The Eastern Anatolia Grand Heritage Private Journey
Most visitors to Türkiye see the western coastline and go home convinced they have seen the country. This twelve-day private package tour goes the other way — east, into the high plateau where Hittite merchants kept their accounts in clay, where Seljuk stonemasons cut portals no one has matched since, where a medieval capital of a hundred thousand people now stands empty in the grass above a border river, and where Mount Ararat closes the horizon like a wall. It is the itinerary we give travellers who already know Istanbul and Cappadocia and want the part of Anatolia that most tour operators quietly leave off the map.
The journey opens gently. Day one stays in Istanbul but crosses to the Asian shore, where the city is residential, wooden-housed and unhurried — Üsküdar's waterfront mosques, the marble rooms of Beylerbeyi Palace, the whole skyline laid out from Çamlıca Hill, the painted streets of Kuzguncuk and the market lanes of Kadıköy. On day two a short morning flight sets you down in Kayseri beneath the snow line of Mount Erciyes, and from that point the tour becomes a single continuous eastward line drawn across the Anatolian highlands.
What follows is a layered reading of the same landscape. At Kültepe you stand on the mound where Assyrian merchants wrote Anatolia's earliest surviving documents nearly four thousand years ago. In Kayseri and Sivas you walk through the Seljuk thirteenth century, when this plateau was the intellectual centre of the Islamic world and its sultans and royal women endowed hospitals, colleges and caravanserais at a pace Europe would not match for two hundred years. At Divriği the stone carving becomes something close to hallucination. Beyond Erzurum the architecture turns defensive and the horizons widen, and by Kars the street plan is suddenly Russian imperial, laid out in the decades when the city belonged to the Tsar. At Ani you cross into what is left of a vanished Armenian capital. At Doğubayazıt the palace of a Kurdish lord looks out at a mountain carrying more mythology than any other in the region. At Van the record goes back further still, to the Urartian kings who cut their annals directly into the rock of the citadel.
The tour is private from the first transfer to the last. You travel with your own licensed guide and your own vehicle, you decide how long to linger, and no stranger's schedule shapes your day. Internal flights at each end remove the two longest transfers, hotels are the best available in each provincial city, and a single named coordinator in our Istanbul office stays reachable throughout. For diplomatic missions, government delegations, corporate boards and sporting clubs the same route runs at full protocol standard, with escorted vehicles, CIP airport handling, interpreters and advance liaison at every site.
What Makes This Eastern Turkey Tour Different
Ten reasons travellers choose this route over a standard western Türkiye circuit — each one a headline experience you will not find bundled into a coach itinerary.
Ani — the Silent City
A medieval capital of a hundred thousand souls, abandoned on the grass steppe above a border gorge. Cathedral, frescoed churches, city walls and the earliest Seljuk mosque in Anatolia, explored privately with your own guide.
The Great Mosque of Divriği
Stone carved until it behaves like textile. The north and west portals of this thirteenth-century mosque and hospital complex are the single most extravagant piece of Seljuk sculpture surviving anywhere.
Mount Ararat & İshak Paşa Palace
A golden-stone palace on a rock terrace, harem and mosque and audience hall intact, facing a 5,137-metre volcano that carries more legend than any other mountain in the region.
Akdamar Island, Lake Van
A private boat crossing on turquoise soda water to the tenth-century Church of the Holy Cross, its exterior walls carved with Adam, Jonah, David and Goliath in continuous relief.
Kültepe — Anatolia's First Writing
The Assyrian merchant colony of Kaneš, where thousands of cuneiform tablets recorded the loans, marriages and lawsuits of Bronze Age traders — the oldest written history of this peninsula.
The Medrese Square of Sivas
Four thirteenth-century colleges — Gök, Şifaiye, Çifte Minareli and Buruciye — facing one another across a single park. Nowhere else in Türkiye concentrates Seljuk learning so tightly.
Çıldır Lake & the Devil's Castle
High Caucasian steppe at nearly 2,000 metres, a lake that freezes solid in winter for horse-drawn sledges, and a ruined fortress clinging impossibly to a cliff face above a gorge.
Urartian Rock Citadels
Van Fortress, Çavuştepe and Hoşap — royal strongholds of the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu, with cuneiform annals cut straight into living rock above the lake.
The Eastern Table
Kayseri mantı and pastırma, Erzurum cağ kebabı turned on a horizontal spit, Kars gruyère aged in mountain cellars, and the legendary multi-plate Van breakfast to finish.
Protocol-Grade Operation
The same logistics team that handles embassy, ministry and corporate-board travel runs this route — advance site liaison, CIP airport handling, escorted vehicles and one accountable coordinator throughout.
A Turkey-Based VIP Travel Agency for Official and Corporate Travellers
The History Travel Agency is a TÜRSAB-licensed tour operator and destination management company based in Istanbul, working across 122 destinations in Türkiye. Alongside leisure journeys such as this one, we run the arrival, movement and hospitality side of official and corporate travel — the quiet work of making sure a delegation's day happens exactly as the schedule says it will. The twelve-day itinerary on this page can be delivered at standard private level or at full protocol level, and the service list below applies to either.
Heads of State, Ministries & Parliamentary Delegations
Movement planning for visiting heads of state, prime ministerial parties, ministers and members of parliament: motorcade sequencing, escorted protocol vehicles where authorised, secure arrival and departure windows, holding rooms, and liaison with provincial governorates and site directorates ahead of every visit.
Embassies, Consulates & Foreign Missions
Standing ground-handling support for embassies, consulates general and foreign missions in Ankara and Istanbul — visiting-delegation programmes, national day receptions, spouse and family programmes, staff rotation transfers, and invoiced accounts settled against a purchase order rather than a card payment.
Diplomatic Meetings & Negotiations
Neutral venues for bilateral meetings and negotiations, from hotel boardrooms to historic waterfront mansions on the Bosphorus. Simultaneous interpretation booths, discreet catering, secure document handling, and a room layout agreed in advance with both protocol offices.
Holdings, Corporations & Executive Personnel
Board travel, incentive journeys, client hosting and staff programmes for holdings and corporations. Chauffeur-driven executive sedans and VIP minivans, airport CIP lounges, meeting rooms, venue sourcing, and consolidated monthly billing for companies moving personnel through Türkiye regularly.
Football Clubs & Sporting Events
Squad and delegation logistics for football clubs and federations — team coaches, equipment transport, training-ground access, secure hotel floors, family and directors' programmes, match-day movement, and full arrangement of championship and sporting celebration events afterwards.
Private Boat & Yacht Charters
Bosphorus charters from classic wooden gulets to modern motor yachts for receptions, dinners and closed meetings on the water, plus coastal charters on the Aegean and Mediterranean. Crew, catering, live music and berthing permits all arranged under one contract.
VIP Transportation & Official Car Hire
Chauffeur-driven Mercedes S-Class and V-Class, executive minibuses and full-size coaches, with vetted drivers, GPS-tracked fleet and 24-hour dispatch. Official and ceremonial vehicles for state occasions and weddings are available on request in Istanbul and major provincial cities.
Celebrations, Galas & Receptions
Weddings and wedding anniversaries, graduations, circumcision ceremonies, championship parties, gala dinners, rallies and political party organisations — venue, permits, catering, décor, entertainment, photography and guest transport managed end to end by one production team.
Meetings, Congresses & School Travel
Congress and conference handling, invitation and delegate management, registration desks and hostess teams, and supervised educational travel for schools and universities with risk assessments, licensed guides and 24-hour duty staff.
Licensed Guides in Every Region
Ministry-certified professional tourist guides in Istanbul, Cappadocia, Ephesus, Pamukkale and across the eastern provinces, working in English, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, Russian, Italian and Japanese — the same guides who accompany our official and diplomatic programmes.
