The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Turkey
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable archaeological sites in Turkey are Ephesus, Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut. The list covers 11 archaeological sites. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Anatolia sits where Europe, the Middle East and the steppe meet, and almost every culture that passed through left something behind. Neolithic hunter-gatherers raised the first monumental sanctuaries here, Hittites ruled the plateau, Greek cities lined the Aegean coast, and Romans and Byzantines filled the land with theatres, temples and churches. Geology helped as well: soft volcanic tuff in Cappadocia could be carved into homes and refuges, and local marble supplied sculptors for centuries.
Göbekli Tepe, in the southeast, has rings of T-shaped limestone pillars carved with animals, erected some eleven thousand years ago, long before writing or the wheel. On Mount Nemrut, the 1st-century BC king Antiochus I of Commagene built a tomb-sanctuary guarded by colossal statues whose stone heads now rest on the terraces. Derinkuyu is a many-levelled underground city dug into the volcanic rock of Cappadocia.
The Greco-Roman west is represented by Ephesus, with its great theatre and the facade of the Library of Celsus, Pergamon, whose theatre clings to a steep acropolis, and Aphrodisias, famous for its school of sculpture. Sagalassos and Termessus are mountain cities in the Taurus range, and Didyma held a vast temple of Apollo. In Istanbul, the Basilica Cistern is a 6th-century forest of columns beneath the city, while Ani preserves the ruined churches of a medieval capital on the edge of a gorge.
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 | Basilica Cistern | Reservoir | |
| 6 | Sagalassos | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 8 | Aphrodisias | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Ani | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 10 | Didyma | Archaeological site | |
| 11 | Termessus | Archaeological site |
01 Ephesus
Efes
Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lucag259 from Pixabay The site is large, and in summer an early start is wise. In Selçuk, the Ephesus Archaeological Museum holds many of the finest finds, and the hill of Ayasuluk above the town carries the ruins of the 6th-century Basilica of St John, the Isa Bey Mosque and a Byzantine castle.
Did you know? According to legend, Androklos founded the city where an oracle’s prophecy came true: “A fish and a boar will show you the way.”
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 The first chambers may go back to the Phrygians in the eighth or seventh century BC, but the city grew to its full size in Byzantine times, when the Arab–Byzantine wars made the Anatolian plateau a frontier and whole communities retreated underground during raids. The Greek-speaking Christians of Cappadocia still used it as a refuge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the population exchange of 1923 emptied the region. It was then forgotten, and rediscovered in 1963 when a resident renovating his house broke through a wall and found a passage behind it. Derinkuyu is part of the Göreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia, a World Heritage Site since 1985.
Did you know? The main air shaft, about 3 by 2.8 metres, was laid out so that the openings on different levels never sit directly above one another, apparently to improve airflow.
03 Mount Nemrut
Turkey37.981° N 38.741° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArifYasa from Pixabay The site was surveyed in 1881 by the German engineer Karl Sester, who was assessing transport routes for the Ottoman government. The American archaeologist Theresa Goell devoted much of her life to it, excavating from 1954, and the photographer Ara Güler's reportage from the late 1950s is counted among his most important work. Mount Nemrut was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. The summit lies in harsh, high country, and visitors come mainly between April and October.
Did you know? Relief stelae show the king clasping hands with the gods, a scene known as dexiosis that presents him as welcomed among them.
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 The excavated enclosures are now under a large protective roof, with walkways around them, so the pillars are seen from above, much as their builders might have looked down into the circles.
Did you know? Before excavation, farmers ploughing the hill had tried to break up some pillars, apparently taking them for ordinary boulders in their fields.
05 Basilica Cistern
Yerebatan Sarnıcı
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.978° E
Image by narya from Pixabay After the Ottoman conquest the cistern slipped out of sight, though not out of use: houses stood over it, and their owners drew water — and, it was said, caught fish — through holes in their basement floors. The French scholar Petrus Gyllius, studying the antiquities of Constantinople in the 1540s, heard these stories, found his way down and was rowed between the columns, watching fish in the water beneath the boat. Today the water is shallow, the walkways have been rebuilt in major restorations in the 1980s and in 2020–2022, and soft lighting picks out the columns as they recede into the dark.
Did you know? It is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie hidden beneath the streets of Istanbul.
06 Sagalassos
Turkey · 10 km from Isparta37.680° N 30.525° E
Image by introtanitim from Pixabay Decline came in stages. The town was fortified around 400 CE, damaged by an earthquake in 518 and hit by plague around 541–543, which is thought to have halved its population. Arab raids around 640 and a final destructive earthquake in the mid-seventh century led the inhabitants to leave for the valley below. The French traveller Paul Lucas described the ruins in 1706, and the antiquarian Francis Arundell identified the city by its inscriptions in 1824. Systematic excavation began in 1990 under Marc Waelkens of the University of Leuven, and the project has since traced ten thousand years of landscape and settlement history around the site.
