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Travel and Tourism in Turkey
Travel alerts, currency, climate, transit, health, and safety information for visitors to Turkey.
Practical Information
Travel alert status, currency, climate, and transit details.
- Travel Alert Status
- Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution
- Time Difference
- UTC+3 (8 hours ahead of Washington, DC, during Standard Time)
- Currency
- Turkish lira (TRL)
- Climate
- The climate varies a great deal across Turkey. Precipitation is highest on the Black Sea, where, in Rize, an average of 98 inches of rain falls each year. Ankara averages only 14 inches (chiefly accumulating from November to May), and Antalya on the south coast gets about 28 inches. Istanbul has an average of 25 inches of annual precipitation. The plateau region has hot with very dry summers and temperatures in July that range from the mid-70s to the low 90s. The skies are almost always clear and cloudless during the day and nights are cool. Winters in this region are generally windy and cold (the mean temperature for January is 30°F). Around the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul, the average temperature is 83°F in July and 35°F in January. The south coast has long summers that are often hot and humid both night and day in the midsummer months (the average temperature in mid-August is 94°F), but it is very pleasant in spring and autumn. Winters in the south are usually fairly mild. The north coast Black Sea region tends to have cooler summers and warmer winters than the other coastal areas.
- Language(s) Spoken
- Turkish (official), Kurdish, other minority languages
- Ethnic Groups
- Turkish 70-75%, Kurdish 19%, other minorities 6-11%
- National Holiday
- Republic Day, 29 October (1923)
- Geographic Coordinates
- 39 00 N, 35 00 E
- Location
- Southeastern Europe and Southwestern Asia (that portion of Turkey west of the Bosporus is geographically part of Europe), bordering the Black Sea, between Bulgaria and Georgia, and bordering the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, between Greece and Syria
- Airports
- 120
Destinations
Regions and cities, top sights, national parks, UNESCO sites, and festivals for visitors.
Istanbul: City Between Continents
Istanbul is one of those rare cities that exceeds every expectation and every cliché. Visitors who arrive braced for crowded tourist traps and overpriced tea find instead a living, breathing metropolis of extraordinary energy — a city where the call to prayer echoes from a thousand minarets at dawn, where the ferries on the Bosphorus carry workers from Asia to Europe every morning and back again every evening, where Byzantine mosaics share wall space with Ottoman calligraphy and twenty-first-century street art. The city contains more layers of history per square kilometer than almost anywhere else on earth, and it wears those layers not as museum pieces but as living fabric.
The city was founded by Greek colonists as Byzantium around 657 BCE, and its position at the meeting of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara made it immediately valuable. When the Emperor Constantine I chose it as the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 CE, renaming it Constantinople — the City of Constantine — he was recognizing a geographic logic that had been apparent for a thousand years.
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Health and Safety
Medical facilities, vaccinations, disease risk, and sanitation conditions.
The care provided in Turkish hospitals varies greatly. New private hospitals in Ankara, Antalya, Izmir, and Istanbul have modern facilities and equipment, numerous U.S.-trained specialists, and international accreditation. However, some still may be unable to treat certain serious conditions. While the State Department prefers medical evacuation for its personnel who will be giving birth, there are private hospitals in Ankara and Istanbul that meet Western standards of obstetric care.
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