Flights, Tickets & Reservations
Internal flight ticketing, museum and archaeological site tickets, fast-track entries, dinner arrangements with traditional entertainment, private daily excursions and complete multi-day packages — issued and reconfirmed by our own ticketing desk, not a third-party portal.
Nationwide Destination Management
One licensed operator covering 122 destinations from Edirne to Van, with local staff, vetted suppliers and legal liability held in Türkiye. Customised package tour itineraries and event planning delivered to a single contract, a single invoice and a single point of contact.
Official and diplomatic inquiries: please send your request on letterhead or from an official domain address and include the delegation size, the dates, the arrival airport and any protocol requirements. Programmes of this type are quoted individually, and a named coordinator is assigned to your file within one working day.
Twelve Days, Told Day by Day
Every full day below lists at least four named places, with the reasoning behind the order and the timing. Because the tour is private, nothing here is fixed in stone — your guide can stretch a site you love and shorten one you do not, and the whole sequence can be rebuilt around your interests before you travel.
Istanbul's Asian shore is where the city exhales. There are no ticket queues wrapping around a square here, no coach parks. Instead there are ferry horns, tea gardens under plane trees, timber houses in colours chosen a century ago, and a population of fifteen million people getting on with ordinary life in extraordinary surroundings. Beginning the tour here does two useful things: it lets jet lag settle at a humane pace, and it shows you the city as residents actually experience it before you head east.
Üsküdar Waterfront & the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque
Your guide collects you from your hotel and crosses to Üsküdar, the oldest continuously inhabited quarter on the Asian side and the place Ottoman caravans assembled before setting out for Damascus and Baghdad. On the quay stands the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque, designed by Sinan in the 1540s for Süleyman the Magnificent's only daughter — a wide, generous prayer hall with a triple-domed porch that opens straight onto the water. A few steps away the small Şemsi Paşa Mosque sits so close to the sea that fishermen lean their rods against its wall, and the little Maiden's Tower stands offshore on its rock, the subject of more Istanbul legends than any other building.
Beylerbeyi Palace
Directly beneath the first Bosphorus bridge, Beylerbeyi was the summer palace of the late Ottoman sultans and the guest house where the empire lodged visiting royalty — Empress Eugénie of France left with her opinion of the Bosphorus permanently altered. The scale is human after Dolmabahçe: twenty-four rooms of Egyptian reed matting, Bohemian crystal, Hereke carpets and ceilings painted with ships, arranged around a marble pool that once cooled the air. The waterside terraces and magnolia gardens, looking back across the strait to the European shore, are the reason to linger.
Çamlıca Hill
The highest point in the city, 268 metres above the Bosphorus, and the single best place to understand Istanbul's geography in one sweep — the strait threading north to the Black Sea, the Golden Horn cutting into the European side, the Princes' Islands sitting low in the Marmara, and on a clear winter day the white ridge of Uludağ far to the south. The terraced gardens are a favourite Istanbul picnic spot, and lunch today is a traditional Turkish meal at a hillside restaurant with the whole panorama in front of you.
Kuzguncuk
A single sloping street of painted timber houses running up from the water, Kuzguncuk is the neighbourhood every Istanbul film crew uses when it needs to show the city as it once was. Within a few hundred metres stand a mosque, a synagogue, an Armenian church and a Greek Orthodox church, a survival of the mixed Bosphorus village life that dominated these shores for centuries. There is a market garden in the middle of it, cats asleep on every windowsill, and coffee worth stopping for.
Kadıköy Market & Moda
Ancient Chalcedon, founded a generation before Byzantium by settlers the oracle famously called blind for missing the better site opposite, is today Istanbul's most enjoyable food district. The lanes behind the ferry terminal are stacked with fishmongers, pickle shops, spice counters, coffee roasters and century-old confectioners, and your guide will steer you through a tasting walk — Turkish delight, aged cheeses, dried fruits, roasted nuts, a glass of tea. The walk finishes along the Moda seafront as the ferries start their evening runs.
Bosphorus Crossing & Hotel Transfer
You return by water rather than by road, on a public ferry between the continents — twenty minutes of gulls, tea in tulip glasses and the palaces of the European shore rising ahead of you. Private transfer back to your hotel, with the evening free.
Guide's note: if you are arriving in Istanbul on this same morning, we simply flip the day — airport meet-and-greet, hotel check-in and rest first, with the Asian shore moved to the afternoon or to a spare day at the end of the tour. Tell us your flight number and we build the day around it.
A morning flight of about ninety minutes drops you into central Anatolia, and the change is immediate: a wide volcanic plain, a 3,916-metre snow-capped cone on the southern horizon, and a city that has been trading across this plain for four thousand years. Kayseri was Mazaca to the Hittites, Caesarea to the Romans and Byzantines, and a Seljuk capital in all but name — and its merchants are still the shrewdest in Türkiye, a reputation locals will cheerfully confirm. Today belongs to the countryside around the city; tomorrow belongs to its streets.
Istanbul → Kayseri Flight & Mount Erciyes Approach
Private transfer to the airport, assisted check-in, and a short domestic flight east. As the aircraft descends, Mount Erciyes fills the window — the extinct volcano whose eruptions laid down the soft tuff that Cappadocia's cave dwellings were later carved from, and whose meltwater made this plain farmable. Your Kayseri guide and vehicle meet you airside for the drive out to the plain.
Kültepe-Kaneš — Anatolia's Oldest Written Records
Twenty kilometres northeast of the city, a low mound and the flat ground beside it hold the remains of Kaneš, the most important Assyrian trading colony in Anatolia during the twentieth to eighteenth centuries BC. Merchants from Aššur, more than a thousand kilometres away, lived here permanently in a lower town called the kārum, exchanging tin and textiles for Anatolian silver and gold. They kept obsessive accounts, and more than twenty thousand cuneiform clay tablets have been recovered from their house archives — loan contracts, partnership agreements, marriage settlements, complaints from wives in Assyria to husbands who had stayed away too long. These are the earliest written documents ever found in Anatolia, and the moment when this peninsula steps out of prehistory and starts speaking for itself. Walking the excavated streets with a guide who can read the house plans turns a field of foundations into a functioning commercial quarter.
Ağırnas — the Birthplace of Mimar Sinan
The greatest architect of the Ottoman world was born in this stone village in 1489, conscripted into imperial service as a young man, and went on to design more than three hundred buildings, including the Süleymaniye and Selimiye mosques. His family home survives, and beneath the village runs an extraordinary network of rock-cut tunnels, cisterns and chambers dug by early Christian communities and used for centuries afterwards as cold stores and refuges. Lunch is served locally — expect Kayseri mantı, the famous tiny dumplings served under garlic yoghurt, counted out by the dozen in a spoon.
Talas Historic Quarter
On the slopes above Kayseri, Talas is a hillside of nineteenth-century cut-stone mansions built by the Greek and Armenian merchant families who ran the region's trade with Istanbul and Europe. Many have been restored as boutique hotels and cafés, and the Yaman Dede church-mosque, the old American college buildings and the rock-cut Panagia chapel are all within a short walk. The views back across the plain to Erciyes at late afternoon light are the best of the day.
Mount Erciyes Foothills & Hisarcık
A short drive up the volcano's northern flank to the alpine meadows and the ski-resort plateau at around 2,200 metres, where the air turns sharp and the whole Kayseri plain lies below. In summer the slopes are pasture and wildflowers; in winter this is one of Türkiye's principal ski areas. Either way, it is the cleanest view of Erciyes you will get, and a good place to end before checking into your hotel in the city.
Add-on: Cappadocia's valleys begin barely an hour west of here. Travellers who have not yet seen Göreme frequently add one or two nights at this point, including a dawn hot-air balloon flight, before rejoining the eastern route. Ask us for the extended fourteen-day version.
