The Most Beautiful Places in Turkey
47 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Turkey are Göreme National Park, Hagia Sophia and Pamukkale. The list covers 47 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Few countries hold so many civilisations on one stretch of land. Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans all built across Anatolia and along the Bosphorus, and the ground itself is just as varied: volcanic tuff in Cappadocia soft enough to carve into churches and whole towns, mineral springs that coat hillsides in white stone, and the snow cone of Mount Ararat, the highest peak in the country.
In Istanbul, Hagia Sophia has crowned the old city since 537, its dome a model for centuries of later building, and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque answers it across the square with six minarets and walls of Iznik tile. The Chora Church keeps some of the finest late Byzantine mosaics and frescoes anywhere, and Dolmabahçe Palace shows the Ottoman court of the nineteenth century reaching towards European style on the shore of the Bosphorus. Rumeli Hisarı, raised by Mehmed II in 1452, still guards the strait's narrowest point.
Away from the city, Ephesus keeps the two-storey façade of the Library of Celsus and a great theatre, Derinkuyu descends through many levels of rooms and ventilation shafts beneath Cappadocia, and Pamukkale's travertine terraces spill down a hillside above ancient Hierapolis. On the summit of Mount Nemrut, colossal stone heads set up by King Antiochus I of Commagene sit beside a burial mound, and in Edirne the Selimiye Mosque marks the peak of Mimar Sinan's career.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Göreme National Park | Protected area | ✓ |
| 2 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | ✓ |
| 3 | Pamukkale | Hot spring | ✓ |
| 4 | Sümela Monastery | Monastery | |
| 5 | Butterfly Valley, Fethiye | Beach | |
| 6 | Ishak Pasha Palace | Palace | |
| 7 | Akdamar Island | Island | |
| 8 | Ephesus | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Dolmabahçe Palace | Palace | |
| 10 | Mount Ararat | Volcano | |
| 11 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 12 | Chora Church (Kariye) | Church building | ✓ |
| 13 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 14 | Derinkuyu Underground City | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 15 | Selimiye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 16 | Mount Nemrut | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 17 | Rumeli Hisarı | Fortress | |
| 18 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 19 | Midas Monument, Yazılıkaya | Rock-cut architecture | |
| 20 | Lake Nemrut | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 21 | Basilica Cistern | Reservoir | |
| 22 | Kaunos | Necropolis | |
| 23 | Maiden's Tower | Lighthouse | |
| 24 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 25 | Aqueduct of Valens | Aqueduct | |
| 26 | Haydarpaşa railway station | Railway station | |
| 27 | Sagalassos | Archaeological site | |
| 28 | Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı | Public bath | |
| 29 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 30 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village |
01 Göreme National Park
Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı
Turkey · 12.5 km from Nevşehir38.653° N 34.863° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Central Anatolia seems to have been sculpted rather than formed. Millions of years ago the volcanoes of the region buried the plateau under thick beds of ash, which hardened into soft tuff, and in places a lid of harder lava settled on top.
Did you know? After the Middle Ages the Dark Church served as a pigeon house until the 1950s, and restorers spent 14 years scraping droppings off its frescoes.
02 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The building that stands today was put up in barely five years.
Did you know? Crusaders stripped its treasures in 1204, smashed the altar and are said to have led mules inside to haul away the loot.
03 Pamukkale
Turkey · 17.4 km from Denizli37.924° N 29.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by neponu from Pixabay Pamukkale means "cotton castle," and the name is literal: mineral-rich water rises from underground springs at around 35°C, then cools as it spills down the slope, and as it cools it can no longer hold all the calcium carbonate dissolved in it.
Did you know? The area has 17 hot springs, ranging from about 35°C to 100°C.
04 Sümela Monastery
Turkey · 29.1 km from Gümüşhane40.690° N 39.658° E
Rotadefterim · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sümela Monastery clings to a sheer cliff on Mount Mela (Karadağ), about 1,200 metres above sea level, above the forested gorge of the Altındere valley in the Pontic Mountains behind Trabzon.
Did you know? From 1682 the monastery housed the Phrontisterion of Trapezous, a Greek school for the region.
05 Butterfly Valley, Fethiye
Kelebekler Vadisi
Turkey36.497° N 29.127° E
Ezzeldin.Elbaksawy · CC BY-SA 4.0 Butterfly Valley is a narrow canyon that opens onto the Mediterranean on the Turkish coast south of Fethiye. Its walls rise 350 to 400 metres, so steep that the valley floor is effectively cut off from the land around it, and the only easy way in is from the sea.
Did you know? The name is recent: in the late 1970s the collector and photographer Rıfat Kılar, struck by the insects, proposed calling the cove Butterfly Valley.
06 Ishak Pasha Palace
İshak Paşa Sarayı
Turkey39.521° N 44.129° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ishak Pasha Palace stands on a rocky terrace above the plain of Doğubayazıt, close to the Iranian border, with the snow cone of Mount Ararat filling the horizon behind.
Did you know? Carvers used around 110 different motifs on the gateways, and reliefs across the complex include lions, cypress trees, vases and flowers.
