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Size might put you off Turkey. You could fit France in the same landmass and still have room spare. The 'must see' sights are far apart. But on a recent holiday, I managed to see the best of everything
A Lycian tomb poking out of the water at Kekova. Photograph: Sam Field
I went on a two-centre holiday with Westminster Classical Tours, visiting the classical sites of both central and Mediterranean Turkey.
It also involved a generous amount of swimming, staying in a luxurious cave, dawn air-ballooning above fairy chimneys, traditional food and wine and riotous good company.
It's said that Turkey has more Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman ruins than Rome.
To see two of the best areas - Cappadocia and the Lycian Coast - on one holiday would literally be a pain in the neck, involving a two-day drive on poor roads.
But this itinerary involved two pain-free flights, giving us adequate time in both areas without excessive travelling.
Cappadocia's landscape of "fairy chimneys", formed by the erosion of soft volcanic tufa, a porous stone, is awe-inspiring.
An elegantly-furnished cave-room at the Museum Hotel in Cappadocia.
Among these, the Goreme valley contains rock-cut churches resplendent with Byzantine frescoes. Our tour leader Terry Brown is managing director of Westminster Classical Tours and holds a doctorate from Oxford on the founding of Constantinople. His knowledge of the area's history, as you might expect, was extensive.
We stayed at the Museum Hotel, in luxurious caves hewn from rock, decorated with old chests and berry-stained rugs.
At dawn, we floated high above the fairy chimneys in a hot air balloon, excited like children.
The Valley of Love - tufa towers eroded away by the elements make for a dazzling 'forest of stone'. Get the best view from a hot air balloon.
Days later, two internal flights took us to the Mediterranean coast at Göcek, where we boarded a gulet.
The next nine days became one long adventure. We visited Xanthus, ancient capital of Lycia with its theatre.
We sailed to isolated Aperlae, and swam ashore to inspect a Lycian tomb covered in Greek inscription. No ticket booths or postcards for sale here.
We later sailed over the sunken city of Kekova, submerged by an ancient earthquake.
Back on land again and a stroll took us to an Ottoman fort and through a 1,000 year-old olive grove to a dozen Lycian tombs strewn about the hillside.
Later, we visited Myra, its preserved theatre and tombs carved from the rock. Gemiler is a monastic island of rock tombs, destroyed by the Arabs in the 7th century AD, with links to St Nicholas of Myra (Santa Claus).
We had lengthy lunches and even lengthier dinners of delicious traditional Turkish food.
Some of us slept on the deck under the stars. Each morning we gathered on deck for the `beauty contest': we had sailed in the dark the night before and had not known what we would wake up to.
At first light, when we glimpsed our secluded fjord, we laughed at the beauty of it, and plunged in for a pre-breakfast swim.
This coastline is a stark, earthly paradise, pine-scented, with seas of the most exorbitant turquoise, its rocky littoral studded with sea-urchins.
It is without a single building, or road or person in sight. We went fishing with the captain and caught barracuda.
One day we anchored in a remote place called Aglimani, followed a Roman cattle track and discovered a ruined city - Lydae - with the crumbling half-statue of a lady in a Roman toga hidden in the weeds. This site was completely wild, untouched by tourism, a rare thing indeed.
Every historical site we visited, like every different bay or fjord we woke to, was more dazzling.
How to holiday here
Westminster Classical Tours are the specialist operator for this trip. Contact them via their website www.wct99.com or telephone 01225 835488
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