Kayseri wears its history in black basalt. Almost everything old in this city is cut from the dark volcanic stone of Erciyes, which gives the centre a gravity that softer limestone towns never have. Today is walked rather than driven, and it is a concentrated lesson in what the Anatolian Seljuks and their remarkable royal women actually did with power in the thirteenth century: they endowed hospitals, colleges, soup kitchens and caravanserais, and they signed them.
Kayseri Castle (Kale)
A black basalt fortress planted squarely in the middle of the modern city, begun under the Romans in the third century, rebuilt by Justinian, and given its present form by the Seljuk sultans in the 1220s. Nineteen towers and a double circuit of walls survive almost intact, which is rare for an urban castle still surrounded by traffic and shopfronts. Restored interiors now house exhibition and market spaces, and the wall walk gives you the city's layout at a glance.
Hunat Hatun Complex
Directly opposite the castle stands the first great charitable complex in Anatolia commissioned by a woman — Mahperi Hunat Hatun, wife of Sultan Alâeddin Keykubad I, who founded it in 1238. Mosque, medrese, bathhouse and her own domed tomb form a single connected block, and the twelve-sided mausoleum with its conical cap is one of the most photographed Seljuk tombs in the country. The hamam next door has been in continuous use for nearly eight centuries.
Gevher Nesibe Medical Medrese — Museum of Seljuk Civilisation
Two courtyards joined by a passage: one a hospital, one a medical school, founded in 1206 by Sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev I in memory of his sister Gevher Nesibe. It is among the earliest teaching hospitals anywhere in the world, treating patients and training physicians side by side at a time when European medicine was still largely monastic. Music therapy rooms were part of the plan. Today the complex houses the Museum of Seljuk Civilisation, with an unusually well-designed set of displays on Seljuk science, astronomy and daily life.
Kayseri Covered Bazaar & Pastırma Han
The sixteenth-century bedesten and the surrounding covered market are still the commercial heart of the city, and the pastırma trade is its speciality — beef cured, pressed, and coated in a thick paste of fenugreek, garlic and paprika, hung in ranks that perfume an entire street. You will also find sucuk sausage, dried apricots, walnut sujuk sweets and a carpet section where bargaining is a spectator sport. Lunch is in the bazaar quarter.
Döner Kümbet & the Tomb Route
The "revolving tomb" does not revolve, but its twelve-sided drum is carved so richly — palmettes, double-headed eagles, a stylised tree of life, lions facing one another — that the eye keeps travelling around it. Built around 1276 for Şah Cihan Hatun, it is the finest of a whole family of Seljuk mausolea scattered through Kayseri, and your guide will link two or three of the others, including the Sırçalı and Ali Cafer kümbets, on a short walking loop.
Güpgüpoğlu Mansion (Ethnography Museum) & Sahabiye Medrese
A fifteenth-to-eighteenth-century merchant family's konak, arranged around a courtyard with a selamlık for men, a haremlik for the family, kitchens, storerooms and a stone-vaulted winter room. Furnished tableaux show Kayseri household life — weddings, births, carpet weaving, coffee ritual. A short walk away, the Sahabiye Medrese of 1267 has a crown portal whose muqarnas hood is worth the detour on its own.
Guide's note: Kayseri's museums close on Mondays in some seasons. If your dates fall awkwardly, we swap the museum interiors for the Kapuzbaşı or Soğanlı valley excursions and keep the street architecture in place — your confirmation will always show the version that actually applies to your departure.
Today is the architectural summit of the tour and it earns an early start. The road runs northeast out of Kayseri through farming country and rising hills to Divriği, a small town in a side valley that happens to contain the most astonishing carved stone in Anatolia — a mosque and hospital complex whose portals have been argued over by architectural historians for a century without anyone quite explaining them. From there the route continues to Sivas, where four thirteenth-century colleges stand within sight of one another in a single city park.
The Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği
Commissioned in 1228–29 by the Mengücek ruler Ahmed Shah and his wife Turan Melek, this joined mosque and hospital is unlike anything else in the Islamic architectural record. Four portals, each carved by a different hand in a different idiom, erupt from otherwise plain stone walls: vast three-dimensional rosettes, palm fronds that seem to grow out of the masonry, interlacing stars, human and animal faces hidden in the foliage, and on the north doorway a pair of shadow profiles that appear at certain hours of certain days. Inside, sixteen columns carry a forest of differently vaulted bays, and the hospital half is a cool, silent, domed space with a carved fountain basin at its centre. No two visitors read it the same way, and your guide will show you the details that photographs consistently miss.
Divriği Castle & the Kale Mosque
The Mengücek fortress sits on the ridge above the mosque, with a small thirteenth-century mosque inside the walls and a full view down the valley of the Çaltı River. It takes twenty minutes and puts the whole extraordinary commission in context: this was a minor principality, not an empire, and it produced that. Lunch follows in Divriği before the road on to Sivas.
Şifaiye Medrese & Çifte Minareli Medrese
Arriving in Sivas you walk straight into the open park where the city's Seljuk colleges face each other. The Şifaiye Medrese of 1217 was a hospital and medical school founded by Sultan İzzeddin Keykâvus I, whose own tiled tomb is set into the south wall — the turquoise and black faience is among the earliest and finest in Anatolia. Directly opposite, the Çifte Minareli Medrese of 1271 has lost its building but kept its façade: two brick minarets, fluted and banded, rising above a deeply carved stone screen that has become the emblem of the city.
Buruciye Medrese & Gök Medrese
The Buruciye of 1271, founded by Muzaffer Burucerdi, keeps its four-iwan courtyard plan almost perfectly and now serves tea under its arcades — the easiest place in Türkiye to sit inside a Seljuk college and simply look at it. Gök Medrese, the "sky-blue college" of 1271, is the most ornate of the four: a towering crown portal, twin minarets in glazed brick, geometric tilework in turquoise, and a row of carved reliefs along the façade. Between them, and the Sivas Ulu Cami of 1197 with its leaning brick minaret, the city presents a century of Seljuk building in a single afternoon.
Sivas Congress Museum
In September 1919, in a high-school building in this city, the delegates of the Sivas Congress resolved that the country would be governed from within and not partitioned — one of the founding moments of the Turkish Republic. The rooms are preserved as they were, with the congress table, Atatürk's quarters and the original telegraph equipment, and for anyone trying to understand modern Türkiye it is a short, clarifying visit.
Logistics: Divriği lies roughly 170 km from Sivas on mountain roads, which is why this day starts early and runs long. Travellers who prefer a gentler pace can split it across two nights, sleeping in Divriği; ask us for the thirteen-day version, which also allows a morning at the Kangal thermal fish springs.
Between Sivas and Erzurum the land buckles. The road climbs through pine ridges and drops into the valley of the Karasu — the western branch of the Euphrates, still young and green here, a long way from the Mesopotamian river it becomes. This is the most scenic driving day of the tour and one of the least visited corners of the country, a place of castle rocks, Mengücek tombs and waterfalls that appear without warning around a bend.
Kemah Castle & the Euphrates Gorge
Kemah is a small town wedged into a gorge where the Euphrates narrows between vertical rock, and its castle occupies the crag directly above — a fortress with Urartian foundations, rebuilt by Romans, Byzantines, Mengüceks and Ottomans in turn, each leaving a layer. The climb is short and the reward is a raw view straight down to green water and across to terraced orchards. Locals will tell you the site was sacred long before any of these walls existed, and the geography makes the claim easy to believe.
Mengücek Gazi Tomb
Below the castle stands the brick-and-stone mausoleum of Mengücek Gazi, the Turkmen commander who founded the dynasty that later commissioned Divriği. The octagonal tomb with its conical roof is modest next to what his descendants achieved, which is exactly why it is worth seeing the day after Divriği — it shows you where that extraordinary building came from. The adjacent Melik Gazi tomb and the old town cemetery complete the group.
