Secret Türkiye 7 Days

We fly from Istanbul to Şanlıurfa (2 h), the city of the prophet Abraham. In the afternoon we walk around Balıklıgöl, the pool of sacred fish where tradition places Nimrod's bonfire, go down to the cave where Abraham was born and lose ourselves in the bazaar, where copper is hammered just as it was three centuries ago. Dinner of Urfa cuisine — this is where çiğ köfte was born — and overnight in Şanlıurfa.

Twenty minutes from Urfa, Göbekli Tepe awaits: eleven-tonne T-shaped pillars carved with foxes and vultures 11,600 years ago — seven thousand years before the pyramids, the oldest temple known to humankind. We continue to Harran, with its beehive mud-brick houses and the ruins of the first university of Islam, and cross the Mesopotamian plain to Mardin. Dinner and overnight in Mardin.

Mardin wakes up perched above the Mesopotamian plain: alleys of golden stone, carved doorways and donkeys still doing the work of delivery vans. We visit the Syriac monastery of Deyrulzafaran, the patriarchal seat for 640 years, and in the afternoon we enter the Tur Abdin, "the mountain of the servants of God": Midyat and the Mor Gabriel Monastery, active since the year 397, where prayers are still said in Aramaic. Dinner and overnight in Mardin.

Today the star is the Tigris. We stop at Hasankeyf, the ancient town by the river, and continue down to Cizre, in the province of Şırnak, where local tradition venerates the tomb of the prophet Noah and the red madrasa recalls Al-Jazari, the medieval engineer of automata. Tea on the riverbank, watching the river of Mesopotamia flow by. Dinner and overnight in Cizre.

The stage that gives the trip its name: the Zap valley road climbs for hours through a canyon of sheer rock walls, with the green river below and 4,000-metre peaks above — the Cilo Mountains, the Alps of Türkiye. Stops at viewpoints, shepherds with their flocks and arrival in Hakkari, the small, frank capital of the country's most mountainous province. Dinner and overnight in Hakkari.

We come down from the mountains to the great soda lake of Van, 3,700 km² of blue at an altitude of 1,650 m. In the afternoon we climb up to Van Fortress, the stronghold of the kings of Urartu with its 9th-century BC cuneiform inscriptions, and watch the sun set over the lake from the walls. Dinner and overnight in Van.

Van's breakfast is the most famous in Türkiye: twenty little dishes, herb cheese and honey with clotted cream. Fortified by it, we cross by boat to Akdamar Island, where the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross (AD 921) displays its biblical reliefs carved in pink tuff against the turquoise water. Transfer to the airport and direct flight to Istanbul. End of our services — and of the Türkiye that hardly anyone gets to tell.