12 Day Discover Turkish History, Culture, and Cuisine Culinary Tour Including Cappadocia and Ephesus

Sightseeing and Culinary Tour in Turkey

Experience Turkey through the eyes, lives, and tastes of its people. Sample its diverse food and culture. Meet local people, visit local markets and ethnic restaurants, and float high over the “fairy caves” in a hot-air balloon. Join your guide, Turkish Flavours, as they explore ancient, Ottoman, and modern Turkey. You’ll come away with a deep appreciation for the magnitude of history and culture in this ancient land. Indulge your love of ancient history, delicious food, exploring new cultures and walking amongst some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

Highlights

Tours of food markets and bazaars
Cooking classes by local Turkish culinary experts
Local home visits in Istanbul and Cappadocia
Explore Istanbul, Cappadocia's food and culture and the ancient world of Ephesus
Guided visits to the iconic monuments of Istanbul
Boat journeys down the Bosphorus and Bodrum Bays
Sumptuous meals at the best restaurants throughout the itinerary
11 nights accommodation in prestigious luxury hotels

8 days with instruction in English

Group size: 4-12 participants

Airport transfer included: Istanbul Atatürk Airport

Program

Day 1: Istanbul

Arrival in Istanbul, the only city in the world built on two continents, providing a unique link between East and West and guardian of the treasures of three empires of which she has been the capital. Napoleon said that if the world were a single state then its capital would be Constantinople. Even today, amid the traffic-choked streets of modern Istanbul, among the high-rises, the steep alleys and the glowing ancient churches and mosques, you can still feel exactly what he meant.

Overnight in Istanbul.

Day 2: Istanbul

Today you will visit the Blue Mosque, a famous 17th-century mosque that dominates the Istanbul skyline. Hagia Sophia, the church of the Divine Wisdom, was a church (circa 548 AD), then a mosque. The Theodosius Cistern (known as Şerefiye Sarnıcı in Turkish), was built by Roman Emperor Theodosius II between 428 and 443 to store water supplied by the Valens Aqueduct. The area is about 148 by 82 feet and the roof is supported by 32 marble columns about 30 ft high.

For lunch, you will taste delicious kofte -meatballs- at a specialized restaurant operating since 1920. Then you will drive to the pier for your private cruise on the Bosphorus. Upon disembarkation, you will proceed to a Turkish home to enjoy a hands-on cooking class learning to cook home-style, family recipes and taste what you have cooked. A truly unique opportunity to experience Turkish hospitality and local home life.

Overnight in Istanbul.
Meals included: Breakfast, lunch and dinner

Day 3: Istanbul

Today you will visit Topkapı Palace the residence of the sultans for almost three centuries. It is located on the promontory jutting out between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. Being the imperial residence of the sultan, his court and harem, the palace was also the seat of government for the Ottoman Empire. In the Treasury section, you will see the 7th biggest diamond in the world, the “Spoonmaker’s Diamond” and the Harem is a vast labyrinth of rooms and corridors once occupied by the black eunuchs, concubines, the Sultan’s mother and the Sultan himself.

You will visit The Palace Kitchens, Helvahane and Quarters and learn about our culinary culture of 400 years. Lunch will be at a restaurant where you will taste Ottoman Palace recipes. After lunch you will visit Süleyman the Magnificent Mosque created by the great architect Sinan. The Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent is one of his two most impressive achievements, carrying mosque architecture to its grandest development. Then explore the famous Grand Bazaar. A baklava shop where you will taste the best Baklava in town will be your last stop for the day.

Overnight in Istanbul.
Meals included: Breakfast and lunch. Dinner will be on own.

Day 4: Istanbul - Cappadocia

After checking out today you will start the day with a walk through the Spice Bazaar, an extensive market that was built in the 17th century to finance the upkeep of the nearby mosque – Yeni Cami. The bazaar is often referred to as the “Egyptian Market” due to the fact that spices used to come to the market from India and Southeast Asia via Egypt. During the tour you will visit the Rustem Pasha Mosque, another skillful accomplishment of the architect Sinan, the Rustem Pasha Mosque was built in 1561 on the orders of Rustem Pasha, Grand Vizier and son-in-law of Suleyman the Magnificent. Exquisite Iznik tiles panel the small and superbly proportioned interior.