Girlevik Waterfall
Fed by karst springs in the Munzur foothills, Girlevik drops over a wide travertine shelf in a series of curtains, roughly thirty metres at its highest, with paths and tea gardens threaded through the spray below. In high summer it is the coolest place in the province; in winter it freezes into columns of ice and attracts climbers. Trout lunch is served at one of the riverside restaurants nearby.
Ergan Mountain & the Erzincan Plain
The road up Ergan gives the classic view over the Erzincan plain — one of the flattest, most fertile basins in eastern Anatolia, ringed entirely by mountains and famously fragile, having been rebuilt after catastrophic earthquakes more than once. The plateau is a ski area in winter and a wildflower meadow in June, and it explains the region's geography better than any map.
Mama Hatun Complex, Tercan
East of Erzincan on the Erzurum road stands one of the most unusual monuments in Anatolia: a circular walled enclosure, entered through a carved portal, with a small domed mausoleum standing free at its centre — the tomb of Mama Hatun, the Saltukid ruler who governed this region in her own right around 1200. Eight niches radiate from the outer wall. The adjoining caravanserai and bathhouse formed a complete staging post on the road east. Nothing else in the country is planned quite like it, and it is almost always empty.
Variation: if your dates fall in June or early July, we can add the Munzur Valley approach above Tercan for high-alpine meadow scenery, or substitute the Kemaliye (Eğin) Dark Canyon road — one of the most dramatic cliff roads in the country — as a full-day alternative to Girlevik.
At 1,900 metres, Erzurum is the highest major city in Türkiye and it feels it — thin bright air, stone buildings built to survive a six-month winter, and a civic character that is famously serious. It was the eastern military and religious capital under the Seljuks, the Ilkhanids and the Ottomans, the anchor of the road to Persia and the Caucasus, and the density of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century monuments within a few hundred metres of one another is remarkable. Today is a walking day in the old centre, finished on the mountain above it.
Çifte Minareli Medrese
The emblem of Erzurum and one of the largest Seljuk medreses ever attempted: a colossal crown portal flanked by two fluted brick minarets in turquoise glaze, opening onto a two-storey courtyard with an arcade on all four sides. The stone carving beside the door includes a double-headed eagle and a tree of life with dragons coiled into the branches — a motif that keeps appearing on this tour and never quite resolves into a single explanation. At the far end stands the Hatuniye Türbesi, a domed twelve-sided mausoleum on a vaulted crypt, thought to be built for the daughter of Sultan Alâeddin Keykubad.
Yakutiye Medrese & the Turkish-Islamic Arts Museum
Built in 1310 under Ilkhanid rule by the governor Cemaleddin Hoca Yakut, this is a covered medrese — a rarity, and a sensible response to the Erzurum climate. Its stubby minaret is sheathed in geometric glazed brick, and the portal carving shows an eagle above a pair of leopards flanking a palm. Inside, the museum displays Erzurum's oltu stone jewellery, Caucasian metalwork, ethnographic costume and Seljuk woodwork, all under the original stone vaults.
Üç Kümbetler & the Ulu Cami
Three conical-roofed mausolea stand together on open ground south of the medreses, the largest attributed to the Saltukid emir Emir Saltuk in the twelfth century, its octagonal drum carved with paired animal heads and blind arcading. A few minutes away, the Ulu Cami of 1179 is the city's oldest working mosque: seven aisles of heavy stone piers, deliberately low and dim, with a remarkable stalactite-vaulted wooden dome over the central bay. Lunch is cağ kebabı, the Erzurum speciality — lamb marinated overnight, roasted on a horizontal spit, and cut to order onto skewers.
Erzurum Castle & the Rüstem Paşa Bedesten
The citadel was raised in the Byzantine period and reworked repeatedly; the tower converted into a clock tower in the nineteenth century still rings over the city, and the ramparts give the best overview of the old street grid against the Palandöken ridge. Below, the sixteenth-century bedesten built by Rüstem Paşa is the centre of the oltu stone trade — a jet-black fossilised lignite found only in this province, carved and polished into prayer beads, rings and cufflinks in workshops you can watch from the aisle.
Palandöken
The ski mountain rises directly from the southern edge of the city, its gondola running up to around 3,100 metres. In winter this is one of Türkiye's premier ski resorts with a season that lasts into April; in summer the gondola still runs for the view, which takes in the whole Erzurum plain and, on clear days, ranges far into the Caucasus foothills.
Winter travellers: from December to March we can extend the Palandöken stop into a full ski half-day with equipment and instruction, and add the Sarıkamış forest and Ottoman-Russian battlefield sites when the route continues to Kars.
This is the day people come east for. Ani stands on a triangular plateau above the Arpaçay gorge, on the line where Türkiye meets Armenia, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries it was the capital of a Bagratid kingdom with a population estimated at a hundred thousand — a rival to Constantinople and Baghdad, sitting on the Silk Road, famous for "a thousand and one churches." Then came invasion, earthquake and a shift in the trade routes, and it simply stopped. What is left is a walled city in an empty grassland, with cathedral, churches, mosque, caravanserai and bathhouse standing in the wind.
The Walls of Ani & the Lion Gate
You enter as everyone did for a thousand years, through the double land walls on the northern side, where round towers and a carved lion relief mark the main gate. The scale registers immediately — the fortifications run for kilometres across the neck of the plateau, and beyond them the ground opens into grass with ruins standing at intervals like anchored ships. Your licensed guide walks the whole circuit with you at your own pace.
Ani Cathedral (Fethiye Mosque)
Completed in 1001 by the architect Trdat — the same man called to Constantinople to repair the dome of Hagia Sophia after an earthquake — the cathedral is the central monument of the site. Its pointed arches and clustered piers are often cited in the long argument about where Gothic architecture actually began, since they predate comparable European work by a century. The dome is gone, so you stand inside a roofless nave with the sky and the birds above it, which is arguably better.
Church of St Gregory (Tigran Honents) & the Menuchehr Mosque
Built in 1215 and set on the terrace above the ravine, the Tigran Honents church keeps the best surviving frescoes at Ani — cycles of the life of St Gregory and the Gospels, in Georgian-influenced style, still holding their red and blue. A short walk along the cliff edge stands the Menuchehr Mosque of the late eleventh century, generally identified as the earliest Seljuk mosque in Anatolia, its minaret and polychrome stone vaults hanging directly over the gorge. From its windows you look across the river into Armenia.
Church of the Redeemer, St Gregory of the Abughamirs & the Silk Road Bridge
The Church of the Redeemer is half a building — sheared vertically by lightning in 1957, leaving a perfect cross-section of eleventh-century construction standing upright. Nearby, the compact rotunda of St Gregory of the Abughamirs survives almost complete, and below in the gorge the broken piers of the Silk Road bridge still mark where caravans crossed into Persia. Lunch follows at a village restaurant near the site entrance, typically Kars goose or a lamb tandır.
Çıldır Lake
The drive north climbs onto open Caucasian grassland to Çıldır, the second largest lake in eastern Anatolia at nearly 1,960 metres, ringed by pasture and volcanic cones and dotted with wooden fishing boats. In winter it freezes hard enough to drive on, and the local Karapapak fishermen cut holes in the ice and haul out nets behind horse-drawn sledges — a genuine working tradition rather than a performance. In summer it is a mirror for a very large sky.
Şeytan Kalesi — the Devil's Castle
Above a gorge on the road back, a ruined fortress is built into a sheer cliff so improbably that local legend assigns its construction to demons rather than to the Urartians and Georgians who actually did it. Walls follow the rock ledges, a stair descends toward the river, and the whole thing hangs above a drop of well over a hundred metres. It is the kind of place that ends a day well.
