Türkiye: A City on Two
Continents, and a Landscape
From Another Planet

All Destinations › Europe › Turkey

Byzantium and the Ottomans in one skyline, fairy chimneys carved into volcanic rock, and white terraces built by water over ten thousand years.

Istanbul is the only city in the world standing on two continents, and it has been the capital of two empires that between them ran the eastern Mediterranean for fifteen hundred years. Hagia Sophia has been a cathedral, a mosque and a museum, and every one of those lives is still legible in the building. Below the streets, the Basilica Cistern holds 336 marble columns in the dark, two of them resting on Medusa heads nobody has fully explained.

Beyond the city, Türkiye becomes genuinely strange in the best sense. Cappadocia’s valleys are filled with fairy chimneys of soft volcanic tuff that early Christians hollowed into churches and whole underground cities eight levels deep. Pamukkale’s white travertine terraces were built over millennia by mineral water spilling down a hillside. Ephesus preserves a Roman city so complete you can read its street plan on foot.

At Finders & Keepers Safaris we treat the sunrise balloon flight over Cappadocia as the centre of a Turkish journey rather than an add-on, and we build a spare morning into the schedule because balloons fly only when the wind allows. Everything else — the food, the coast, the archaeology — arranges itself around that.