From Mesopotamia to the Black Sea

Why the programme is built this way

The route runs one way, and that is the first decision. The group flies into Gaziantep and out of Trabzon, so nothing is driven twice across a region where doubling back would cost whole days. It also means the journey has a shape: it starts on the Mesopotamian plain at the oldest continuously inhabited end of the country, climbs to two thousand metres, and comes down to the sea.

The second decision is where the nights sit. Mardin, Van, Kars, Gaziantep and Trabzon all get two or more, which is what makes a sixteen-day eastern programme bearable. Mardin earns it because the monasteries, Dara and the old town cannot be done in an afternoon. Van earns it because Akdamar depends on the boat and the boat depends on the lake. Trabzon holds four nights and works as a base rather than a stop, which is how the Black Sea should be done: the coast is the least interesting part of it and the valleys inland are the point.

The third is that the journey is organised around three different religious histories rather than one. Harran and the pools at Şanlıurfa for Abraham, the Syriac monasteries at Mardin and Midyat for a Christian community that has been there since the fourth century, and Akdamar and Ani for Armenian architecture. A guide who can hold all three is what makes this route work, and that is the part that is hard to buy anywhere else.

Itinerary

Day 1 | Gaziantep — Arrival

Your group is met at Gaziantep airport and transferred to the hotel, with the rest of the day free. Gaziantep is a good place to start a long journey: it is a working city with one of the oldest continuously inhabited centres in the world, and the first evening needs no programme beyond walking out into it.

Day 2 | Gaziantep — Zeugma, copper and baklava

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum holds the floors lifted out of a Roman city before the Birecik dam covered it, and the Gypsy Girl is a fragment the size of a dinner plate that stops people where they stand. Then the Bakırcılar bazaar, where coppersmiths still work to order, and a baklava shop that makes nothing else — forty layers, Antep pistachio, a protected name. Coffee afterwards at Tahmis, open since 1635.

Day 3 | Gaziantep to Adıyaman — Nemrut

North and east through the Euphrates country, with lunch at Kahta before the ascent. Nemrut is a tomb nobody has found: King Antiochus of Commagene had fifty metres of broken stone piled over his burial and surrounded it with colossal statues of himself among Greek and Persian gods. Earthquakes took the heads off and they now sit on the terraces at eye level. At 2,150 metres, in the late light, it is the single most extraordinary thing in eastern Türkiye.

Day 4 | Adıyaman to Şanlıurfa — Göbekli Tepe and Harran

Göbekli Tepe in the morning, while it is cool. T-shaped limestone pillars up to five metres high, carved with boars, cranes, foxes and scorpions, raised eleven thousand years ago by people who had not yet invented farming or pottery, and then deliberately buried. It moved the start of monumental architecture back by seven thousand years. Then the Şanlıurfa museum, which holds what came out of the ground there, and Harran in the afternoon, where the beehive houses are still built the way they were when Abraham passed through.

Day 5 | Şanlıurfa to Mardin — the pools of Abraham

The morning is Şanlıurfa on foot: Gümrük Han, where the tea is drunk at tables in a sixteenth-century courtyard, the covered bazaars, and Balıklıgöl — the pool where tradition holds Abraham was thrown into a fire that God turned to water, its carp sacred and uncatchable. Three faiths claim this city, and the morning shows you why. In the afternoon, east to Mardin for two nights.

Day 6 | Mardin — Dara, Deyrulzafaran and the old town

Dara first, a Byzantine frontier fortress city with cisterns the size of cathedrals cut down into the rock and a necropolis carved into a quarry face. Then Deyrulzafaran, a Syriac Orthodox monastery founded in the fifth century on a temple older still, and the seat of the Patriarchate until 1932. Monks are there now. In the afternoon, the Kasımiye Medrese, which looks out over the whole Mesopotamian plain, and the honey-coloured streets of old Mardin on foot.