Practical: Ani sits on an international frontier. Photography is restricted in a few clearly signed directions, drones are not permitted anywhere on site, and there is almost no shade — bring a hat, sunglasses and water in summer, and a windproof layer in any season. The ground is uneven grassland; sturdy shoes matter more here than anywhere else on the tour.
Kars is the strangest-looking city in Türkiye, and the reason is political. Between 1878 and 1918 it belonged to the Russian Empire, and the Tsar's engineers laid out a new town on a grid of broad straight avenues lined with grey basalt mansions in Baltic neoclassical style. Walk two streets and you are in a Bagratid stone church from the 930s; walk two more and you are in a Seljuk bridge and bath complex. It is a city of layers that do not blend, and a slow day here is the right way to read it.
Kars Castle (İç Kale)
Set on a basalt bluff above the Kars River, the citadel was first raised by the Saltukids in the twelfth century, destroyed by Timur, rebuilt by the Ottomans in 1579, and fought over repeatedly in the Russo-Turkish wars — the bullet-scarred walls are genuine. The wall walk gives a clean overview of the Russian grid below, the old Ottoman quarter clinging to the slope, and the treeless steppe running away to the north.
Church of the Apostles (Kümbet Camii)
Below the castle stands a compact domed church built around 930–937 under the Bagratid king Abas, its drum carved with twelve figures representing the apostles in a continuous band — a rare and very direct piece of medieval sculpture. It has served as a church, a mosque, a Russian Orthodox cathedral and a museum at various points, and it is again in use as a mosque today. The building is a complete summary of Kars's history in one structure.
Taş Köprü & the Old Bath Quarter
The stone bridge over the Kars River, in its present form dating from the 1570s on older foundations, links the citadel quarter to the town and is flanked by three Ottoman hamams, one of which still operates. This small area — bridge, baths, mosque, the old Ottoman houses on the slope — is the pre-Russian city, and it makes the contrast with the avenues a few minutes' walk away much sharper.
The Baltic Quarter & Kars Museum
A guided walk along Faikbey and Atatürk avenues takes in the governor's residence, the old Russian consulate, the Cheltikov and merchant houses, and the neoclassical façades whose pediments and pilasters would be unremarkable in Riga and are astonishing here. The city museum, a short drive out, holds Urartian bronzes, Bagratid stonework, ethnographic material from the Karapapak and Terekeme communities, and a section on the railway that brought the Russians and their architecture in the first place. Lunch is Kars goose with bulgur, the local ceremonial dish, or a full Kars breakfast platter.
Boğatepe Village & the Kars Cheese Cellars
Swiss cheesemakers came to this high pasture country in the nineteenth century and left behind a gruyère tradition that has never stopped. At Boğatepe, at around 2,200 metres, a village cooperative runs an ecomuseum and ages wheels of kaşar and gravyer in stone cellars, using milk from cattle grazing meadows with several hundred flowering species. You taste through the range with the producers, and the pasture views on the drive up are worth the road by themselves.
Sarıkamış Forest (seasonal alternative)
For travellers more interested in landscape or modern military history than in cheese, we substitute the Sarıkamış Scots pine forest an hour south — one of the largest in the world, the site of the catastrophic winter campaign of 1914–15, and in season a quiet, deep-snow ski area with none of the crowds of the western resorts.
Guide's note: Kars is the best place on the route for local shopping — oltu stone from Erzurum, honey from the Caucasian pasture, aged gravyer packed for travel, and hand-knotted Karapapak felt. Your guide will keep you away from the tourist-priced shops.
The road south from Kars crosses high, almost empty country and then, somewhere past Iğdır, the horizon changes. Mount Ararat — Ağrı Dağı — does not appear gradually; it is simply there, 5,137 metres of isolated volcano with a permanent icecap, its smaller cone beside it, floating above a plain at a thousand metres. No other mountain in the region carries this much accumulated meaning, and the town beneath it holds one of the most beautiful buildings in Türkiye.
İshak Paşa Palace
Begun in 1685 and completed a century later by the Çıldıroğlu family of Kurdish governors, İshak Paşa Palace sits on a rock shelf five kilometres above the town, facing the Ararat plain across a valley of bare ochre rock. It is a complete princely city under one roof: two courtyards, a ceremonial gate whose carving mixes Seljuk, Ottoman, Georgian and Persian motifs, an audience hall, a mosque with a fluted dome, a harem of dozens of rooms, kitchens, dungeons, a library and a mausoleum. It had underfloor central heating and running water at a time when most European palaces had neither. The light here is extraordinary at either end of the day, and because it is private you can stay as long as it holds.
Eski Beyazıt, the Fortress & Ahmed-i Hani Tomb
On the ridge opposite the palace lie the ruins of old Bayazıt — an Urartian-era fortress, a fourteenth-century mosque, a domed tomb and the shells of houses abandoned when the population moved down to the plain in the 1930s. The white-domed tomb of Ahmed-i Hani, the seventeenth-century Kurdish poet and philosopher whose epic Mem û Zîn remains a foundational work of Kurdish literature, is a place of continuous pilgrimage and the best single viewpoint back to the palace.
Mount Ararat Viewpoints & the Ararat Plain
Your guide runs the classic viewpoint circuit on the plain north of town, choosing the angle by the day's cloud and light: Greater Ararat with its icecap, Little Ararat's clean triangle beside it, and the Iranian border ranges beyond. Shepherd camps, black tents and horse herds still move across this grassland in summer. The mountain generates its own weather, so patience and a guide who knows the road matter — the cloud often lifts in the last hour before sunset.
The Ararat Meteor Crater
Close to the Iranian frontier lies a roughly thirty-five-metre-wide depression, identified as one of the largest meteorite impact craters in the world and second only to Arizona's by some accounts. It is a modest sight in itself, made interesting by the setting — a raw, treeless plain with the border fence in sight and Ararat behind you — and by the improbability of finding it here at all.
The Durupınar Formation & Noah's Ark Visitor Site
A boat-shaped outcrop on a hillside above the Telçeker valley, roughly the length given for the ark in Genesis, has drawn expeditions, believers and geologists since it was noticed from the air in 1959. Mainstream geology reads it as a natural formation of mudflow and rock; a persistent tradition reads it otherwise. Whichever conclusion you reach, the viewing terrace looks across an enormous landscape toward the mountain the story belongs to, and your guide will give you both accounts fairly.
Photographers: if a clear Ararat matters to you, we recommend building in a second night at Doğubayazıt. It doubles your chances with the cloud, allows both a sunrise and a sunset at İshak Paşa, and costs very little to add. Ask for the thirteen-day variant.
The road south follows the Iranian frontier through some of the emptiest and most beautiful country on the tour, then drops toward a sheet of water so large that early travellers mistook it for a sea. Lake Van covers around 3,700 square kilometres, sits at 1,640 metres, has no outlet, and is strongly alkaline — which is why it is that particular hard turquoise and why only one fish species, the local pearl mullet, can live in it. On its eastern shore stands a rock that the kings of Urartu turned into a capital nearly three thousand years ago.
Muradiye Waterfall (Bendimahi)
The Bendimahi River drops over a basalt ledge into a wooded gorge, crossed by a swaying suspension footbridge that puts you directly in the spray. In late spring the snowmelt makes it thunderous; by late summer it is gentler and you can walk the rock shelves below. Tea gardens under the poplars on the far bank are a fixed local institution, and the pearl mullet make their spawning run up this river in May and June — a genuine wildlife spectacle if your dates align.
Çaldıran Plain
A wide, high plain where in August 1514 the Ottoman army of Selim I met the Safavid forces of Shah Ismail in a battle that decided the eastern frontier for centuries and set the political and sectarian map of the region in a shape still visible today. There is little to see but grass, distant volcanic cones and a monument, which is precisely the point — your guide explains the day and the landscape does the rest.