Did you know? A potters' quarter of about two hectares, found in 1987, mass-produced a red tableware traded across Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean.
07 Pergamon
Turkey39.117° N 27.183° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by yusufk53 from Pixabay Below the hill lie two more places of note. The Asclepieion was a healing sanctuary where the physician Galen, born in Pergamon, received his early training. The Red Basilica, a huge Roman-era temple to the Egyptian gods Isis and Serapis, stands in the modern town about a kilometre south of the acropolis. Pergamon is also named in the Book of Revelation as one of the seven churches of Asia. The ancient city and its surrounding landscape were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014. Today the ruins overlook Bergama, a market town that grew up on the lower slopes.
Did you know? In Hellenistic times a pressurised lead pipe carried water down across a valley about 200 metres deep and back up to the summit of the citadel.
08 Aphrodisias
Afrodisias
Turkey · 32.2 km from Denizli37.708° N 28.724° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DebraJean from Pixabay Aphrodisias was also a centre of philosophy, home to Alexander of Aphrodisias, the great commentator on Aristotle, and to the novelist Chariton. It remained a stronghold of the old religion until late in the 5th century; afterwards the temple of Aphrodite was converted into a church and the city renamed Stauropolis, the "City of the Cross". Earthquakes in the 4th and 7th centuries left it in decline, and its later name, Caria, survives in the Turkish village name Geyre. More than 2,000 inscriptions have been recorded on the site.
Did you know? The Temple of Aphrodite is believed to have been dismantled around 481 to 484 on Emperor Zeno's orders, as a focus of pagan opposition to him.
09 Ani
Turkey · 39 km from Gyumri40.508° N 43.573° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 21011655 from Pixabay Ani's fall was slow. It passed to Byzantium in 1045, was taken by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan after a 25-day siege in 1064, was sacked by the Mongols in 1236 and shaken by an earthquake in 1319; as trade routes shifted, the city emptied, and by the seventeenth century it was abandoned. The long line of walls on the northern side survives, and visitors still enter through the Lion Gate. The deep gorge of the Akhurian (Arpaçay) river forms the edge of the site, and the border with Armenia runs along it, so the far bank is another country. UNESCO inscribed Ani as a World Heritage Site in 2016.
Did you know? King Gagik's Church of St Gregory, raised between 1001 and 1005, was conceived as a copy of the famous seventh-century cathedral of Zvartnots, matching its size and plan.
10 Didyma
Turkey37.385° N 27.256° E
Image by elifchakan from Pixabay The design is unlike any other Greek temple. A double ring of Ionic columns surrounds the building, but instead of a closed inner hall, visitors passed through a forest of columns in the porch to a great doorway whose threshold was too high to cross. Two narrow sloping tunnels led down inside the walls into a vast courtyard open to the sky, enclosed by walls about 25 metres high, where the spring, the laurel and the shrine of Apollo stood. Building went on for over six hundred years and was never completed: the pediments were never added, and many blocks were left unpolished.
Did you know? The double colonnade had 10 columns across each end and 21 along each side, each column about 19.7 metres tall.
11 Termessus
Termessos
Turkey · 23.1 km from Antalya36.983° N 30.464° E
Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 3.0 The monumental centre stands on a natural terrace inside the walls. The agora, raised on stone blocks beside five large rock-cut cisterns, was framed on three sides by stoas, one of them a gift from Attalos II, king of Pergamon. The Hellenistic theatre, remodelled in Roman times, seated perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 people. Nearby, the 1st-century BC odeon stands almost to roof height in fine ashlar masonry, and six temples have been identified, among them two dedicated to Artemis. A street lined with porticoes still carries the inscribed bases of statues of well-known athletes, mostly wrestlers. The city lies within the Mount Güllük-Termessos National Park.
Did you know? More than 1,000 inscriptions have been recorded at Termessos, making it a rich archive of civic and private life in Pisidia.
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 remarkable archaeological sites in Turkey?
- On our list, Ephesus ranks first, followed by Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut.
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- The oldest monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe date to around 9500 BC, making the site several thousand years older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. It was built by people who had not yet adopted farming on a large scale.
- What are the giant heads on Mount Nemrut?
- They belong to seated statues of King Antiochus I of Commagene and the gods he honoured, set up around his tomb mound in the 1st century BC. Earthquakes and time toppled the heads from the bodies.
- Why were the underground cities of Cappadocia built?
- The soft volcanic tuff of Cappadocia is easy to dig, and settlements such as Derinkuyu were expanded over centuries, especially in the Byzantine period, as refuges where people could shelter with their livestock and stores during raids.
- How many archaeological sites are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 11 archaeological sites.