A personal journey through the ancient roads, hidden valleys, and forgotten villages of Anatolia — curated by Osman Ferit Aydoğan.
A note on this project
osmanferitaydogan is a completely independent, non-commercial travel guide built on one simple idea: that Turkey's most rewarding journeys happen far from the tourist trail. Every itinerary here — from the olive-grove backroads of the Aegean coast to the ancient caravanserai routes of Eastern Anatolia — has been personally researched, road-tested, and written without any commercial interest whatsoever.
There are no advertisements here. No paid placements. No affiliate links. No sponsored content. Just honest, hand-crafted route guides shaped by a genuine love for this country and a belief that slow, curious travel is the only kind worth doing.
12–16 daysFollow ancient footpaths where limestone cliffs tumble into turquoise coves along Turkey's most legendary long-distance trail.
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10–14 daysTraverse volcanic plateaus, Kurdish market towns, and glacier-fed lakes in Turkey's most remote and rewarding highland region.
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8–11 daysWander between caravanserais and cave churches across the sun-bleached steppes where ancient trade routes shaped civilisations.
Read the guideAll routes are free, independently researched, and updated annually by osmanferitaydogan — no sponsored recommendations.
Southeastern Anatolia
Perched on a dramatic limestone ridge above the vast flatlands of upper Mesopotamia, Mardin is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth — a place where the air carries the scent of history and the stones themselves seem to breathe. Its honey-coloured terraced houses and elaborate Artuqid-era mosques cascade down the hillside in a spectacle that has moved travellers, poets, and pilgrims for centuries.
Positioned at the crossroads of ancient trade and faith, Mardin has absorbed Assyrian, Armenian, Arab, Kurdish, and Ottoman influences into a singular, syncretic culture unlike anything else in Turkey. The city's Syriac Orthodox monasteries — among them Mor Gabriel, founded in 397 AD — remain living places of worship, offering a rare encounter with one of Christianity's oldest surviving communities.
To walk Mardin's bazaars is to move through overlapping centuries: the smell of freshly ground isot pepper mingling with the hammering of coppersmiths, the call to prayer echoing off walls etched with intricate arabesque stonework. For the unhurried traveller willing to step off the familiar path, Mardin rewards with a depth of experience that few places in the Mediterranean world can still offer.
Altitude
1,082 m
Province
Mardin, Turkey
Settled
c. 4500 BC
View over the Mesopotamian plains from Mardin's old quarter, southeastern Turkey.
Osman Ferit Aydoğan
Independent Traveller & Writer
Based in Ankara, Turkey
I am Osman Ferit Aydoğan — a traveller, amateur historian, and reluctant writer based in Ankara. For over a decade I have been driving, hiking, and occasionally hitchhiking across Turkey's lesser-known corners: unmarked mountain passes in the Kaçkars, abandoned caravanserais on the old Silk Road, forgotten Byzantine chapels half-swallowed by fig trees in the Aegean hinterland.
This site began as a personal notebook — a place to record routes before memory softened the details. It grew, slowly, into something I hope is useful for others who feel the same pull toward roads that do not appear on highlight reels.
My approach to travel is unhurried and guest-like. I believe the places we pass through deserve our curiosity and our restraint in equal measure. That means staying longer, spending locally, learning a handful of words in whatever dialect is spoken, and understanding that the best view is often the one from a çay garden shared with a stranger who becomes, for an afternoon, a friend.
Every route documented here is one I have travelled personally, on my own time and at my own expense. There are no sponsored itineraries, no affiliate recommendations — only what I genuinely found worth the detour.
"Turkey is not a single landscape or a single story. It is forty landscapes arguing warmly with one another — and I have not tired of listening."
Dispatches written in the field — mountain passes, valley walks, and the quiet roads that don't appear in guidebooks.
When the first snowfall seals the high passes of the Taurus, most travellers turn back — but that is precisely when the range reveals its most austere and magnificent self. We traced the D695 from Mut toward Alanya in late December, navigating hairpin bends glazed with ice and stopping at shepherd villages where smoke curled from chimneys into a steel-grey sky.
The Phrygian Valley stretches across a plateau between Afyonkarahisar and Eskişehir, carved by wind and time into a landscape of tuffaceous rock formations that the ancient Phrygians shaped into temples, tombs, and open-air sanctuaries nearly three thousand years ago. To walk it over three days is to move through deep time with very little company.
The Kaçkar Mountains form the northeastern spine of Anatolia — a range so abrupt and rain-soaked that their northern flanks support genuine temperate rainforest, while their southern slopes drop into the dry valleys of the upper Çoruh. Driving the circuit that connects Rize, Artvin, and Yusufeli in summer is an exercise in extreme topography and extraordinary hospitality.
While Göreme and Ürgüp attract the majority of visitors to Cappadocia, the eastern margin of the region — around Soğanlı, Güzelyurt, and the Ihlara Valley's less-visited upper reaches — preserves a slower, older quality of the landscape that the rock-cut churches and caravanserais of the old Silk Road routes still haunt. This is a drive best taken without a fixed itinerary.
Discover Turkey through roads less travelled — independent guides crafted from lived experience across Anatolia's most compelling landscapes.
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