Turkey Audio Walking Tour

Cappadocia — Derinkuyu, the Deep City

You're about to descend into the largest underground city ever discovered.

Cappadocia — Breathing Underground, the Ventilation Problem

The air you just inhaled traveled through a ventilation system designed over a thousand years ago. Without it, you would suffocate within hours.

Cappadocia — The Rolling Stone Doors, defense From the Inside

Stand in front of the door. It is a cylinder of stone, between one and one and a half meters across and thirty to thirty-five centimeters thick, according to the 2024 cultural geography survey of Nevşehir's underground cities. The Bixio, Calio, and De Pascale symposium paper records related millstone doors across Cappadocia at one hundred to one hundred sixty centimeters in diameter and twenty to thirty centimeters thick. The Turkish term for the form is tığraz.

Cappadocia — Kaymaklı, the Wider City and the Tunnel Between

Derinkuyu is the deep one. Kaymaklı is the broad one. They sit about ten kilometers apart in the same volcanic plateau, and they are the two most visited underground cities in Cappadocia, but they were built on different logics. Derinkuyu drives straight down, narrow and vertical, eighteen levels of it. Kaymaklı spreads outward, low and wide, with rooms larger and ceilings higher, organized around a system of broad sloping passages rather than a single deep stair.

Catalhoyuk — Çatalhöyük, the Town With No Streets

You are looking at a low double mound in the Konya plain, wheat on every side, and it does not look like the beginning of anything. But around 7400 BCE, as many as several thousand people lived here, in one of the largest settlements humanity had yet built. This quiet hill is one of the main reasons we still argue about how civilization began.

Catalhoyuk — The Wall That May Be the Oldest Map

In 1963, James Mellaart uncovered a wall painting at Çatalhöyük that has been argued over ever since. It is a band of small rectangles, packed together, stacked and offset, and above them a shape with two peaks, dotted all over and trailing what look like sparks or falling debris. Mellaart read it immediately and confidently. The rectangles, he said, were the houses of Çatalhöyük itself, seen from above, a plan of the very town you are standing in. The twin-peaked shape was Hasan Dağ, the volcano you can see on a clear day to the northeast, shown in eruption. If he was right, this is the oldest known map and the oldest known landscape painting in the world, made around 6600 BCE.

Catalhoyuk — The Dead Beneath the Floor

At Çatalhöyük, the dead did not leave the house. There was no cemetery, no separate ground for the buried. Instead, under the raised platforms where the living slept and worked, archaeologists keep finding graves. Bodies were placed in pits cut into the floor of the home, then plastered over, and life went on above them. Some houses hold a handful of burials. A few hold dozens. You slept, every night, on a floor that was also a tomb.

Catalhoyuk — The Experimental House, and Why Çatalhöyük Breaks the Story

Near the shelters that cover the excavation trenches stands a full-size house, rebuilt from scratch. The Çatalhöyük team raised it as an experiment, using the materials and methods the evidence points to: mudbrick walls, timber posts, a flat roof, an entry hole in the ceiling with a ladder reaching down, a hearth and oven against one wall, raised platforms around the edges. Climb the ladder and drop in through the roof, the way every resident did for fifteen hundred years, and the strangeness of this town becomes physical. There is no front door. There is no street outside to have a door onto.

Ephesus — The Library of Celsus, knowledge, Death, and a Secret Tunnel to the Brothel

The midday sun off the marble at the end of Curetes Street is the kind of light that turns stone to bone. You stand where Marble Road meets the Tetragonos Agora and the facade of the Library of Celsus is in front of you, two tiers of columns, four statues set in their niches, the heat coming off the pavement in a slow shimmer. Gaius Iulius Aquila built this in the early second century AD for his father, Tiberius Iulius Celsus Polemaeanus, Roman senator and former proconsul of Asia around 105 to 107 CE.

The Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Turkey

Ephesus — The Temple of Artemis, the Wonder That Became a Single Column

One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stands about two kilometers from the main Ephesus ruins. It's a single reconstructed column rising from a marshy field, with a stork's nest on top.

The Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, Turkey

Ephesus — The Terrace Houses, how the Roman One Percent Actually Lived

Forget the temples. Forget the theaters. If you want to understand what life in the ancient world actually felt like, walk through the terrace houses.

The Terrace Houses, Ephesus, Turkey

Ephesus — The Great Theater, where a Riot Almost Killed Christianity

Twenty-five thousand people were screaming the same words for two hours straight. "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" Over and over. The sound filling this massive bowl of stone, echoing off the hillside, drowning out everything else.

The Great Theater, Ephesus, Turkey

Istanbul — Hagia Sophia, the Faces Behind the Plaster

Stand in the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia, away from the crowds beneath the dome, and find the panel they call the Deesis. Christ in the center, the Virgin and John the Baptist turned toward him, their faces worked in glass and gold so fine the skin looks lit from inside. It is one of the greatest mosaics in the world. For almost five hundred years, no one could see it. It had been buried under plaster, on a wall in plain sight.

Troy — Hisarlık, the Mound That Holds Nine Cities

Stand on the mound at Hisarlık in the early morning, when the wind off the Dardanelles is still cold and the Aegean light is flat. Below you the strait glitters, the same water a thousand ships were said to cross. In front of you is a gash in the earth forty feet deep, cut by a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann in 1871. He was not looking for a city. He was looking for a poem.