07 Akdamar Island
Turkey · 36.1 km from Van38.342° N 43.036° E
gozturk · CC BY 3.0 7 km², ending in a limestone cliff some 80 m high — and on it stands one of the masterpieces of medieval Armenian art, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
Did you know? King Gagik's island residence had a harbour admired for its complex hydraulic engineering and a large square palace decorated with frescoes, none of which survives.
08 Ephesus
Efes
Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lucag259 from Pixabay Ephesus is one of the largest Roman cities left standing in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few where you can walk a marble street from end to end and understand how a great ancient city worked.
Did you know? To force the people to move to his new city, Lysimachus flooded the old settlement around the temple by blocking its sewers.
09 Dolmabahçe Palace
Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.039° N 29.002° E
Image by krigell from Pixabay Dolmabahçe Palace lines the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, a long white facade of columns and carved stone reflected in the water. Its name means "filled-in garden": the site was once a bay where the Ottoman fleet anchored, reclaimed in the eighteenth century as an imperial garden.
Did you know? The palace's art collection includes 23 paintings by the Russian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky.
10 Mount Ararat
Ağrı Dağı
Turkey · 35.3 km from Artashat39.702° N 44.298° E
Image by Nick115 from Pixabay Mount Ararat is a vast, dormant double volcano in the far east of Turkey, rising to about 5,137 metres from the plains near the borders of Iran, Armenia and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan.
Did you know? In Persian the mountain is called Kuh-e Nuh, the mountain of Noah, while its Kurdish name, Çiyayê Agirî, means fiery mountain.
11 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Sultan Ahmed I commissioned this at just 19 years old, and it was built between 1609 and 1616 — a low point in Ottoman fortunes, coming right after an unfavorable peace ended a long war with Persia.
Did you know? Islamic scholars objected that an imperial mosque should be paid for with spoils of war, and they even forbade the faithful to pray in it.
12 Chora Church (Kariye)
Kariye Camii
Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.031° N 28.939° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tadam · CC0 From the street in Edirnekapı the Chora looks modest: a cluster of brick domes and banded walls tucked just inside the land walls of Istanbul.
Did you know? The names of the craftsmen who made the Chora mosaics are unknown, although the work is counted among the finest of the Palaiologan Renaissance.
13 Topkapı Palace
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by falco from Pixabay For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? Palace records show the Chinese porcelain holdings grew from about 400 pieces in the 16th century to 16,566 by the 18th century.
14 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 Derinkuyu is the deepest of the underground cities of Cappadocia, a warren of rooms, stairways and passages cut down through the soft volcanic tuff to a depth of around 85 metres.
Did you know? The Turkish name Derinkuyu means "deep well", after the shafts that once supplied water both to the hidden city and to the town on the surface.
15 Selimiye Mosque
Turkey · 1.2 km from Edirne41.678° N 26.559° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Mozder from Pixabay The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne is the building its architect considered his masterpiece. Mimar Sinan, the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, built it for Sultan Selim II between 1568 and 1575, and it is widely regarded as the summit of Ottoman — and much of Islamic — architecture.
Did you know? According to legend, the site was once a tulip garden whose owner refused to sell, and Sinan carved an upside-down tulip on the muezzins' platform to mark her stubbornness.
16 Mount Nemrut
Turkey37.981° N 38.741° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArifYasa from Pixabay At 2,150 metres, Mount Nemrut is one of the higher summits of the eastern Taurus range, but it is famous for what a king built on top of it.
Did you know? The three planets on the lion relief, Jupiter, Mercury and Mars, are identified with Zeus, Apollo and Heracles, the same gods seated beside the king.
17 Rumeli Hisarı
Turkey · 10.1 km from Istanbul41.085° N 29.056° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Rumelihisarı was built for a single purpose, and it achieved it. In 1452 the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was preparing to take Constantinople, and his father's earlier attempt had shown that a Byzantine fleet on the Bosphorus could make a siege fail.
Did you know? The curtain walls run some 250 metres from north to south along the steep shore.
18 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 Göbekli Tepe changes the order in which the story of civilisation is usually told.
Did you know? Geophysical surveys suggest about 16 more buried enclosures, which could together hold nearly 200 pillars; only around a tenth of the mound had been dug by 2021.
19 Midas Monument, Yazılıkaya
Yazılı
Turkey39.201° N 30.714° E
Mark Landon · CC BY 4.0 On the edge of a rocky plateau in the Phrygian highlands, a whole cliff face has been carved into the front of an imaginary building.
Did you know? The facade faces east, and its lower edge starts some 1.2 to 1.8 metres above the ground rather than at its foot.
20 Lake Nemrut
Nemrut Gölü
Turkey · 13.6 km from Tatvan38.619° N 42.222° E
EvgenyGenkin · CC BY 2.5 On the western shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, the volcano Nemrut has a summit that has fallen in on itself, leaving a caldera nearly ten kilometres across. Much of its floor is filled by Lake Nemrut, deep blue water at about 2,250 metres above sea level, enclosed by the steep inner walls of the crater.
