The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Turkey
15 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the greatest archaeological wonders in Turkey are Ephesus, Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut. The list covers 15 archaeological wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Anatolia has been a crossroads for as long as there have been settlements to cross between. Some of the oldest monumental building known was raised here by hunter-gatherers; Hittites, Phrygians, Lycians and Persians followed; Greek and Roman cities filled the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts; and Byzantine and medieval kingdoms added their own layers. The land itself helped: the soft volcanic tuff of Cappadocia could be dug with hand tools, and the limestone of the coast was ideal for theatres and tombs.
At Göbekli Tepe, in the southeast, carved T-shaped pillars stand in circular enclosures built around 11,000 years ago, thousands of years before farming spread or Stonehenge was begun. Mount Nemrut carries the colossal stone heads of gods and of King Antiochus I of Commagene on a mountaintop tomb sanctuary. In Cappadocia, Derinkuyu descends many levels underground, with ventilation shafts, stables and rolling stone doors.
The classical world is everywhere. Ephesus keeps its marble streets and the façade of the Library of Celsus; Pergamon's theatre plunges down one of the steepest slopes of any ancient city; Aphrodisias was famed for its sculptors; and Sagalassos sits high in the Taurus Mountains. The theatre of Aspendos is among the best preserved Roman theatres anywhere, and at Kaunos rock-cut temple tombs look down on the river near Dalyan. Istanbul's Basilica Cistern, a forest of columns built under Justinian, and the ruined churches of medieval Ani take the story into the Byzantine and later centuries.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ephesus | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Derinkuyu Underground City | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Mount Nemrut | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 4 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 5 | Midas Monument, Yazılıkaya | Rock-cut architecture | |
| 6 | Basilica Cistern | Reservoir | |
| 7 | Kaunos | Necropolis | |
| 8 | Sagalassos | Archaeological site | |
| 9 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 10 | Aphrodisias | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 11 | Ani | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 12 | Roman Theatre of Aspendos | Roman theatre | |
| 13 | Didyma | Archaeological site | |
| 14 | Termessus | Archaeological site | |
| 15 | Myra Rock Tombs | Necropolis |
01 Ephesus
Efes
Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lucag259 from Pixabay The city was famous in antiquity for the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; today a single re-erected column in a marshy field outside Selçuk is all that marks it. Alexander the Great passed through, the city fell to Rome in 129 BC, and the apostle Paul lived here for about three years in the 50s AD.
Did you know? The Library of Celsus once held nearly 12,000 scrolls in a reading room of about 180 square metres.
02 Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu Yeraltı Şehri
Turkey · 27.8 km from Nevşehir38.373° N 34.735° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Giorgio Galeotti · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes Derinkuyu extraordinary is how completely it was engineered for survival. A system of vertical shafts carried fresh air down through every level, one of them a central well more than fifty metres deep that supplied water both to the hidden rooms and to the village above.
Did you know? Cappadocian Greeks called the place Malakopia, a name probably linked to the Greek word for "soft", a nod to the easily carved volcanic tuff.
03 Mount Nemrut
Turkey37.981° N 38.741° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArifYasa from Pixabay On the terraces to the east and west of the mound Antiochus placed seated colossal statues, 8 to 9 metres high: himself, two lions and two eagles, and a pantheon of gods in which Greek and Iranian identities are fused, such as Zeus-Oromasdes and Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes. The faces are Greek in style, the dress and headgear Persian, reflecting the dynasty's claim to descend from both Alexander's successors and the Achaemenid kings.
Did you know? A long Greek inscription carved on the backs of the colossal statues names each deity and lays down the rules of the royal cult.
04 Göbekli Tepe
Göbeklitepe
Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Spica-Vega Photo Arts (Banu Nazikcan) · CC BY-SA 4.0 What visitors come to see are the enclosures: round and oval spaces 10 to 30 metres across, their walls set with T-shaped limestone pillars, the oldest known megaliths anywhere. 5 metres tall and weigh an estimated eight to ten tonnes each. The T is not a mere support: the pillars are stylised human figures seen from the side, and some carry carved arms that bend round to hands meeting above the belly, belts and fox-pelt loincloths.
Did you know? Rock-cut cisterns fed by carved channels collected rainwater on the hilltop and could store at least 150 cubic metres of water.
05 Midas Monument, Yazılıkaya
Yazılı
Turkey39.201° N 30.714° E
Mark Landon · CC BY 4.0 Carved on the monument is a dedication in Old Phrygian in which a man named Ates, son of Arkias, dedicates the monument to Midas, giving him titles usually translated as "leader of the people" and "lord". It was this line that earned the facade its long-standing reputation as the tomb of King Midas, though it is not a tomb at all but a cult monument, perhaps honouring the dead king.
Did you know? At least 38 stepped altars have been catalogued on the plateau; the largest, the Throne Monument with twin idols, crowns its highest point around 600 BC.
06 Basilica Cistern
Yerebatan Sarnıcı
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.978° E
Image by narya from Pixabay The columns did not come from one quarry or one workshop. Most were salvaged from older buildings across the empire, which is why Ionic and Corinthian capitals stand side by side and why some shafts are smooth while others are carved. One column is covered in a pattern often described as a hen's eye, with slanting branches and teardrops.
Did you know? The Medusa blocks probably came from a late Roman building, and there is no sign they ever served as column bases before being placed here.
