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We flew from Tel Aviv to Antalya and spent eight days there in Kalechi, the old city. While in Antalya we visted the ancient cities of Perge, Aspendos, and Termessos (blue circles near Antalya). Then we rented a car for four days and travelled generally east, spending nights on the outbound at Side(Manavgat) and Anamur and at Alanya on the return. On the return to Alanya we stopped at the very interesting Antioch Ad Cragum. Going east we stayed on the coast; returning we travelled inland near Alanya and near Manavgat. After we returned to Antalya we again spent two nights in Kalechi and then left by bus for a six week tour that ended in Erdine in the far northwest.

We stayed at a series of Mediterranean coastal towns, most of which had one or more associated ancient Greek sites. Usually the town or tourist center had a large collection of massive tourist hotels. Excepting one night we stayed in smaller pensions. First we stayed in Tekirova and made an outing to Phaselis, to Olympos, and our first walk on the Lycian Way Then we stayed at Myra (Kale) (only one night because we didn't like our pension); leaving we made an excursion by boat to Kekova on the way to Kas, a coastal town with marina. From Kas we made a day trip to the ancient city of Xanthos, and another walk on the Lycian Way. Leaving Kas we passed through Xanthos again on the way to Fethiye, a larger marina town. From there we made an outing to the deserted village of Kara and walked through coastal hills and cliffs to Oludeniz.

From Fethiye it was on to the really big — and gorgeous — tourist town and Marina of Marmaris, on the Datça pennsiula. We went out to Datça, where, although it is smaller and less interesting, we managed to spend one more night than at Marmaris because of our day long outing to Knidos (shown in blue).

When we went north of the Datça Penninsula we left the Mediterranean and entered the Aegean sea. We bypassed Bodrum (shown in blue), a place we are told is a giant resort, even noisier than Marmaris; so we doubt that we missed much. Instead we went on to the modern and modest Turkish town of Selçuk and visited one of the highlights of our Turkey tour, Ephesus. We also made a day trip to Kusadasi, another giant resort favored by the British; it didn't have much attraction for us. Leaving them we went on to Izmir, once known as Smyrna when it was a Greek majority city. We liked Izmir and wished we had had infinite time and could have stayed there longer. But we went on to something better, the twins of Bergama (modern Turkish) and Pergamon (ancient Greek up on the hill). Then it was on to comparatively unknown Ayvalik and the the hilltop ancient Assos. That was essentially it for the Aegean, unless you include Troy, way up near the entrance to the Dardanelles.

Our stay in Turkey ended in Attaturk and ancient Ottoman country. We spent five days in Çanakkale, gateway to Gallipoli and the World War I battles fought there. Then we were off for two days in Edirne, once the summer capital of the Ottoman Empire. We left by crossing the border into Bulgaria and passed through Plovdiv on our way to Sofia.

We visited Turkey in 1975 on our way to Iran. We then drove from Vienna through Yugoslavia to Sofia and Plovdiv and entered Turkey near Edirne. From there we drove along the route shown as white dots to Terkidag, Istanbul, Ankara, and points east.

The map makes it clear that there are very large parts of Turkey that we did not visit. One classic route could have taken us from Antalya north to Ankara and Istanbul via Capadoccia. Next time!

The one regret of our stay is that we didn’t have a full library of history and other reference books with us. Even our CD-ROM encyclopaedias were not available for most of our visit, making us more reliant than ever on guidebooks — and we didn’t buy an up-to-date one until we were six weeks into our stay!

Updated September 9, 2004