Did you know? Before its summit collapsed some 270,000 years ago, the volcano's cone is thought to have stood around 4,400 metres high.
21 Basilica Cistern
Yerebatan Sarnıcı
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.978° E
Image by narya from Pixabay The Basilica Cistern is a drowned forest of stone under the streets of Istanbul's old city. Emperor Justinian I had it built in the 6th century on the site of a great Roman-era basilica — hence its name; in Turkish it is Yerebatan Sarnıcı or Yerebatan Sarayı, the "sunken palace".
Did you know? Historical accounts claim that some 7,000 enslaved labourers were put to work building the cistern under Justinian.
22 Kaunos
Turkey36.828° N 28.626° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay High on a sheer cliff above the reed-lined Dalyan River, the façades of rock-cut tombs look out over the water like small temples, with columns, pediments and doorways carved straight into the stone.
Did you know? The city exported salt, salted fish, dried figs and pine resin, along with the black mastic used to make tar for shipbuilding.
23 Maiden's Tower
Kız Kulesi
Turkey · 2.5 km from Istanbul41.021° N 29.004° E
Image by Ben_Kerckx from Pixabay The Maiden's Tower stands on a tiny islet in the Bosphorus, about 200 metres off the Asian shore at Üsküdar, where the strait opens into the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? The underwater remains of a Byzantine defensive wall that once joined the islet to the Asian shore can still be seen.
24 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay The Süleymaniye crowns Istanbul's Third Hill, and from the water its silhouette — a great central dome shouldered by cascading half-domes and four slender minarets — is one of the defining outlines of the old city's skyline.
Did you know? The complex rose on the site of the Old Palace, the first Ottoman palace in the city, which was still in use and had to be demolished for it.
25 Aqueduct of Valens
Bozdoğan Kemeri
Turkey · 1.6 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.956° E
Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Aqueduct of Valens is the most striking piece of Roman engineering still standing in the middle of Istanbul.
Did you know? Byzantium had an official called the logothete of the waters; one holder, Basil Maleses, was captured by the Seljuks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.
26 Haydarpaşa railway station
Turkey · 4.4 km from Istanbul40.996° N 29.019° E
Image by muratortasil from Pixabay Haydarpaşa station stands at the water's edge on the Asian shore of Istanbul, a massive stone block in a German-inflected Neoclassical style that seems oddly northern on the Bosphorus. The impression is well founded.
Did you know? German and Italian stonemasons carved the façade decoration, and the German builders founded their own small neighbourhood, with a school, in nearby Yeldeğirmeni.
27 Sagalassos
Turkey · 10 km from Isparta37.680° N 30.525° E
Image by introtanitim from Pixabay High on the slopes of Mount Akdağ in the western Taurus, between roughly 1,400 and 1,700 metres above sea level, the stone streets, agoras and fountain houses of Sagalassos are laid out on a staircase of terraces facing a wide mountain basin.
Did you know? Sagalassos red slip ware was made from the reign of Augustus until the first half of the seventh century AD.
28 Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı
Haseki Hamamı
Turkey · 1.2 km from Istanbul41.007° N 28.979° E
Gryffindor This panoramic image was created with Autostitch (stitched images may differ from reality) . · Public domain Few buildings in Istanbul have better neighbours than the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı.
Did you know? Each hot room follows a cross-shaped plan, with four iwans and four private corner cubicles grouped around the central octagonal heated stone.
29 Pergamon
Turkey39.117° N 27.183° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by yusufk53 from Pixabay Few ancient cities make such a statement with their setting. Pergamon was built on a steep andesite hill rising to about 335 metres above the Caicus plain, and its rulers terraced the slopes so that temples, palaces and public buildings climbed the rock in tiers.
Did you know? Water reached the citadel from a spring more than 40 kilometres away in the Madradağ mountains, and the city's pipes delivered roughly 30,000 cubic metres a day.
30 Kayaköy
Turkey36.577° N 29.087° E
Nikodem Nijaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Across a green upland valley a few kilometres south of Fethiye, a whole town of roofless stone houses covers the slopes of a hill.
Did you know? The town was probably settled by Byzantine islanders from nearby Gemiler Island who moved inland to escape pirate raids.
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 most beautiful places in Turkey?
- On our list, Göreme National Park ranks first, followed by Hagia Sophia and Pamukkale.
- How was Pamukkale formed?
- Hot springs rich in calcium carbonate flow down the hillside and deposit travertine as the water cools and releases carbon dioxide. Over thousands of years this has built the white terraces and pools above the ruins of Hierapolis.
- Who built the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne?
- It was designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for Sultan Selim II and completed in 1575. Sinan regarded it as his masterpiece, and its single great dome rests on eight supports.
- Why was Derinkuyu built underground?
- The soft volcanic tuff of Cappadocia was easy to dig, and the underground city gave inhabitants shelter, storage and protection during times of danger. It was expanded over many centuries and could be sealed with rolling stone doors.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Turkey?
- In our collection, the places in Turkey are most often archaeological sites (11), mosques (8), palaces (4) and rock-cut churches (2).
- How many places are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 47 places.