The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Turkey
16 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Turkey are Hagia Sophia, Ephesus and Sultan Ahmed Mosque. The list covers 16 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Turkey sits where the empires of antiquity, Byzantium and the Ottomans overlapped, and each left its masterpieces on the same ground. Soft volcanic tuff in Cappadocia let people carve whole towns, mineral springs built white terraces at Pamukkale, and in the southeast stand some of the oldest monumental structures humans ever raised.
Göbekli Tepe, with its carved stone pillars from around 9500 BC, predates farming and pottery. Mount Nemrut carries the colossal heads of gods and of King Antiochus I on its summit, and Ephesus preserves the facade of the Library of Celsus and a vast theatre. In Cappadocia, Göreme fills valleys of rock pinnacles with painted cave churches, while Derinkuyu descends many levels underground. Pamukkale's travertine pools spill down the hill beside the ruins of Hierapolis.
Istanbul brings the imperial capitals together. Hagia Sophia, completed in 537, held the largest dome in the world for centuries, and the Chora Church keeps some of the finest late Byzantine mosaics and frescoes. Topkapı Palace was the court of the sultans, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque is known for its blue İznik tiles and six minarets, and the Süleymaniye Mosque crowns a hill above the Golden Horn. In Edirne, the Selimiye Mosque is the work Mimar Sinan considered his masterpiece.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | ✓ |
| 2 | Ephesus | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 4 | Chora Church (Kariye) | Church building | ✓ |
| 5 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 6 | Derinkuyu Underground City | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 7 | Selimiye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 8 | Mount Nemrut | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Pamukkale | Hot spring | ✓ |
| 10 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 11 | Göreme National Park | Protected area | ✓ |
| 12 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 13 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 14 | Aphrodisias | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 15 | Ani | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 16 | Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital | Mosque | ✓ |
01 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. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537.
Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.
02 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. Founded by Ionian Greeks in the 10th century BC, it became one of the leading cities of Roman Asia, a centre of early Christianity and, until its harbour silted up, one of the busiest ports of the Aegean.
Did you know? The Temple of Artemis took about 120 years to build and was burned down in 356 BC.
03 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. An imperial mosque of this scale was, among other things, a calculated show of confidence: proof the empire hadn't actually faltered. Ahmed died the year after it was finished, at 27.
Did you know? The tile orders swallowed the entire İznik industry, and in 1613 the sultan banned making or selling tiles for anyone else until his were finished.
04 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? During the final Ottoman siege of 1453, the Hodegetria icon, revered as the protector of Constantinople, was carried to the Chora to help the defenders.
05 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? The palace stands on the site of the acropolis of ancient Byzantion, and parts of its outer walls date back to Byzantine times.
06 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? More than 600 separate entrances to the underground city have been found since 1963, some of them hidden beneath the basements of houses in the town above.
07 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? Sinan was about 80 when he built the Selimiye, which he called his masterwork after the Şehzade, his apprentice work, and the Süleymaniye, his journeyman work.
08 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. In the 1st century BC Antiochus I, ruler of Commagene, a small kingdom between Anatolia and Syria on the upper Euphrates, turned the peak into his hierothesion, a sanctuary for his own cult and presumably his tomb.
Did you know? Antiochus shows his ancestry on two rows of relief stelae: his father's line traced back to Darius I of Persia, his mother's to Alexander the Great.
09 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? Next to the Temple of Apollo lies Pluto's Gate, a small cave that exhales suffocating carbon dioxide and was revered as an entrance to the underworld.
10 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. On a limestone ridge north-east of Şanlıurfa, a mound about 15 metres high and 8 hectares across holds monumental enclosures built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC — by people who had not yet adopted pottery and were only on the threshold of farming.
Did you know? In Turkish the name means Potbelly Hill, while one Kurdish name for the mound translates as Wish Hill.
11 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? The deep blue of the New Church at Tokalı, the largest church in Göreme, comes from Badakhshan lapis lazuli, its value estimated at about 31.5 pounds of gold.
12 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. It was built for Suleiman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan; the inscription over the entrance gives 1550 for the foundation and 1557 for the inauguration.
Did you know? Sinan is said to have channelled the smoke of the mosque's oil lamps into a chamber above the entrance, where the soot was gathered and turned into calligraphers' ink.
13 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? The word parchment derives from Pergamon, a major production centre, though the tale that the city invented it to beat Egypt's papyrus monopoly is untrue.
14 Aphrodisias
Afrodisias
Turkey · 32.2 km from Denizli37.708° N 28.724° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DebraJean from Pixabay Aphrodisias was a city built of marble by people who knew how to carve it. Quarries of white and blue-grey stone on the slopes just above the town fed a school of sculptors whose work became famous across the Roman world, and the ruins in a fertile valley of inland Caria are still crowded with columns, reliefs, portraits and inscriptions.
Did you know? According to the Byzantine Suda, the city had three earlier names, including City of the Leleges and Great City, before it became Aphrodisias.
15 Ani
Turkey · 39 km from Gyumri40.508° N 43.573° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 21011655 from Pixabay Ani stands on a high, triangular plateau in eastern Anatolia, and the first thing to understand about it is the silence. Here, between deep river gorges, lay the capital of Bagratid Armenia from 961 to 1045 - a city that under King Gagik I may have held around 100,000 people, rivalling the great cities of its age.
Did you know? Trdat, the architect of Ani Cathedral, was also summoned to Constantinople to rebuild the dome of Hagia Sophia after an earthquake brought it down, returning in 993.
16 Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital
Turkey39.371° N 38.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
R Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0 Divriği is a small town in the uplands of Sivas Province, and above its roofs, just below the citadel, stands one of the most astonishing pieces of stone carving in the Islamic world. The mosque and the hospital attached to it were raised together in 1228–1229 under the Mengujekids, a minor Anatolian dynasty whose Divriği branch ruled this valley.
Did you know? Each aisle of the prayer hall is roofed with a different star-patterned stone vault, so the ceilings never repeat from one bay to the next.
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 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Turkey?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia ranks first, followed by Ephesus and Sultan Ahmed Mosque.
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- Göbekli Tepe's oldest monumental enclosures date to around 9500 BC, thousands of years before Stonehenge, making it one of the earliest known sites of monumental construction.
- How was Pamukkale formed?
- Pamukkale's white terraces formed as warm spring water rich in calcium carbonate flowed down the hillside and deposited travertine, building up basins and cascades over thousands of years.
- Who built the Selimiye Mosque?
- The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne was designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for Sultan Selim II and completed in the 1570s. Sinan regarded it as his masterpiece.
- How many UNESCO World Heritage Sites are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 16 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.