Cultural tours in Turkey

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    [introduction] => The most prosperous region of the ancient Mediterranean world.

The finest collection of Hellenistic and Roman city ruins to be found anywhere.

Includes all the major sites, many of which are off the beaten track or difficult to get to.

Scenically varied and spectacular: coast, mountain and plain.
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The coastal strip of western Anatolia contains many of the most brilliant expressions of the Ancient World. It was the meeting place of two worlds, a maritime one of commerce, inter-cultural contact and innovatory ideas and an inland realm of agricultural wealth and imperial power. The legendary Midas, whose hand turned everything to gold, was King of Phrygia in inland Anatolia. Hittites, Assyrians, Persians and, following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Macedonian Greeks were successive ruling civilisations in these regions.
But long before Alexander, in the centuries following the end of the Bronze Age from c. 1100 BC onwards, Greeks settled along the coast, Aeolians in the north, Ionians further down and Dorians yet further south. They founded cities all along the Aegean and Mediterranean seaboards and penetrated the river valleys. Most of the local peoples in these areas absorbed and adopted Greek culture.
The new civic form of the polis – a self-governing city with contiguous territory for food production and a harbour for trading – was perfectly suited to this region. Cities took off from the seventh century BC in parallel with those of the Greek mainland. The greatest advance in human thought – the attempt to explain the natural world according to laws based on scientific observation – took place in these cities. The key early philosophers, Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximander, were all based in the Ionian city of Miletus, as was the father of urban planning, Hippodamus. 
Roman city-building was a continuation of Greek, eased by the way local communities worked within the Roman empire. Their leaders and plutocrats adorned their cities with monuments, tapping into the supreme architectural and sculptural traditions of the region. Most of what remains today is of Hellenistic and Roman origin, though there is much also from the Byzantine era; from the fourth century AD cities reconfigured themselves in a Christian guise.
With a falling away of maritime commerce, however, and severe disruption in the wake of Arab incursions in the seventh century ad, the ancient cities toppled into decline. Even the greatest of them, such as Ephesus or Sardis, became little more than villages or were abandoned altogether. Only a few, notably Izmir and Antalya, revived in the economic world of the Middle Ages and later. Two millennia after Alexander, the Ottoman Turks arrived to create an empire that lasted for five centuries until the birth of modern Turkey.
This tour presents the finest group of Hellenistic and Roman city ruins to be found anywhere. They are set against the backdrop of a beguiling landscape, one that unfurls as the tour progresses.
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    [name] => Central Anatolia
    [code] => 12077
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    [introduction] => Endlessly fascinating journey through an extraordinary variety of landscapes and civilizations in Central Anatolia.

From the ancient capital of the Hittites to Turkey’s modern capital, Ankara.

Some of the finest examples of Seljuk architecture including the UNESCO listed complex at Divriği.

Turkey is changing rapidly, but many aspects of traditional life continue.
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At the centre of Anatolia lies a limestone plateau, crumpled and eroded, with mountainous barriers at the rim. A land-bridge between Asia and Europe, this unpromising terrain has perhaps been traversed by a greater variety of peoples and cultures than any comparable part of the world.
Diversity is the hallmark of Central Anatolia. There is land blessed with exceptional fertility, emblazoned with a patchwork of greens and golds; and there are vast vistas of inhospitable rolling hills, parched and bereft of topsoil. Forests sprout around turbulent valley streams; elsewhere desolate, dead-flat, arid plains stretch to distant horizons. In Cappadocia the volcanic tufa has been whipped by wind and rain into clusters of billowing cones, cascades of frolicking rock and other bizarre geomorphic contortions.
Equally diverse are the civilisations which have made their mark. Here can be found the site of what is generally held to be the world’s oldest town, Çatal Höyük. Vast towns were built by the Hittites–a people strangely little-known in the English-speaking world but, for periods during the second millennium bc, second only to the Egyptians as a power in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean. They were succeeded by Phrygians, the people of King Midas. Greeks and Persians followed, and fought; the brief rule of Alexander and his Macedonians was continued under the Seleucids.
Invaded variously by migrants, conquerors, adventurers and traders, Anatolia was progressively part orientalised and part Hellenised, but indigenous characteristics remained. The Pontic kingdom was a native kingdom, which under Mithridates valiantly if cruelly resisted Roman might, but by 50 bc Central Anatolia was under Roman rule as the province of Asia Minor. When five centuries later Europe ceased to be Roman and the eastern half of the empire was ruled from Constantinople (formerly Byzantium), Anatolia found itself to be the home counties of the Roman world, a world which was now Christian. Monks and hermits cut dwellings and churches in the pliable rock of Cappadocia, and Christian communities continued there into the last century. 
Islam encroached when the Seljuk Turks from the Central Asian steppes rapidly extended their empire and wrested part of Anatolia from the Byzantines after their victory of 1071. Among their legacy is the mosque and hospital in Divriği, a masterpiece of Islamic architecture. The Turkish advance continued under the Ottomans until Byzantium finally fell in 1453. 
Traditional ways of life continue in central Turkey, seemingly oblivious to the encroachments of the modern world and the thoroughly westernised sectors of society–another instance of diversity.
The best finds from sites visited are now in the excellent Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. More than mere witnesses to lost civilisations, many of the objects are endowed with compelling sculptural force and decorative beauty; the museum is as much a collection of great art as of archaeology. Few journeys in the Old World are as stimulating or as varied as this survey of the Turkish heartlands. 
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