Take a ferry ride to the other side of the river that separates the European and Asian parts of Istanbul to explore the famous open-air street market of Kadıkoy. Notice the big difference in atmosphere between the Spice Market and the Kadıkoy which is more in tune with the way most people in Istanbul cook and eat.

Indulge yourself in the huge variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables, with plenty to discover for the “foodie.” Feel the real bazaar shopping experience with the fishmongers, bakers, butchers and grocers singing out to attract you to their stalls. Take your time and explore the many pastry shops, Turkish delight and deli stores and aromatic spice stands. There is plenty to see and buy, with information and recommendations available.

Lunch will be served at one of Turkey’s foremost cook’s Çiya restaurant. The chef is devoted to letting the world know about the glorious food of his homeland. The ingredients used in the dishes travel from South Eastern Anatolia to arrive at your plate in Istanbul: aromatic red pepper, pistachios, chickpeas, olive oil, and pomegranate molasses. After lunch, you will head for the airport for your flight to Cappadocia. You will be transferred to the hotel upon arrival.

Overnight in Cappadocia
Meals included: Breakfast and lunch

Day 5: Cappadocia

In Cappadocia, you will focus on the very particular culture and foods of Anatolia. Today, you will be cooking in a village home with local village women. They will show you how to make stuffed vine leaves and manti, a traditional dish whose heritage stretches back into the Central Asian origins of modern Turkey. You will taste what you have cooked for lunch.

After lunch, you will be introduced to the lunar landscape of Cappadocia at Dervent Valley, and you head on to Zelve Open Air Museum, which is one of the earliest inhabited and latest abandoned monastic settlements of Cappadocia. Seeing the best examples of fairy chimneys at Pasabag Fairy Chimneys Valley, we drive further to Avanos. From here you will stop at Avanos, a center of terracotta art since 2,000 BC, for a demonstration in a traditional pottery workshop. Then we will try our hands at it under the supervision of a master potter.

You will end the day by relaxing at one of the most spectacular valleys of Cappadocia with its different rock formations in a variety of colours and enjoying the sunset while sipping delicious Cappadocian wines. Dinner will be served at one of Turkish Flavours' favourite restaurants in Cappadocia.

Overnight in Cappadocia
Meals included: Breakfast, lunch and dinner

Day 6: Cappadocia - an optional balloon ride

Early morning optional balloon ride – transfer to the balloon launching site to meet the balloon crew. The gentle and stable wind conditions are ideal during the first few hours of the day in Cappadocia. It is also the ideal time for photography, with splendid colours and contrasts. The deep canyons and gentle winds carry you over places that could never be reached except by balloon. After flying over Cappadocia for about one hour, you will land an awaiting champagne breakfast!

After breakfast, you will visit the famous Goreme Open Air Museum to see the best examples of Byzantine art in Cappadocia. These are found in rock-cut churches with frescoes and paintings dating from as early as the 10th century. After lunch in a local restaurant, you will then explore an underground city, one of the largest and deepest of Cappadocia’s many such settlements. Then while sipping your wine you will enjoy a demonstration and explanation of Turkish carpet-making techniques, symbols and different types of carpets. Later you will visit the Saruhan Caravanserail to watch the Whirling Dervish Sema Ritual. Tonight is free.

Overnight in Cappadocia
Meals included: Breakfast and lunch

Day 7: Cappadocia - Izmir

After a leisurely morning, join a Turkish Art of Marbelling (Ebru) workshop. Rest of the day on your own. In the afternoon you will drive to a village where they will show you how they do grape molasses and homemade baklava. After a light dinner, you will take an evening flight to Izmir

Overnight near Ephesus
Meals included: Breakfast and dinner

Day 8: Ephesus

After breakfast, you will proceed to visit Ephesus, one of the most incredible archaeological wonders of the world. You will then proceed to Kusadası for lunch on an ecological farm that houses the best restaurant in the area and visit the Oleatrium, an Olive and Olive Oil Museum where you will be travelling 2500 years in time.

