The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites in Turkey
7 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in Turkey are Ephesus, Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut. The list covers 7 UNESCO-listed archaeological sites. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Anatolia has been a crossroads for longer than almost anywhere on Earth. Some of the first monumental buildings of the Neolithic rose here, followed by Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians and Seljuks, each leaving cities in stone. Soft volcanic tuff in Cappadocia allowed whole settlements to be carved underground, while Aegean marble gave Ionian and Roman cities their monumental streets. UNESCO listing traces that sequence across eleven thousand years.
Göbekli Tepe, built around 9500 BC, is a set of stone enclosures with T-shaped pillars carved with foxes, boars and birds, raised by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before Stonehenge. On the summit of Mount Nemrut, the first-century BC king Antiochus I of Commagene surrounded his tomb mound with colossal statues of gods and of himself, whose fallen heads now rest on the terraces. Derinkuyu, in Cappadocia, descends through many levels of rock-cut rooms, ventilation shafts and rolling stone doors.
The Greek and Roman cities are among the finest anywhere. Ephesus keeps its marble streets, its great theatre and the reconstructed facade of the Library of Celsus. Pergamon set its acropolis on a steep hill with one of the steepest theatres of the ancient world. Aphrodisias, home to a renowned school of sculptors, has an exceptionally well-preserved stadium and a monumental gateway known as the Tetrapylon. On a remote plateau, Ani preserves the ruins of a medieval Armenian capital, with churches and walls above a river 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 | Pergamon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 6 | Aphrodisias | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 7 | Ani | Archaeological site | ✓ |
01 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.
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 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.
03 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.
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 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
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 UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in Turkey?
- On our list, Ephesus ranks first, followed by Derinkuyu Underground City and Mount Nemrut.
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- Its oldest enclosures date to around 9500 BC, in the early Neolithic. That makes it some six thousand years older than Stonehenge and the earliest known monumental site built by people.
- What is Derinkuyu Underground City?
- It is a multi-level settlement carved into the soft volcanic rock of Cappadocia, with living rooms, stables, chapels and ventilation shafts. It could shelter thousands of people and their animals, and its passages could be sealed with large rolling stone doors.
- Where is the Pergamon Altar today?
- The Hellenistic Great Altar of Pergamon was excavated by German archaeologists in the late nineteenth century and reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Its foundations remain on the acropolis of Pergamon.
- How many UNESCO-listed archaeological sites are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 7 UNESCO-listed archaeological sites.