Van Fortress (Tushpa)
A limestone ridge a kilometre long and eighty metres high, rising straight out of flat ground beside the lake, fortified by the Urartian kings from the ninth century BC as their capital Tushpa and used by every power since. Cut into the rock are royal burial chambers with carved doorways, and on the lower face the trilingual inscription of the Persian king Xerxes, still crisp after two and a half thousand years. The climb is stepped and takes about twenty-five minutes at an easy pace; from the top you look down on the lake on one side and the ruins of the old city on the other.
The Old City of Van
Below the rock lies an eerie field of foundations, two ruined mosques and a pair of minarets standing alone in the grass — all that remains of the walled city destroyed in 1915 and never rebuilt, the population having moved five kilometres east to found the modern town. The Ulu Cami's brick minaret and the Hüsrev Paşa complex still stand. It takes half an hour to walk, and few places on this route leave a stronger impression.
Van Museum & the Lakeside at Sunset
The provincial museum holds one of the most important Urartian collections anywhere — bronze belts, helmets, horse fittings, cuneiform tablets and gold jewellery from the royal workshops — alongside Hakkâri stelae and ethnographic material. The day ends on the shore of the lake, where the water turns metallic in late light with the volcanic bulk of Süphan Dağı on the northern horizon.
Guide's note: Van is a genuinely enjoyable city in the evening — a long pedestrian street, good coffee, and a strong café culture. Ask your guide about the Van cat, the white, odd-eyed, swimming breed native to this shore; the university's breeding and research house can be added to tomorrow morning if you would like to see them.
The final full day is the richest single day of the tour: a boat crossing to a tenth-century island church covered in carved storytelling, a Seljuk cemetery of ornamented headstones, an Urartian royal citadel with its temple inscription intact, and a seventeenth-century Kurdish castle that looks like something from a book of fairy tales. All of it around the southern shore of Lake Van, with the water in view for most of the driving.
Church of the Holy Cross, Akdamar Island
A twenty-minute boat crossing over clear alkaline water brings you to a small almond-planted island and one of the masterpieces of medieval architecture. Built between 915 and 921 by the architect-monk Manuel for King Gagik I of Vaspurakan, the Church of the Holy Cross is entirely sheathed on the outside in carved relief: Adam and Eve, David facing Goliath, Jonah going over the side of his ship and emerging from the fish, Daniel among the lions, vine scrolls populated with hunters, bears, gazelles and a camel, and a frieze of running animals around the whole building. Inside, faded frescoes cover the walls of the cross-in-square plan. The setting — lake, mountains, almond blossom in April — is as much of the experience as the building.
Gevaş Seljuk Cemetery & the Halime Hatun Tomb
On the mainland opposite the island jetty stands a field of fifteenth-century headstones carved in deep relief with rosettes, geometric interlace and inscriptions, and at its centre the twelve-sided Halime Hatun Kümbet of 1358, built for the daughter of a Karakoyunlu ruler. The stonework here is a direct descendant of what you saw at Kayseri and Erzurum earlier in the tour, two hundred years later and several hundred kilometres further east — a good moment for your guide to draw the thread together.
Çavuştepe (Sardurihinili) Urartian Citadel
A long ridge fortified in the eighth century BC by King Sarduri II as a royal centre, with an upper and a lower citadel, a palace, storerooms still holding their enormous sunken jars, a cistern, and — the highlight — the temple of the god Haldi, whose polished black basalt blocks are cut and joined with a precision that looks machine-made and carry a crisp cuneiform dedication. Little else in Anatolia gives such a direct sense of Urartian engineering.
Hoşap Castle (Güzelsu)
Built in 1643 by the Mahmudi Kurdish lord Sarı Süleyman Bey on a rock above the Hoşap stream, this is the most theatrical castle in the country — a round entrance tower with a carved inscription and two lion reliefs, a tunnel gate, and a curtain of walls and turrets following the crest of the rock. Inside were a palace, a mosque, a bath, a dungeon and storerooms for a garrison. The mud-brick outer wall snaking across the hillside below, with its regular towers, is still largely traceable.
Van Cat Research & Breeding House
On the way back into the city, the university's research house keeps and studies the Van cat — a pure-white, semi-longhaired breed native to this basin, famous for its odd-coloured eyes and for a willingness to swim that almost no other cat shares. It is a short, cheerful visit and an unexpectedly memorable one, particularly with children in the party.
Farewell dinner: tonight we reserve a private table for your farewell meal — traditionally Van's lake fish or a slow-cooked keledoş, with live local music arranged on request. Tell us in advance if you are marking an anniversary, birthday or graduation and we will organise the rest.
The tour closes where it began, but on the other shore. A morning flight of around two hours returns you to Istanbul with the afternoon free for the imperial centre — the part of the city the first day deliberately left out. It is the right ending: after twelve days of Urartian rock, Seljuk stone and frontier grass, the domes of Sultanahmet read completely differently than they would have on day one.
Kahvaltı Sokağı — Van Breakfast Street
Van's breakfast is a regional institution and arguably the best meal in eastern Türkiye: otlu peynir, the herb-studded cheese matured in sheepskin; kaymak with honeycomb; murtuğa and kavut, the local skillet dishes; olives, tomatoes, sucuk, eggs, fresh bread and endless tea, spread across twenty-odd small plates. Breakfast Street is a whole pedestrian lane devoted to it, and no visitor should fly out without sitting down to one.
Van (VAN) → Istanbul Flight
Private transfer to Ferit Melen Airport, assisted check-in and baggage handling, and the flight west across the whole length of the country you have just crossed by road. Your Istanbul driver meets you landside on arrival.
Hagia Sophia
Justinian's cathedral of 537, for nearly a thousand years the largest enclosed space in the world, later an imperial mosque and now again in use for prayer. The dome floats on a ring of forty windows in a way that sixth-century engineering should not have managed; the marble revetments are cut and matched like open books; the surviving gold mosaics in the gallery and above the imperial door are among the finest Byzantine work anywhere. After Ani's cathedral on day seven, the comparison writes itself.
The Blue Mosque & the Hippodrome
Sultan Ahmed I's mosque of 1616 faces Hagia Sophia across a garden — six minarets, a cascade of half-domes, and an interior lined with more than twenty thousand İznik tiles in the blues that gave it its English name. The square between the two monuments is the old Byzantine Hippodrome, chariot-racing arena and political heart of Constantinople, still marked by the Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III, the bronze Serpent Column brought from Delphi, and the German Fountain.
The Spice Bazaar & Eminönü Waterfront
The seventeenth-century Egyptian Bazaar, built to fund the Yeni Cami beside it, remains the best place in the city for saffron, sumac, pistachio baklava, Turkish delight, dried fruit and tea — and the lanes outside it, full of coffee grinders and cheese merchants, are better still. A last glass of tea on the Golden Horn before the airport, with the ferries crossing in front of you.
Private Airport Transfer & Departure
Private transfer to Istanbul Airport (IST) or Sabiha Gökçen (SAW) in good time for your international flight, with assistance to the check-in desk. Travellers staying on in Istanbul are transferred to their hotel instead, and we are happy to plan the extra days.
Late flights: if you depart after 21:00 we add the Basilica Cistern or a Bosphorus sunset cruise to the afternoon at no extra cost. If you depart in the morning of Day 12 instead, we move the Van flight to the previous evening and close the tour in Istanbul the night before — just send us your ticket.
Nine Provinces, One Continuous Story
A short orientation to every city and region this twelve-day package tour passes through — what each one was, what survives, and why it earns its place in the sequence.
