Twelve days from Istanbul to Rhodes: ruins on both sides of a very small sea

Istanbul Airport sits forty kilometres out on the European side. The M11 metro runs from under the terminal to Gayrettepe in about half an hour, where you change for the M2 into Şişhane or Taksim; the Havaist coaches are slower but drop closer to most hotels. Either way, budget an hour and a half from baggage hall to bed.

Do nothing ambitious with the rest of the day. Walk down through Galata, ride the lift up the tower for the orientation view, and eat somewhere in Karaköy where the tables are on the pavement.

Three of the most visited buildings in Turkey stand within five minutes of each other, so the day is about order and timing rather than distance. Start at Hagia Sophia when it opens. It has been a working mosque again since 2020 and visitors now pay for the upper gallery, which is the better view of the dome anyway.

Cover shoulders and knees, and bring a scarf if you have long hair to tie back; both mosques hand them out at the door but the queue for them is its own queue. The Blue Mosque closes to visitors around each of the five daily prayers, so check the board at the courtyard gate before you join a line.

Save the Basilica Cistern for the afternoon. It is underground, cool, and the one thing on this list that does not get better for being seen early.

Topkapı takes longer than people expect, partly because of its size and partly because the Harem is a separate ticket with its own entrance inside the second court. Buy both online the night before. Go straight to the Harem first if the day is busy, then work back out through the treasury and the kitchens.

The Archaeological Museum is inside the palace's outer wall and most visitors walk past it. It should not be missed: the Alexander Sarcophagus, carved in the 4th century BC and named for the figures on it rather than its occupant, is one of the finest pieces of Greek relief sculpture anywhere.

Finish in the Grand Bazaar, which is ten minutes uphill. Treat it as architecture with shops in it rather than as a place to buy anything: locals do not shop here and prices show it.

A quieter day, and the best one. Süleymaniye is Mimar Sinan's Istanbul masterpiece and it sits on a hill with a terrace looking down the Golden Horn, usually with more cats than tourists on it. The mausoleums of Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Roxelana are in the small garden behind.

Downhill from there, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque is hidden above a row of shops and reached by an unmarked staircase. It is small, it takes ten minutes, and the interior is one of the densest surviving displays of İznik tilework in the city.

The Egyptian Bazaar at the bottom of the hill is smaller than the Grand Bazaar and smells better. Buy the pistachios and the pepper; skip the saffron, which is not saffron.

Fly to İzmir Adnan Menderes, an hour and a quarter in the air and easily the day's least interesting part. From arrivals, the Havaş coach or a prebooked shuttle takes about ninety minutes down to Kuşadası. If you would rather not wait for a coach, a prebooked minibus meets the flight and costs a little more.

That leaves the late afternoon. Walk out along the causeway to Pigeon Island, which is a small fort on a rock joined to the town, and get your bearings on the harbour front before dinner.

Take the first dolmuş of the morning and ask for the upper gate, not the lower one. The site runs down a valley, so entering at the top means you walk the whole of Curetes Street downhill and arrive at the Library of Celsus with your legs intact. Taxis in Kuşadası will drop you at the top and collect you at the bottom for a fixed price.

There is no shade to speak of. In summer, be through the gate at opening and out again by noon, with water you carried in.

The Terrace Houses are the only part of the site with an extra ticket, and they are the reason to buy one: a hillside block of wealthy Roman homes under a modern canopy, still being excavated, with mosaic floors and painted walls that have never been outdoors.

Two of the day's three stops are ruins of things that are barely there, which is part of the appeal. The Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and is now a single re-erected column in a field with storks nesting on it. Ten minutes is enough, and the ten minutes are worth having.

The House of the Virgin Mary is up a wooded hill above Ephesus, a small stone chapel that the Catholic church treats as a shrine and archaeologists date, in its earliest fabric, to about the right period to be interesting. Whatever you make of the tradition, it is quiet, cool and full of pines.

Then spend the afternoon in Şirince, a hill village of old stone and plaster houses above Selçuk that sells fruit wine to everyone who arrives. Go late, when the coaches have gone.

The Samos boat leaves Kuşadası mid morning. Hand your passport to the ticket agency the evening before, be at the port an hour early, and expect Turkish exit formalities in a small building on the quay. It is a foot passenger service, so anything you cannot carry has to stay behind.

Boats from Turkey dock at Vathy Port on the east side of the harbour, where the customs post is; domestic ferries use a different quay three kilometres west, which matters on the day you leave. Greek entry takes a few minutes.

Vathy is a working town wrapped round a deep bay, and its archaeological museum is far better than a town this size has any right to have. Then go and swim.

Herodotus wrote that the Samians had built the three greatest works in the Greek world, and all three are within a few kilometres of Pythagorion. Two of them are still standing, and the third is under your feet on the quay.

Start with the tunnel, because entry is timed and the queue builds. It runs a kilometre through the hill and you walk a good stretch of it, stooped in places, on a metal walkway above the original water channel. Anyone who dislikes confined spaces should say so before buying a ticket.

The Heraion is eight kilometres west along the coast road, a huge sanctuary reduced to foundations and one re-erected column. Lunch in Pythagorion between the two, then look at the mole from the quay: the modern harbour arm is built on the ancient one.

This is the long leg, and the one to have booked. Boats south from Samos call at Patmos, Leros and Kos before Rhodes, and depending on the operator and the day the trip takes anywhere from five hours on a catamaran to most of a day and night on a conventional ferry. Check which quay you leave from: the Turkey boats and the Greek domestic boats use different ones at Vathy.

However long it takes, you arrive at the commercial harbour under the walls of the Old Town, which is one of the better ways to arrive anywhere. Walk in through the gate, drop your bag, and give the evening to the lanes.

The Suleymaniye Mosque near the top of the old town is the obvious first stop, mostly because of where it puts you: the highest ground inside the walls, at the head of the old Turkish quarter, ten minutes from everywhere else.

The palace opens early and the ticket queue is the worst of the day by ten, so be there at the start. What you walk through is largely a 1930s Italian reconstruction laid over the medieval shell, with Roman and early Christian mosaics brought in from Kos to floor it. Knowing that in advance makes it more interesting rather than less.

The Archaeological Museum is five minutes away in the Knights' hospital, a 15th century building that would be worth the ticket empty. It is not empty: the Aphrodite of Rhodes and a courtyard of grave stelae are in there.

In the late afternoon walk or take a bus two kilometres up to Monte Smith, where the acropolis of the ancient city sits on the ridge with the sea on both sides. Three columns of the temple of Athena stand at the top, and almost nobody is there at six.

Rhodes airport is on the west coast, about fourteen kilometres out, and the bus from the station by the Old Town takes about thirty five minutes. Anything before a mid afternoon flight leaves you a usable morning.

Spend it at Rodini, a wooded gorge park twenty minutes' walk south of the walls with peacocks in it and a stretch of the ancient city's water channel running through. Then walk back in through the gates one more time and get lost on purpose, which is the correct way to leave Rhodes.