Black Sea

Safranbolu is the best-preserved Ottoman town in Turkey. The old quarter (Çarşı) contains over 1,000 Ottoman-era timber-framed houses (konaks) in a valley between three hills, most of them still standing and many converted to hotels. The town looks essentially as it did in the 18th and 19th centuries. UNESCO listed it in 1994. It receives…

Trabzon sits on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey, a city that has been continuously important for 3,000 years — as a Greek colony, a Roman outpost, the capital of the Empire of Trebizond (a Byzantine successor state), and a major terminus of the Silk Road. The surrounding landscape is unlike anywhere else in…