of aqueduct crosses the valley, built with siphon towers to get water over the rises. The 13th century bridge over the river below is worth the short detour.

A Pamphylian city on a flat topped hill above the plain, far less excavated than its neighbours and usually deserted. What survives is the ramp up to the gate, stretches of Hellenistic wall and tower, and later buildings scattered across the top; part of the site was lost to a landslide. There is no ticket office, no shade and no path worth the name, and the view over the plain to the sea is the payment.

The fluted brick minaret, thirty eight metres of it, was built under the Seljuks in 1230 and is what everyone photographs. The six domed mosque at its foot was rebuilt in 1373 under the Hamidid emirs on the site of a Byzantine church, and the surviving fragments of that church are in the courtyard. It is the middle of the old town and everything else on this day is downhill from it.

Begun as a Roman temple in the 2nd century AD, converted to a church, then a mosque, then back again more than once; the minaret went up in the early 13th century during one of those turns. A fire in 1800 left only the minaret standing and the rest lay open to the weather until a restoration begun in 2018 reopened it in 2021. The layers are legible in the walls, which is the interest of it.

The Roman harbour at the bottom of the cliff, reached by a ramp or a lift from the old town, was the reason Attalos put a city here and is now a marina of gulets and tour boats. Trips leave through the day for two hours or six, out along the cliffs to where the river falls into the sea, with a swimming stop on the longer ones. Buy at the quay, not from the touts up in the lanes.

The lower falls of the Düden, where the river reaches the cliff at the eastern edge of the city and goes over it into the sea in a broad white curtain. The park above has the viewpoints and is free to walk in; the best view is actually from the water, which is why every harbour boat swings past it. Strongest in spring, thinner by August.

Tram line 1A runs from the old town out to Terminal 1 in about fifty minutes, every quarter of an hour, and takes a contactless card. It does not serve Terminal 2, so for an international departure change to the free shuttle or take a taxi.