8 Days Eastern Turkey Tour

Highlights of the 8-Day Eastern Turkey Tour

• Trabzon & Sumela Monastery — the Black Sea coast, the frescoed Hagia Sophia of Trabzon and the cliff-hanging Sumela Monastery above the Altındere valley.
• Ani & Kars — the ghostly ruins of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani on the frontier, reached across the high plateau from Erzurum and Kars.
• Mount Ararat & İshak Paşa Palace — the snow-capped volcano towering over Doğubeyazıt and the romantic clifftop palace of İshak Paşa.
• Lake Van & Akdamar Island — the vast soda lake and the tenth-century Armenian Church of the Holy Cross with its carved reliefs.
• Diyarbakır — the great black basalt city walls on the banks of the Tigris, journey's end in upper Mesopotamia.

Travel from the Black Sea coast to the plains of Mesopotamia on this eight-day scheduled group tour of Türkiye's wild and little-visited east, planned in-house by Inca Tour, a TURSAB-licensed operator, and guided in English throughout. You begin in Trabzon, where the Byzantine Hagia Sophia keeps its thirteenth-century frescoes and the tea gardens of Boztepe look out over the city. A highlight is the Sumela Monastery, clinging to a sheer cliff above the forested Altındere Valley National Park, before the road climbs through the Zigana Mountains and past the Karaca Cave to Erzurum, the great city of the eastern plateau with its Seljuk double-minaret madrasa.

Crossing a landscape of high steppe and distant peaks, you reach the haunting ruins of Ani near Kars — the medieval capital of Armenia, its cathedrals and churches standing alone on a grassy plateau at the modern border. Further east, the perfect cone of Mount Ararat dominates the horizon above Doğubeyazıt, where the eighteenth-century İshak Paşa Palace, part mosque, part fortress and part palace, surveys the plain below alongside the ruins of old Bayazıt and an earlier Urartian citadel.

The tour turns south-west to the shores of Lake Van, Türkiye's largest lake, where a short boat ride reaches Akdamar Island and its exquisite tenth-century Church of the Holy Cross, carved with Biblical scenes. You visit the Urartian fortress of Hoşap Castle and the citadel of Van before travelling on through Ahlat, with its field of Seljuk tombstones, and the medieval town of Bitlis to Diyarbakır. There the monumental black basalt city walls rise above the Tigris, a fitting finale to a journey across the length of eastern Anatolia. With seven nights' accommodation, daily breakfast, six dinners, a private air-conditioned coach and a professional guide, this is a genuine expedition into Türkiye's most dramatic and historic frontier. Prices are per person.