The Most Mystical Places in Turkey
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical places in Turkey are Kaunos, Kayaköy and Selime Cathedral. The list covers 5 mystical places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Turkey's mystical places are carved into rock. The ancient peoples of Lycia and Caria cut temple-fronted tombs into cliff faces above their cities, and in Cappadocia, early Christians hollowed churches and monasteries out of soft volcanic tuff. More recent history added villages left empty, slowly returning to the hillsides around them.
Above the river at Dalyan, the tombs of Kaunos look out from the cliff with columns and pediments carved directly into the rock. Kayaköy, a village of hundreds of roofless stone houses near Fethiye, was abandoned after its Greek Orthodox inhabitants left in the population exchange of 1923. Selime Cathedral, at the end of the Ihlara Valley, is a rock-cut monastic complex with a nave and galleries inside a single tuff cone. Tokalı Church in Göreme glows with 10th-century frescoes on deep blue grounds, and the Myra Rock Tombs at Demre cover a cliff with Lycian tombs carved to imitate timber houses.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kaunos | Necropolis | |
| 2 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | |
| 3 | Selime Cathedral | Rock-cut church | |
| 4 | Tokalı Church | Rock-cut church | |
| 5 | Myra Rock Tombs | Necropolis |
01 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. These are the tombs of Kaunos, an ancient port city whose ruins lie on the hills just across the river from the town of Dalyan, in south-western Turkey.
Did you know? According to legend, the founder's twin sister Byblis fell in love with him, and the river beside the city sprang from her tears.
02 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? According to local tradition, Muslim settlers arriving from Greece refused to move into the empty houses, believing the town was haunted.
03 Selime Cathedral
Selime Katedrali
Turkey38.301° N 34.259° E
Dudva · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the northern end of the Ihlara Valley a ridge of soft volcanic tuff rises above the village of Selime, and inside it is the largest rock-cut church in Cappadocia. Known as Selime Cathedral, it is the heart of a monastic complex carved straight into the cliff, with halls and chambers set on two storeys and the upper part shaped like a fortress above the valley floor.
Did you know? Some researchers argue Selime was not a monastery at all but the rock-cut mansion of a Byzantine military family of the 10th and 11th centuries.
04 Tokalı Church
Tokalı Kilise
Turkey · 10.7 km from Nevşehir38.641° N 34.845° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tokalı Kilise, the "Buckle Church", is the largest of the rock-cut churches of Göreme and, for many historians of Byzantine art, the finest. It stands a little apart from the cluster of chapels inside the Göreme Open Air Museum, just below the main entrance, and from outside it gives almost nothing away: a doorway in a tufa slope.
Did you know? The paintings of the Old Church are dated by some scholars to around 913 to 920, roughly half a century before the New Church was cut.
05 Myra Rock Tombs
Myra Kaya Mezarları
Turkey36.259° N 29.984° E
Aerdemsenturk · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cliff above the ancient city of Myra is one of the most striking sights on the Lycian coast of Turkey: a honeycomb of tomb fronts cut straight into the rock face, stacked one above another as if a whole village had been carved into the mountain.
Did you know? In all, 104 rock tombs have been recorded at Myra, with 23 inscriptions between them, 13 in Lycian and 10 in Greek.
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 mystical places in Turkey?
- On our list, Kaunos ranks first, followed by Kayaköy and Selime Cathedral.
- Why is Kayaköy abandoned?
- Its Greek Orthodox population left in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and the village was never fully resettled. An earthquake in 1957 damaged it further.
- Why are Lycian tombs carved to look like houses?
- The Lycians shaped their rock tombs after their own timber houses and temples, with carved beams, doors and roofs, so the dead would rest in a home for the afterlife.
- How many mystical places are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 5 mystical places.