Day 7 | Mardin to Van — Mor Gabriel and Hasankeyf

Mor Gabriel, founded in 397, is among the oldest working monasteries on earth, and the community around it still speaks Turoyo, a living descendant of Aramaic. Then north to Hasankeyf. The old town on the Tigris went under the Ilısu reservoir in 2020; the Zeynel Bey tomb and several other monuments were cut free, moved on rails and re-erected in a cultural park above the water. Your guide will tell you what was saved and what was not, which is a more honest afternoon than a tour of the old streets would have been. Then the long road east to Van.

Day 8 | Van — Çavuştepe and Akdamar

Breakfast first, because in Van breakfast is the local institution: twenty-odd dishes on a table at once, herb cheese, clotted cream, local honey, eggs cooked in butter. Then Çavuştepe, an Urartian fortress from the eighth century BC with cuneiform still legible on the temple blocks. In the afternoon the boat from Gevaş out to Akdamar island, and the tenth-century Church of the Holy Cross: Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale carved in relief right round the outside walls.

Day 9 | Van to Kars — Mount Ararat and İshak Paşa

North along the lake, then up. Muradiye falls in the morning, and from Doğubayazıt the whole mass of Ararat, 5,137 metres and snow-capped in any month. The İshak Paşa Palace above the town is the extraordinary one: an eighteenth-century Kurdish governor's palace built with Ottoman, Seljuk, Persian and Armenian stonework in the same building, underfloor heating in the harem and a view down the plain towards Iran. Then across to Kars for two nights.

Day 10 | Kars — Ani

Ani sits on a gorge that is now the closed Armenian border, and it was a city of a hundred thousand people when London had twenty. The cathedral of 1001 still stands with its pointed arches, which were being built here before the Gothic ones in France. So does the Church of the Redeemer, cut exactly in half by lightning in 1957 and left that way. Nothing has been rebuilt and almost nobody is there. Back in Kars for the old city and the Russian-period streets.

Day 11 | Kars to Erzurum

The Kars museum in the morning, then the drive south-west across high grassland. Erzurum sits at nearly two thousand metres and was the Seljuk frontier: the Çifte Minareli Medrese is one of the great buildings of that period, and the Kümbetler beside it are conical Seljuk tombs standing in a row. Dinner in the city — Erzurum cooking is mountain food, and cığ köfte here is made differently from the way it is in Urfa.

Day 12 | Erzurum to Trabzon — the Çoruh valley

The best drive in the country, and it takes the day. The Ulu Cami and the coppersmiths first, then north out of Erzurum, past Tortum falls and the length of Tortum lake, and down into the Çoruh gorge — a thousand metres of near-vertical valley with the river at the bottom and the road cut into the side of it. The landscape changes from high steppe to rainforest in about four hours. Artvin, then the coast, then Trabzon.

Day 13 | Trabzon — the city

Hagia Sophia of Trabzon is a thirteenth-century church of the Byzantine successor empire at Trebizond, which outlived Constantinople itself by eight years and fell to the Ottomans only in 1461. Its frescoes are among the best-preserved anywhere. Then the Atatürk Mansion, a white villa in a garden above the city, and the old centre and bazaar on foot. Dinner is Black Sea food, which is a different cuisine entirely: anchovies, maize bread, collard greens, and cheese that is melted rather than sliced.

Day 14 | Trabzon — Sumela and Uzungöl

Sumela is built into a cliff three hundred metres above the floor of the Altındere valley, founded in the fourth century and lived in until 1923, and the approach through the forest shows it to you a piece at a time. The rock church still holds its frescoes inside and out. In the afternoon, Uzungöl: a lake in a bowl of forested mountains, a wooden mosque on the shore and tea gardens on the slope above it. Back to Trabzon in the evening.

Day 15 | Trabzon — a day to go slowly

The fifteenth day of any journey should not be a schedule, and this one is not. The day runs east along the coast to Sürmene, where knives have been forged by hand for three hundred years and the workshops will show you how, with viewpoints and tea stops along the way and the afternoon free in Trabzon. Groups who would rather keep moving can go up into the Hemşin valleys instead, to Ayder and the Zilkale fortress, which is the wildest landscape on the route.

Day 16 | Trabzon — departure

Breakfast and the transfer to Trabzon airport.