After having a feast, you will be taken around the farm so you will see how they dry their vegetables under the sun, how they make tomato or pepper paste, and the making of many different organic jams. The farm tour will end at the Olive Oil museum where you will see how mankind first discovered that olives were edible and how olive oil was used from the beginning of time until today. Dinner at one of Turkish Flavours' favourite restaurants.

Overnight near Ephesus
Meals included: Breakfast and dinner

Day 9: Ephesus - Bodrum

Morning at leisure. Before lunch visit the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selcuk. Lunch at an eco-conscious local cuisine restaurant. After that, you will then be driven to Bodrum.

Overnight in Bodrum
Meals included: Breakfast and lunch

Day 10: Bodrum

Today after breakfast, you will go around the Bays on a Goulet. Goulets are traditional wooden yachts first built in Bodrum for fishing and sponge hunting, but with the rise of the Blue Cruise concept, Goulets became spacious motor-sailing yachts for people to enjoy a cruise in the untouched bays around the Aegean coast of Turkey. It is a perfect way to enjoy swimming in the blue waters as well as to try more of the local cuisine on board. After the cruise, you will return to the hotel.

Overnight in Bodrum
Meals included: Breakfast, lunch and dinner

Day 11: Bodrum

Enjoy a lazy breakfast and a day of relaxation... Early afternoon you may get together to drive into the centre of Bodrum to walk through some of the shopping areas for a couple of hours. Then you will visit the famous Crusaders Castle and the Underwater museum. After spending some leisure time in town, enjoy a leisurely supper together before taking your flight to Istanbul.

Overnight in Istanbul
Meals included: Breakfast and dinner

Day 12: Departure

Take your flights back home.

Location

The proposed tour will start in Istanbul – Constantinople – the only city in the world that straddles two continents, linking East and West. See the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, including the Harem, restored kitchens, and the 7th biggest diamond in the world, the “Spoonmaker’s Diamond”.

Leaving Istanbul on day 5, the group will fly to Cappadocia where you will focus on the foods and culture of Anatolia. You will see the “fairy chimneys”, visit an underground city and take an optional hot-air balloon ride. Back on earth, you’ll learn to make baklava and visit a winery. Moving on to Ephesus to visit the ancient archeological ruins featuring the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Lunch will be in an ecological farm restaurant and Oleatrium (an olive and olive oil museum). The tour comes to an end back in Istanbul.

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Food

Meals as specified in the itinerary (daily breakfast, 7 lunches and 6 dinners) are included in the package.

Everywhere you turn in Turkey, there is something delicious to eat, including street food such as bread rings covered in sesame seeds, deep-fried mussels with a garlic-rich sauce, warm roasted almonds and pistachio nuts, pastries bathed in syrup, divine milky desserts, and chewy ice creams.

In the many restaurants and street cafés, you can dine in style eggplants stuffed, grilled, or fried in endless ways; tangy salads and yoghurt dips strongly flavoured with garlic. Every town and city has a market where you will find a wealth of fresh seasonal produce, such as plump olives and crunchy pickles, fresh figs, ruby red pomegranates, juicy ripe peaches, pungent spices, and fresh leafy herbs, which are sold like bunches of flowers.

Culinary tradition

While the food and cooking of Turkey is inevitably shaped by its diverse geography and climate, it could be said that the country’s turbulent history has also played a key role in shaping the cuisine. Constantly in flux, the culinary traditions embody the many cultures that have had an impact on Turkish life over the centuries. These include ancient Persian and Arab practices that have been handed down from generation to generation, the influences of Islam and the Ottoman Empire and today, the growth of urbanization and tourism.