07 Kaunos
Turkey36.828° N 28.626° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Kaunos stood on the border between two ancient regions: the river, known in antiquity as the Calbys, divided Caria from Lycia, and the city mixed influences from both. Legend credits its foundation to a king named Kaunos, a grandson of Apollo, while archaeology shows habitation back to at least the ninth century BC. Herodotus records that the people of Kaunos resisted the Persian general Harpagus in 546 BC.
Did you know? In 88 BC Kaunos sided with Mithridates against Rome and massacred every Roman living in the city, and was later punished for it.
08 Sagalassos
Turkey · 10 km from Isparta37.680° N 30.525° E
Image by introtanitim from Pixabay The place has a long memory. Hittite texts of the fourteenth century BCE already mention a mountain site called Salawassa, and by the time Alexander the Great took the city in 333 BCE on his march east it was one of the richest towns of Pisidia, home to a few thousand people. Greek culture took root quickly under the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed.
Did you know? The colossal Hadrian statue was carved in separate pieces fitted together on site with marble tenons, and it broke apart along those joins when the baths collapsed.
09 Pergamon
Turkey39.117° N 27.183° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by yusufk53 from Pixabay The city reached its height as the capital of the Attalid kings between 281 and 133 BC. Eumenes II and his brother Attalus II rebuilt it on a grand scale, enclosing around 90 hectares within a new wall about 4 km long, and set out to make it a rival to Athens as a centre of learning and art. Its library was second only to Alexandria's in the Greek world.
Did you know? By the middle of the 2nd century AD Pergamon had around 200,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest cities in Roman Asia.
10 Aphrodisias
Afrodisias
Turkey · 32.2 km from Denizli37.708° N 28.724° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DebraJean from Pixabay The city took its name from Aphrodite, whose distinctive local cult image stood in its temple: a stiff, columnar figure wrapped in a tunic carved with bands of celestial and marine imagery, closer to the Artemis of Ephesus than to the Aphrodite of classical art. Its golden age came with Rome.
Did you know? Copies of the city's distinctive cult statue of Aphrodite have been found as far away as Beja in Portugal.
11 Ani
Turkey · 39 km from Gyumri40.508° N 43.573° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 21011655 from Pixabay The architecture is the reason to come. The Cathedral, completed around 1001 by the architect Trdat, uses pointed arches and ribbed vaulting that anticipate the Gothic of western Europe by generations - a building that looks far younger than it is.
Did you know? The cathedral measures about 34 by 22 metres, and before its conical dome fell in 1319 it rose to roughly 38 metres.
12 Roman Theatre of Aspendos
Aspendos Antik Tiyatrosu
Turkey36.939° N 31.173° E
Image by Ben_Kerckx from Pixabay An inscription records that it was built in the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the mid-second century AD, paid for by two brothers, Curtius Crispinus and Curtius Auspicatus, and designed by an architect named Zenon, a native of the city. The auditorium, about 96 metres across, rests partly on the slope of the acropolis hill and partly on vaulted arcades, with 41 rows of seats.
Did you know? Aspendos was among the earliest cities to mint coins, from about 500 BC, often showing a slinger and the city's local name, Estwedus.
13 Didyma
Turkey37.385° N 27.256° E
Image by elifchakan from Pixabay Ionian Greeks venerated Apollo here from at least the late eighth century BC, around a sacred spring and a laurel tree that remained the centre of the cult for more than a thousand years. A Sacred Way about 20 kilometres long, lined with statues of noblemen and noblewomen, animals and mythical beasts, linked the sanctuary with Miletus; some of those archaic figures are now in the British Museum.
Did you know? Before 494 BC the sanctuary was run by the Branchidae, a priestly family that claimed descent from a founder named Branchus.
14 Termessus
Termessos
Turkey · 23.1 km from Antalya36.983° N 30.464° E
Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 3.0 Termessos was a city of the Pisidians, whose people called themselves Solymi, the name Homer gives to the mountain folk fought by Bellerophon. Its chief god was Zeus Solymeus, shown on the city's coins.
Did you know? Termessos has a 1st-century AD gymnasium decorated in the Doric order, and a colonnaded street built in the 2nd century with contributions from citizens.
15 Myra Rock Tombs
Myra Kaya Mezarları
Turkey36.259° N 29.984° E
Aerdemsenturk · CC BY-SA 4.0 There are several groups. 5 kilometres up the Demre stream, and its finest monument is the Lion Tomb, also known as the Painted Tomb. Some tombs carry reliefs — one shows the dead man among his relatives — and many have inscriptions in the Lycian language. When the English traveller Charles Fellows saw them in 1840, some still showed their original colouring in red, yellow and blue.
Did you know? On Charles Fellows's 1840 visit, the artist George Scharf made colour drawings that preserve how vividly the reliefs were once painted.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the greatest archaeological wonders in Turkey?
- On our list, Ephesus ranks first, followed by Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut.
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- The earliest monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe date to around 9500 BCE, making them roughly 11,000 years old. They were built by hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming.
- Who built the Derinkuyu Underground City?
- Derinkuyu was carved into the soft volcanic rock of Cappadocia, and its first chambers may go back to the Phrygian period. It was greatly enlarged in Byzantine times, when it could shelter large numbers of people, along with their livestock and stores, during raids.
- What are the stone heads on Mount Nemrut?
- They belong to giant seated statues of gods, lions, eagles and King Antiochus I of Commagene, set around his tomb mound in the 1st century BCE. Over time the heads fell from the bodies and now stand on the ground in front of them.
- How many archaeological wonders are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 15 archaeological wonders.