Istanbul
The only city on two continents, capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires in turn, and still the commercial and cultural centre of Türkiye. This tour uses both halves deliberately: the residential Asian shore at the beginning, when you need the city at walking pace, and the imperial peninsula at the end, when twelve days of Anatolian history have given you the context to read it properly.
As a travel agency headquartered here, we handle Istanbul arrivals, VIP airport service, hotel selection and extra days at either end of any package.
Kayseri
Mazaca to the Hittites, Caesarea to Rome, and a Seljuk capital in everything but title. Kayseri sits on a volcanic plain beneath Mount Erciyes and has been a trading city for four millennia — a continuity you can actually trace, from the cuneiform archives of Kültepe to the pastırma counters of the covered bazaar this afternoon.
The city's black basalt monuments — citadel, Hunat Hatun complex, Gevher Nesibe hospital, the carved kümbets — form the densest Seljuk urban ensemble in central Anatolia, and the countryside adds Sinan's birthplace at Ağırnas and the merchant mansions of Talas.
Sivas & Divriği
Sivas was Sebasteia to the Romans and a Seljuk and Ilkhanid administrative capital, and it kept an extraordinary concentration of thirteenth-century colleges: Gök, Şifaiye, Çifte Minareli and Buruciye, all within one open square. In 1919 the same city hosted the congress that shaped the Turkish Republic.
Divriği, in a side valley to the east, holds the Great Mosque and Hospital of 1228 — stone carving of a richness and strangeness that has no parallel in Islamic architecture, and reason enough on its own to travel this road.
Erzincan & Kemah
A broad fertile plain enclosed by mountains, on the upper Euphrates, historically the crossing point between central Anatolia and the eastern highlands. Kemah's castle rock and Mengücek tombs, Girlevik's travertine waterfall and the Mama Hatun complex at Tercan make this the quietest and most purely scenic day of the tour.
Very few international visitors stop here, which is exactly the argument for doing so.
Erzurum
The highland capital at 1,900 metres, gateway to the Caucasus and Persia, fortified and endowed by Saltukids, Seljuks, Ilkhanids and Ottomans. Its Çifte Minareli and Yakutiye medreses, the Üç Kümbetler tombs and the twelfth-century Ulu Cami sit within a few minutes' walk of one another in the old centre.
Erzurum is also Türkiye's winter sports capital at Palandöken, the home of cağ kebabı, and the source of oltu stone, the black fossil lignite carved into jewellery nowhere else on earth.
Kars & Ani
Ani was the Bagratid Armenian capital, a Silk Road city of a hundred thousand people renowned for its churches, abandoned after invasion and earthquake and left standing empty on the frontier plateau. It is the single most affecting archaeological site in Türkiye.
Kars itself is unlike any other Turkish city: forty years of Russian imperial rule left broad avenues of grey basalt neoclassical mansions overlaying a Bagratid church, a Seljuk bridge and an Ottoman citadel. Add Çıldır Lake, the Devil's Castle and the gruyère cellars of Boğatepe, and two nights are the minimum this region deserves.
Doğubayazıt & Mount Ararat
Türkiye's highest mountain at 5,137 metres, permanently capped with ice, standing alone above a plain where Türkiye, Armenia and Iran meet. Beneath it, İshak Paşa Palace — an eighteenth-century Kurdish governor's residence combining Seljuk, Ottoman, Georgian and Persian design into one of the most beautiful buildings in the country.
The surrounding plain adds the Durupınar formation, the meteor crater, the ruins of old Bayazıt and the tomb of the poet Ahmed-i Hani.
Van & Lake Van
The largest lake in Türkiye, alkaline, outlet-free and an improbable turquoise, ringed by volcanoes. On its eastern shore the Urartian kings cut their capital Tushpa into a limestone ridge in the ninth century BC and left royal tombs and cuneiform annals in the rock.
Around the basin: the Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island, the Urartian citadel of Çavuştepe, the Kurdish fortress of Hoşap, the Seljuk cemetery at Gevaş, the odd-eyed Van cat, and a breakfast culture serious enough to have its own street.
What Is Included and What Is Not
Services Included
- 11 nights' accommodation in carefully selected 4★ and 5★ hotels, named in writing before payment
- Daily breakfast at all hotels, plus 10 lunches as shown in the itinerary
- Farewell dinner in Van on Day 11
- Domestic flights Istanbul → Kayseri (Day 2) and Van → Istanbul (Day 12), including checked baggage
- All airport, hotel and intercity transfers in private air-conditioned vehicles
- Private vehicle and professional driver throughout the whole route
- Ministry-licensed professional English-speaking guides in every region
- All museum and archaeological site entrance fees listed in the itinerary
- Private boat transfer to Akdamar Island on Day 11
- Cheese-cellar tasting at Boğatepe and the Kadıköy market food walk
- Bottled water and refreshments in the vehicle every day
- 24/7 assistance from a named coordinator in our Istanbul office
- All local taxes, service charges and TÜRSAB-mandated operator liability insurance
Services Excluded
- International flights to and from Türkiye
- Turkish visa or e-visa fees, where your nationality requires one
- Personal travel, health and cancellation insurance (strongly recommended)
- Dinners other than the Day 11 farewell meal
- Alcoholic drinks and beverages outside the included meals
- Optional excursions: hot-air balloon flights, ski passes, Palandöken equipment hire
- Gratuities for guides and drivers (entirely at your discretion)
- Personal expenses, laundry, minibar and telephone charges
- Single-room supplement, where a private room is requested
- Photography and drone permits where separately chargeable (drones are not permitted at Ani)
- Anything not expressly listed in the included column
Transparent Private Tour Pricing
Prices are per person in euros, for the complete twelve-day private package including internal flights, hotels, guiding, transport, entrances and the meals listed above. Because the tour is private, the per-person rate falls as your party grows.
| Party Size | Per Adult (Private) | Per Child (4–11) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 traveller (solo private)Includes single room throughout | €5,290 | — |
| 2 travellers sharingStandard published rate | €3,690 | €2,590 |
| 3–4 travellersPrivate minivan | €3,190 | €2,290 |
| 5–8 travellersPrivate minibus | €2,790 | €1,990 |
| 9–16 travellersGroup rate · midi-coach | €2,390 | €1,690 |
| Single room supplementFor the full 11 nights | €790 | — |
| VIP / Protocol upgrade5★ throughout, CIP handling, escort vehicles | On request | — |
What affects the final quotation: travel season, hotel category, the language of your guide, and airline pricing on your specific dates. High season runs mid-June to mid-September and over the religious holidays. Children aged three and under travel free when sharing with parents. Groups above sixteen, school parties, corporate incentives and official delegations are quoted individually — send your dates and we return a firm written price, usually the same working day.
The Best Season for Eastern Anatolia
This route runs across a high plateau where altitude, not latitude, sets the weather. Erzurum sits at 1,900 metres and Çıldır approaches 2,000; nights are cool even in July, and winter is genuinely severe. Here is how each season actually behaves on this itinerary.
Practical Advice from Our Guides
Pack in Layers, Always
Whatever the season, the plateau can swing fifteen degrees between afternoon and evening. A warm mid-layer and a windproof shell earn their place in June as much as in October. Add a hat and high-factor sunscreen — the sun at 1,900 metres is stronger than it feels.
Footwear Decides Your Comfort
Ani, Van Fortress, Çavuştepe, Hoşap and Kars Castle all involve uneven stone, loose grass and stairs without handrails. Closed walking shoes with grip make the difference between enjoying these sites and enduring them.
Dress for Working Mosques
Several buildings on this route are active places of worship. Shoulders and knees covered for everyone, and a scarf for women to cover the hair inside mosques. Keep a light scarf in your day bag; your guide will also carry spares.
Photography Rules Vary
Ani sits on a frontier — a few directions are signed as no-photography and drones are prohibited across the whole site. Some museums charge a small camera fee or restrict flash. Ask your guide at each stop rather than assuming; they will know the current rule.
