Mountain ranges of Turkey
Mountain Ranges: 49 places from 38 provinces of Turkey. Each has a model-like miniature, a short story and a Numa Made ring on the Isometric Turkey map.
Kaçkar Mountains
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” John Muir said these words of America’s distant ranges; yet you need not cross an ocean to hear this call. Anyone standing at the foot of the…
See on the map →Uludağ
How many names is a mountain called by in its lifetime? If we put this question to Uludağ, I suspect it would have to think for quite a while before answering… In antiquity the Mysians…
See on the map →Mount Nemrut
In his poem ‘Ozymandias’, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes a statue’s head in the middle of the desert, broken from its body, its face buried in the sand. On the pedestal these words appear…
See on the map →Kartepe
How many kilometers from a city does the snow begin? On a winter’s day when a fine rain drizzles over İzmit or the shore of Sapanca, raise your eyes to Kartepe and you will see the answer…
See on the map →Kazdağı
Who, do you suppose, judged history’s first beauty contest? According to mythology, this difficult task fell to a young shepherd tending his flocks on the slopes of Kazdağı, known in…
See on the map →Dupnisa Cave & Istranca
How many floors can there be inside a mountain? Dupnisa Cave, opening on the forested slopes of the Istranca Mountains near the village of Sarpdere, offers an intriguing answer: three… Made…
See on the map →Mount Ganos & Uçmakdere
In Old Turkish, the word “uçmak” meant paradise; when someone died, people said they had “reached uçmak”. So why is the village on the slope where Mount Ganos plunges steeply into the sea…
See on the map →Bozdağ & Gölcük
Have you ever heard of a mountain serving as a judge? As Ovid tells it in the ‘Metamorphoses’, goat-footed Pan one day challenges Apollo’s lyre with his reed pipe, and the god of Mount…
See on the map →Mount Honaz
Even when spring comes and the plain warms up, if you lift your eyes from the streets of Denizli you will see a peak above the city that still hasn’t shaken off its snow. Say “Aegean” and…
See on the map →Mount Spil
In the last book of the Iliad, Homer has Achilles tell a mother’s story to old Priam, who has come to ask for the body of his son Hector. A mother who lost all her children, yet still had…
See on the map →Mount Murat
Ancient writers tell us that the river Hermos springs from a sacred mountain dedicated to the Mother Goddess. The Hermos is the river we now call the Gediz; and many scholars identify that…
See on the map →Akdağ (Sandıklı)
Afyonkarahisar · Mountain Ranges
In Gilgamesh, one of humanity’s oldest known epics, two heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, set out on a long journey toward the Cedar Forest, guarded by the gods. The forest is so sacred that…
See on the map →Sultan Mountains
Afyonkarahisar · Mountain Ranges
Why would a mountain be called “sultan”? Perhaps because a sultan’s road once passed that way, or perhaps because it looks down on the plains at its feet like a ruler… We don’t know the…
See on the map →Saklıkent & Bakırlıtepe
Kant wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within…
See on the map →Kızlarsivrisi
Asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory gave the shortest and most famous answer in the history of mountaineering: “Because it’s there.” If there were a summit over three…
See on the map →Mount Davraz
Stand on the shore of Lake Eğirdir in winter and turn your gaze to the mountains; just beyond the blue of the lake rises a giant ridge wrapped in white… How does a lake manage to stay so…
See on the map →Mount Dedegöl
In the words of Sir Edmund Hillary: “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” So what can a mountain that stops just two meters short of three thousand teach us?
See on the map →Belen Pass
Can a mountain lead a whole army astray? In the autumn of 333 BC, Alexander the Great was marching with his army toward the Syrian Gates south of the Amanos Mountains, today’s Belen Pass…
See on the map →Mount Ahır
Kahramanmaraş · Mountain Ranges
Do you know of anywhere else where ice cream is cut with a knife and eaten with a fork? In Kahramanmaraş, it is a perfectly ordinary sight. The distinctive, stretchy, almost chewy texture…
See on the map →Mount Berit
Kahramanmaraş · Mountain Ranges
What does it feel like to gaze at the sky in the mirror of a lake at three thousand meters, with not a single tree around you? And where did these lakes on the mountaintops come from? The…
See on the map →Göksun & Binboğa Mountains
Kahramanmaraş · Mountain Ranges
In ‘The Legend of the Thousand Bulls’, Yaşar Kemal tells the story of a Turkmen clan that has migrated between these mountains and the plains for centuries, until one day it can no longer…
See on the map →Elmadağ
Anyone who knows Ankara’s winters knows this: the frost cuts to the bone, and when the snow falls the steppe sinks into a white silence. But have you ever wondered why the mountain rising…
See on the map →Aladağlar & Demirkazık
In the middle of the sky, while all the stars wheel around and around, there is a single star that never moves from its place; today we call it the Pole Star. But have you ever wondered…
See on the map →Aladağlar Yedigöller
“With the mountains, with the stones, / Let me call out to You, my Lord,” says Yunus Emre. But which mountains hear that voice best? If you ask me, the places where a person’s voice strikes…
See on the map →Bolkar Mountains
“A fine, fine snow is falling, / Drifting, whispering ‘Elif, Elif’,” says Karacaoğlan. In the lines of this minstrel, who roamed from camp to camp on the Taurus slopes, snow falls as…
See on the map →Mount Yıldız
