A first week in Turkey: Istanbul, then the interior

Turkey is large enough that a first trip has to choose a direction, and the instinct to head straight from Istanbul to a beach resort skips over some of the country's most rewarding ground. A route that goes inland first, across the Anatolian plateau, trades sea views for several thousand years of continuous, occasionally startling history, before arriving somewhere as strange and photogenic as Cappadocia.

Flights from the UK to Istanbul generally take around four hours, and the currency, the Turkish lira, is straightforward to use once converted, with card payments widely accepted in cities and tourist areas. As with a first trip anywhere this size, the practicalities are rarely what makes or breaks the experience; the harder decision is simply where to point the itinerary once you land.

Istanbul, briefly, as an introduction

A few days in Istanbul are more or less compulsory, and rightly so: the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar between them give a fair sense of the layered, Byzantine-then-Ottoman city Istanbul has always been, and the Bosphorus, splitting the city between two continents, is a genuinely disorientating thing to cross on a ferry for the first time. Most first-time visitors underestimate how much of Istanbul's appeal is simply in walking between its neighbourhoods rather than ticking off single sites.

Konya, and one of the world's oldest towns

Heading inland from Istanbul, the route typically passes through Konya, a city with a very different character: conservative, devout, and home to the shrine of Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet whose order of Whirling Dervishes originated here and whose tomb, now a museum, remains a significant site of pilgrimage. Not far away, Çatalhöyük ranks among the oldest known large settlements in the world, a densely packed Neolithic town dating back roughly nine thousand years, where houses were entered through the roof rather than a street-level door, in the absence, this early in human history, of streets in any recognisable sense at all.

Between Konya and Cappadocia, the route often calls at Sultanhani, a vast thirteenth-century caravanserai built by the Seljuk Turks to shelter merchants, animals and goods travelling the trade routes that once crossed Anatolia. Fortified and self-contained, with stabling for camels and a small mosque at its centre, it is a reminder that this inland stretch of Turkey was, for centuries, a working corridor of international trade rather than the quiet farming country it can look like from a coach window today.

Arriving in Cappadocia last

Saving Cappadocia for the end of a first week gives it maximum impact: after Istanbul's domes and Konya's shrine, the fairy chimneys and rock-cut churches around Göreme and Uchisar look like nothing else the trip has shown so far, volcanic rock carved by wind above ground and by hand below it. It is, for many first-time visitors, the single image that ends up representing the whole trip, and arriving at it after several days inland makes the contrast sharper than seeing it in isolation ever could.

An alternative direction, west instead of inland

A different first trip skips the interior and heads west from Istanbul instead, along the Dardanelles to Troy and Gallipoli, down the coast to the Greek and Roman ruins at Pergamon and Ephesus. It swaps Cappadocia's geology for classical archaeology, and suits a first-timer whose main interest is antiquity rather than landscape.

Choosing a direction, not missing out

As with most large countries, a first trip to Turkey cannot cover everything, and the honest advice is the same as it would be anywhere: pick a direction that matches what actually interests you, rather than trying to sample both in a single week. Istanbul earns its place at the start of either route. What comes after it, the interior's deep history or the coast's classical ruins, is where a first-time visitor gets to decide what kind of country they came to see, and either decision tends to leave enough unfinished business to justify coming back for the other one.