Carry Some Cash
Cards work in cities, but village tea houses, roadside producers, the Boğatepe cooperative and small-site parking do not always take them. A few hundred lira in small notes covers tips, tea, and the things you will want to buy directly from the people who made them.
Altitude and Hydration
Nobody gets altitude sickness at 1,900 metres, but dry highland air dehydrates faster than you expect and can leave you tired by mid-afternoon. Water is in the vehicle every day — use it, and go gently on the first evening in Erzurum.
Connectivity and Power
4G is good in all the cities on this route and patchy between them; download your maps and playlists before long transfers. Türkiye uses 220V with European two-pin sockets, and the vehicle carries USB charging throughout.
A Few Words Go a Long Way
Merhaba (hello), teşekkür ederim (thank you) and afiyet olsun (enjoy your meal) will be met with real warmth in the east, where foreign visitors are still uncommon enough to be genuinely welcomed. Expect to be offered tea; accepting is the polite answer.
AI Recommendations for This Itinerary
Patterns drawn from how travellers actually book and rate this route — what to add, what to change, and who each variation suits best.
If you have two extra days
The highest-value additions are a second night in Doğubayazıt, which roughly doubles your chances of a cloud-free Mount Ararat and gives you both sunrise and sunset at İshak Paşa, and a Cappadocia extension after Kayseri on Day 3, which slots in without disturbing anything that follows. Travellers who choose the Ararat night consistently rate the trip higher afterwards; travellers who add Cappadocia get the more famous photographs.
For first-time visitors to Türkiye
Add three days in Istanbul at the start rather than the end. Seeing Sultanahmet, Topkapı and the Bosphorus first gives you the Ottoman baseline that makes the Seljuk and Urartian material further east far more legible.
For photographers
Travel in the last ten days of September. Low sun, clear plateau air, harvest colour, and far fewer people at Ani. Ask us to shift the daily timings earlier so that Ani, İshak Paşa and Akdamar each fall inside golden hour.
For families with children
Trim Day 4 — Divriği is a long drive for young children — and lean into the castles, the Van cats, the Çıldır boats and the Muradiye footbridge. We can restructure the route with a second night in Kayseri and shorter driving legs throughout.
For corporate and incentive groups
Compress to eight days by flying Istanbul–Erzurum and cutting the Kayseri and Erzincan legs, keeping Ani, Kars, Ararat and Van. That version fits a working week, still delivers the headline sites, and leaves room for a gala dinner and a meeting day in Istanbul.
For official and diplomatic parties
Run the route in reverse from Van, which puts the formal Istanbul programme at the end when the delegation is settled and the schedule is firm. We handle provincial governorate notifications, escort arrangements and CIP handling at each domestic sector.
For faith and heritage travellers
Extend south from Van to Şanlıurfa, Göbekli Tepe, Harran and Nemrut Dağı for a fuller reading of Anatolia's religious history, or link this tour to our Seven Churches of Revelation route on the Aegean at either end.
Your Questions, Answered Properly
Every departure is private by default. You travel with your own licensed guide, your own driver and your own vehicle, and nobody outside your party joins the itinerary. Small scheduled group departures are arranged on request for clubs, schools and corporate parties of ten or more, at a lower per-person rate.
Eastern Anatolia is a large region and four of the twelve days include a long transfer. The heaviest are Kayseri to Sivas by way of Divriği, Erzincan to Erzurum, and Doğubayazıt to Van, each roughly four to six hours of driving broken by sightseeing stops. The remaining days are city days with short hops. Vehicles are high-specification minivans or sedans with reclining seats, and stops are timed so no leg runs longer than about ninety minutes without a break.
Yes. The Istanbul to Kayseri flight on Day 2 and the Van to Istanbul flight on Day 12 are both included, with checked baggage. If your international arrival and departure airports differ, tell us at the inquiry stage and the domestic sectors are rebuilt around your schedule at no extra handling charge.
Late May to early October is the reliable window. June and September give long daylight, clear views of Mount Ararat and comfortable temperatures on the high plateau. July and August are warm by day and cool at night. Winter travel is possible and spectacular around Kars and Sarıkamış, but Ani and the Ararat approaches can be snowbound and some mountain sections close at short notice, so we rebuild the routing for winter departures.
Yes. The History Travel Agency is a TÜRSAB-licensed operator that regularly serves embassies, consulates, foreign missions, ministries, parliamentary delegations and corporate boards. For official parties we arrange protocol vehicles with escort where authorised, airport VIP and CIP lounge handling, meeting and reception rooms, interpreter support, advance site liaison at every museum and archaeological area on the route, and a single accountable coordinator who travels with the delegation.
English is standard and included. Spanish, Arabic, French, German, Russian, Italian and Japanese guides are available on request, subject to availability in the eastern provinces, where the licensed pool is smaller than in Istanbul. Booking a non-English language at least four weeks ahead is strongly advised.
Ani is open to visitors year-round during posted hours and no special permit is needed for ordinary tourism. It sits directly on the frontier, so photography is restricted in a few clearly signed directions and your guide will point these out. Heavy snow can shorten opening hours in midwinter. Drone flying is not permitted anywhere on the site.
Four-star and, where they exist, five-star properties are used in Istanbul, Kayseri, Erzurum, Kars and Van. In Erzincan and Doğubayazıt the best available local hotels are comfortable four-star or good three-star houses, since the choice in those towns is genuinely limited. We name every hotel in your written confirmation before you pay, and boutique or luxury upgrades are quoted on request.
Yes. Vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher-style and allergen-aware menus are arranged at every meal with notice. Several sites on this route involve uneven ground and stairs, notably Ani, Van Fortress, Hoşap and Kars Castle; we can substitute gentler alternatives, provide additional assistance and select step-free hotel rooms. Children are welcome and child rates apply from age four to eleven.
Send an inquiry or reservation request through the form on this page, or message us on WhatsApp. We confirm availability, hotels and flight times in writing, usually within a few hours. A deposit of twenty-five per cent secures the dates and the balance is due fourteen days before arrival. Payment is accepted by credit card, bank transfer or PayPal, and corporate and government clients can be invoiced against a purchase order.
Cancellations more than thirty days before departure are refunded in full apart from any non-refundable airline tickets already issued. Between thirty and fifteen days the deposit is retained. Within fourteen days the tour is non-refundable, although we will always try to move your dates instead where hotels and flights allow.
Entirely. The route is modular. Common variations include adding Nemrut Dağı and Şanlıurfa in the southeast, extending Istanbul at either end, adding Cappadocia between Kayseri and Sivas, running the itinerary in reverse from Van, or compressing it to eight or nine days by combining the Kayseri and Kars city days. Tell us your dates and interests and we return a revised day-by-day plan and price.
Book Your 12 Days Eastern Turkey Private Tour
- 2 internal flights included (IST–ASR, VAN–IST)
- Licensed English-speaking guides in every region
- 11 nights in 4★ / 5★ hotels, named before payment
- Daily breakfast, 10 lunches & farewell dinner
- All museum & site entrance fees
- Private vehicle, driver & all transfers throughout
- Secure payment · card, transfer or PayPal
- Free cancellation up to 30 days before departure
0090 536 560 10 38
Not ready to reserve, or want the itinerary adjusted first? Send us your dates and questions and a consultant will reply within a few hours with a firm written quotation.
Choose private or group, select your travellers, and provide your details. We confirm availability, hotels and flight times in writing within a few hours — no payment is taken at this stage.
Cancellation Policy
Free cancellation up to 30 days before departure, less any non-refundable airline tickets already issued. Between 30 and 15 days the 25% deposit is retained. Within 14 days the tour is non-refundable, though we will always try to move your dates where hotels and flights allow.
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