The dishes in Turkish cuisine roughly can be classified as follows:

Soups: wheat and derivatives, rice legumes, seasonal vegetables, yoghurt are used
Mezes, appetizers: this list is endless - it can be a slice of melon with white cheese, beans cooked with olive oil, garlic and parsley, stewed mussels, black olives, boiled potato salad, tomato salad with roasted eggplants, bulgur salad, phyllo cheese rolls, and more
Fish and seafood: Turkey is surrounded by the seas on three sides. All kinds of fish from these three seas are consumed by either grilling, frying, baking, or steaming depending on their variety
Poultry: Nowadays cooks try to substitute chicken with red meat since scientists say white meat is healthier. However, in olden times tasty free-range chickens were boiled; the chicken broth was to make delicious pilav or rice, and the pieces of chicken were served with it. Or boiled chicken garnished with walnut sauce, or chicken stuffed with rice, liver, currants and pine nuts
Meat: it is either consumed in grilled form alone or grilled with some vegetables or fruits such as eggplants, quinces, onions, garlic, loquats, and apples depending on the season and called kebabs, or it can be cooked with vegetables or fruits in a pan called stews or yahni
Vegetables: any seasonal fresh one or two kinds of vegetable is cooked with the addition of olive oil
Dolma, stuffed vegetables: zucchinis, eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, are stuffed with rice or with bulgur; one may add ground meat to the stuffing if she likes; vine leaves, Swiss chard or cabbage leaves are wrapped up with the same stuffing
Pilavs; mostly rice is used, but in folk cuisine bulgur is used due to availability. Either rice or bulgur is used. The pilav is always enriched by the addition of one or two of the following ingredients, onions, tomato, currants, pine nuts, chestnuts, zucchini, eggplants, meat, liver, and more
Noodles and pasta dishes: homemade vermicelli and noodles are still prepared in Anatolian provinces. Manti, a kind of dumpling or ravioli, is prepared by rolling out dough thin enough, cutting the rolled pastry into one inch squares, filling in the centre with ground meat or chickpea size, pinching to seal, boiling, then serving with yoghurt-garlic sauce with butter-paprika topping.
Breads, and boreks: Mostly with wheat, in rural areas with other grains. Pita, tandir (clay oven) bread, flat bread (unleavened) baked on sac (griddle) are some kinds. Olives, walnuts, tahini, cheese, and meat are often added to bread for flavour and texture. Boreks are prepared by rolling out the dough with the rolling pin into desired size circle and filled with either cheese-parsley mix, or ground meat onion mix, or spinach, and shaped into thin packets of pastry, and fried. Or as in lasagna, rolled-out thin dough is layered with different fillings mentioned above, and baked in the oven
Desserts: can be dough or flour-based, milk-based, fruit-based, or rice-based. These desserts can be enriched-flavoured by the addition of one of them; pistachio nuts, walnuts, rose water, saffron, cinnamon, cloves cheese or clotted cream.
Drinks; ayran diluted yoghurt drink, liquorice tea, fruit-based drinks or sherbets such as rose, lemon, orange, sour cherry; tea, coffee and herbal teas such as linden tea, mint tea, boza; a fermented (of ground wheat, barley or millet) soup-like beverage, salep; a drink prepared by milk, sugar and a starchy powder made by drying and pulverizing the root tubers of certain plants of the orchid family, orchis latifolia.

The products people mostly use which are common to all the Mediterranean countries are olive oil, olives, cheese, fish, tomato, pepper, eggplant, zucchini, pine nuts, walnuts, basil, parsley, coriander, paste, noddles, sausages, orange, lemon, honey legumes, and grains.

The following meals are included:

Breakfast

The following dietary requirement(s) are served and/or catered for:

Regular (typically includes meat and fish)

If you have special dietary requirements it's a good idea to communicate it to the organiser when making a reservation

What's included

All domestic flights: Istanbul - Kayseri / Izmir / Istanbul (economy class)
All arrival and departure transfers
Transportation by air-conditioned vehicle
7 lunches and 6 dinners
11 nights accommodation on a bed and breakfast basis at luxurious hotels
Turkish cooking class in Turkish home in Istanbul
Anatolian cooking experience in a village home in Cappadocia
Licensed professional tour guide in the English language
Entrance fees to all museums, parks, and historic sights as included in the itinerary
%18 Vat taxes

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