Safranbolu
An important caravan stop for nearly seven centuries, Safranbolu in north central Turkey grew prominent and wealthy, and its architecture and urban planning eventually influenced city development all over the Ottoman realm.
With its bucolic valley setting and dense concentration of restored timber-framed and red-roofed Ottoman houses, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is a popular weekend getaway for the in-crowds of Ankara and Istanbul, who come to stay in its boutique hotels, shop for handicrafts and sweets like yaprak helvası, and stroll (and photograph) its cobbled streets.
Old mansions of Çamlıhemşin
For an ambitious young man from Turkey's Black Sea region in the 19th century, Russia was the place to go to seek one's fortune.
The success of those who hailed from Çamlıhemşin, in the hills above Rize, can be seen today in the town's Konaklar neighborhood, where 200-year-old mansions line the steep slopes and give the neighborhood its name — Konaklar means "mansions" in Turkish.
Genoese forts along the Black Sea
In the 1300 and 1400s, well before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, earlier Genoese voyagers were plying Turkey's coastlines, establishing a network of trading ports and routes that connected Crimea with the Mediterranean.
Though the Black Sea towns of Sinop, Amasra, Akçakoca, and Şile all contain Genoese traces, the coastline's most famous example of the onetime maritime republic's legacy is the crumbling Yoros Castle, set on a high hill overlooking the meeting of the Istanbul Strait and the Black Sea.
Wooden mosques of the Black Sea
Constructed entirely of chestnut wood and intricately decorated with carvings of trees, tulips, stars, and flowers, the mid-19th-century mosque in Şimşirli village in Trabzon is a fine example of the region's timber-built houses of Muslim worship.
Despite the threats posed by a damp climate and dramatic summer-winter temperature swings, dozens of wooden mosques from the same era persist along the Black Sea coast, though the original architecture of many has been altered by stone or metal minarets, roofs, and other later additions.
With its worn wood and sheet-metal reinforcement, the 160-year-old Maral Mosque in Artvin's Borçka town, for example, looks inauspicious from the outside, but its interior is an explosion of color, full of beautifully carved and painted details depicting scenes from the Quran.
Georgian monasteries and churches of Artvin
This remote northeastern corner of Turkey was once part of the medieval Georgian kingdom of Tao-Klarjeti, which left its mark on the spectacular landscape in the form of 10th- and 11th-century religious buildings scattered amidst the area's rugged peaks.
Long abandoned and out of use, some lie in picturesque ruin, while others are relatively well-preserved, with their distinctive conical domes perched atop cylindrical drums like pointed hats.