“Let those who turn back turn back; I will not turn from my path,” says Pir Sultan Abdal. This sixteenth-century bard is said to have come from the village of Banaz, in the Yıldızeli area…
See on the map →Ilgaz & Yıldıztepe
In the snowy winter days of 1921, oxcarts crept slowly along the road from İnebolu to Ankara. On them, crates of ammunition; beside them, walking women, children, the elderly… And one of…
See on the map →Kartalkaya
Have you ever wondered why eagles always nest at the very top? Perhaps to stay far from the noise of the world below, perhaps to take in everything at a single glance… The rock that gave…
See on the map →Mount Köroğlu
“Give my greetings to the Bey of Bolu / One must climb these mountains and lean against them…” Passed from mouth to mouth for centuries, this folk poem is the voice not of a bandit but of a…
See on the map →Mount Ilgaz
In the winter of 1921, convoys of oxcarts were moving along the snowy roads of Mount Ilgaz. In these carts, wheels creaking, hauled by oxen with heavy steps, there was neither flour nor…
See on the map →Merzifon & Mount Tavşan
In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman army stood before Vienna. At its head was a grand vizier born and raised in Merzifon: Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha… So how did a small-town boy become the…
See on the map →Hamsiköy & Zigana
Hearing its name, “anchovy village,” you look for sea and fish here. Yet Hamsiköy lies far from the coast, at the foot of the Zigana Mountains, in a forest-covered valley… Looking for fish…
See on the map →Mount Ovit
Is the shortest way over a mountain to go through it? Those who for years tried to cross Ovit in winter would surely have answered “yes” without a moment’s hesitation…
See on the map →Altıparmak Mountains
“Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.” Looking at the Artvin face of the Kaçkars, these words of John Ruskin spill from your lips of their own accord. For the…
See on the map →Zigana Pass
“Thalatta! Thalatta!” That is, “The sea! The sea!”… In the ‘Anabasis’, Xenophon tells how that cry went up. Ten thousand Greek soldiers had set out to fight for the Persian throne; after a…
See on the map →Mount Kop
“Mountains never meet, but people do,” we say. True enough; but for people to meet, they often have to cross a mountain first. Mount Kop, between Bayburt and Erzurum, is just such a…
See on the map →Palandöken
Evliya Çelebi tells a famous story about the Erzurum winter: a cat trying to leap from one rooftop to the next froze solid in midair… Those who know Evliya’s fondness for exaggeration read…
See on the map →Mount Ergan
How close can a mountain be to a city? Stand on the Erzincan plain and look south, and the answer appears almost at your feet; for there stands Mount Ergan, climbing skyward from the very…
See on the map →Keşiş Mountains & Esence
Why would a mountain be named “Keşiş”, the monk? Perhaps because hermits once lived in seclusion on its slopes, or perhaps because its snow-covered ridges, seen from afar, look like a…
See on the map →Munzur Mountains
“Both worlds fit within me, but I do not fit into this world,” says Seyyid Nesimi. Imagine hearing this line from the mouth of a mountain; a mountain whose peaks rise above three thousand…
See on the map →Hesarek & Bingöl Mountains
Imagine immortality being as close as a lake… In some tellings of the Köroğlu tales, the water of life, the water of immortality, is said to lie hidden in one of the lakes of the Bingöl…
See on the map →Yalnızçam Mountains
Yalnızçam, “the lonely pine”… Who gave a mountain this name, and is that lonely pine still there, or did it leave its name behind and go long ago? We don’t know. But the faint sadness in…
See on the map →Mount Artos
Picture the best-known photograph of Lake Van: a small island in the middle, a church of reddish stone on the island, and behind it a snowy mountain rising from the water’s edge to the sky…
See on the map →Mount Erek
Looking at Van, you feel seated at a table ringed by mountains: Süphan to the northwest, Artos to the southwest, Erek to the east… For centuries these mountains around the lake have faced…
See on the map →Cilo Mountains
Are there glaciers in Turkey? Most people who ask think the answer is no; yet in the mountains of Hakkari, on the northern slopes of Cilo, tongues of ice still creep slowly downhill…
See on the map →Kurt Mountain
“A grape darkens by looking at another grape,” say our forebears. Anyone wondering where this saying comes from should be shown the slopes of Kurt Mountain; for at summer’s end, in the…
See on the map →Sason & Mount Mereto
Some mountains are known not only for their height but for their epics. The mountains of Sason are like this; an ancient folk epic passed from ear to ear in these lands takes its name from…
See on the map →Mount Herekol
Where is a city’s roof? The tiled roofs of its houses, or that distant peak on the horizon that greets the first sun each morning and sees off the last light each evening? Ask the people of…
See on the map →Mount Cudi
“I gave cradles to Noah, / Swings and hammocks, / Your Mother Eve is but a child of yesterday, / I am Anatolia, / Do you know me?” writes the Diyarbakır poet Ahmed Arif in his poem…
See on the map →
Provinces with this kind of place
- Adıyaman1 place
- Afyonkarahisar2 places
- Amasya1 place
- Ankara1 place
- Antalya2 places
- Ardahan1 place
- Artvin1 place
- Balıkesir1 place
- Batman1 place
- Bayburt1 place
- Bingöl1 place
- Bolu2 places
- Bursa1 place
- Çankırı1 place
- Denizli1 place
- Erzincan2 places
- Erzurum1 place
- Gümüşhane1 place
- Hakkari1 place
- Hatay1 place
- Isparta2 places
- Izmir1 place
- Kahramanmaraş3 places
- Kastamonu1 place
- Kırklareli1 place
- Kilis1 place
- Kocaeli1 place
- Manisa1 place
- Niğde3 places
- Rize2 places
- Siirt1 place
- Sivas1 place
- Şırnak1 place
- Tekirdağ1 place
- Trabzon1 place
- Tunceli1 place
- Uşak1 place
- Van2 places