TURKIYE
Welcome to Türkiye, a vibrant tapestry of culture where the rich traditions of the Ottoman and Byzantine empires live on in the aromatic spice bazaars, majestic mosques, and unmatched warmth of Turkish hospitality.
Turkey • 7 Days • Exclusively Private
Clients who wantTurkeyin full depth. Three days inside one of the world's most layered cities, then a complete shift into the volcanic silence of Cappadocia, and a return to Istanbul for a farewell on the water. Built for travelers who want the imperial and the elemental, the ancient and the alive, and the kind of light that only Istanbul and Cappadocia know how to produce.
Upon arrival in Istanbul, you will be met inside the terminal by your Solaya representative who will assist with immigration procedures, luggage collection, and airport formalities through a personalized meet and greet service.
Transfer by private vehicle to your hotel. The evening is an unhurried welcome dinner, the tone set by a city that has been receiving travelers for two thousand years and has never stopped knowing how to do it well.
Today moves through the heart of what was once the greatest city on earth, and in many ways still is.
Hagia Sophia first, a building that has been a church, a mosque, and a museum and is now a mosque again, its interior one of the most affecting spaces in the world regardless of what it is called or what it contains. Your expert local guide gives you the fifteen hundred years that connect its mosaics to its minarets.
The Blue Mosque follows, its six minarets and cascade of domes visible from almost everywhere in the old city, its interior a study in Iznik tile and filtered light. Then Topkapi Palace, the nerve center of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries, its Harem and Treasury the two spaces that most honestly reveal the scale of what was administered and accumulated here.
The Grand Bazaar closes the afternoon, its four thousand shops and sixty covered streets a living piece of Ottoman urban planning that has been trading continuously since 1461.
As the light turns golden, you reach a rooftop above the historic peninsula. The skyline behind you, the Bosphorus ahead, the minarets catching the last of the sun. One of the great views of the city and one of the great hours to see it.
Today steps away from the monuments entirely and into the city that lives between them.
The morning begins in Balat, the old Jewish and Greek quarter on the Golden Horn, its crumbling Ottoman lanes painted in faded colors that photographers have been returning to for decades. Your guide walks you through a neighborhood that resists gentrification with a stubbornness that makes it more interesting by the year.
The Spice Bazaar follows, approached not as a shopping stop but as a tasting experience. Your guide knows which stalls are worth stopping at and which spices, dried fruits, and Turkish delights are worth eating on the spot.
Lunch at a waterfront restaurant in Karakoy overlooking the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge and the old city visible across the water, the ferries moving back and forth with the unhurried regularity of a city that has always lived by its waterways.
The afternoon moves into Karakoy and up toward Galata, the former Genoese trading quarter whose tower has been watching over the city since the 14th century. The neighborhood below it is now Istanbul's most interesting creative district, its independent coffee houses, bookshops, and galleries occupying the ground floors of buildings that have been here for centuries.
DAY 4 — Into the Volcanic Landscape
A morning flight to Cappadocia, where the landscape changes completely and immediately.
Volcanic rock, fairy chimneys, cave dwellings carved from the tufa by civilizations that needed to disappear underground and did so with extraordinary ingenuity. The silence here is one of the most complete available anywhere in Turkey, a silence that Istanbul, for all its magnificence, never offers.
The afternoon covers the Goreme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO-listed collection of rock-cut churches decorated with Byzantine frescoes that survived underground for a thousand years. Then Pasabag Valley, where the fairy chimneys cluster in formations that have no geological equivalent anywhere else on earth.
A hands-on pottery workshop in Avanos follows, a town that has been producing ceramics from the red clay of the Kizilirmak River since Hittite times. The craft is alive in the hands of families who have practiced it for generations.
A private sunset viewpoint over the valleys closes the day, the light over the fairy chimneys at this hour making the landscape look like it belongs to another planet entirely.
A morning flight to Cappadocia, where the landscape changes completely and immediately.
Volcanic rock, fairy chimneys, cave dwellings carved from the tufa by civilizations that needed to disappear underground and did so with extraordinary ingenuity. The silence here is one of the most complete available anywhere in Turkey, a silence that Istanbul, for all its magnificence, never offers.
The afternoon covers the Goreme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO-listed collection of rock-cut churches decorated with Byzantine frescoes that survived underground for a thousand years. Then Pasabag Valley, where the fairy chimneys cluster in formations that have no geological equivalent anywhere else on earth.
A hands-on pottery workshop in Avanos follows, a town that has been producing ceramics from the red clay of the Kizilirmak River since Hittite times. The craft is alive in the hands of families who have practiced it for generations.
A private sunset viewpoint over the valleys closes the day, the light over the fairy chimneys at this hour making the landscape look like it belongs to another planet entirely.
For those who rise before dawn, a hot air balloon over the Cappadocia valley at first light is one of the few travel experiences that earns every word written about it. The scale of the landscape from above, the silence broken only by the burner, the fairy chimneys emerging from the morning mist below, is something that a photograph approaches but never quite captures.
The rest of the day moves at a gentler pace through the Red and Rose Valleys on foot, the path cutting through orchards and cave churches and formations that change color as the sun moves across them. The panoramic viewpoint at Uchisar, where the castle rock commands a view over the entire valley, offers the kind of perspective that puts the morning balloon flight into geographical context.
Lunch inside a cave restaurant, the tufa walls cool around you, the food as local as the geology.
The afternoon descends underground into one of Cappadocia's ancient subterranean cities, carved by early Christians as a refuge from persecution and expanded over centuries into a complex of tunnels, chambers, churches, and stables that could shelter thousands of people. For clients with energy after the early start, this is one of the most memorable hours of the entire journey. For those who need the afternoon at leisure after the balloon, that is equally valid.
A morning flight back to Istanbul.
The afternoon is entirely free. The city is there if you want it. The hotel is there if you do not.
As the evening arrives, a private Bosphorus cruise takes you out onto the water that divides Europe from Asia. Istanbul on both shores, the mosques and palaces and fortresses reflected in the strait, the light doing what Istanbul light does in the hour before it disappears. There is no better position from which to say goodbye to a city that has been saying hello to travelers for two thousand years.
Farewell dinner on the water as the city lights up on both sides.
This morning belongs to you. A late breakfast, a slow coffee, a last look at the city from your window.
When the time comes, your Solaya team handles everything. Transfer and airport assistance that takes the friction out of leaving.
Istanbul will do the rest of the work of staying with you.
Turkey • 4 Days • Exclusively Private
Clients with a long weekend and the instinct to spend it well. Four days in one of the world's most layered cities, moving between imperial monuments and neighborhood streets, between a private Bosphorus cruise and a marble hammam, between the ancient and the alive. Istanbul rewards short visits with the same generosity it extends to long ones. This is how to do it properly
Upon arrival in Istanbul, you will be met inside the terminal by your Solaya representative who will assist with immigration procedures, luggage collection, and airport formalities through a personalized meet and greet service.
Transfer by private vehicle to your hotel. After settling in, the evening belongs to one of the great street food corridors in Europe.
Your expert local guide leads you through Beyoğlu on a flexible, unhurried walk that begins near Taksim Square and moves through the length of Istiklal Street toward Galata. Wet burgers from an institution that has been operating the same counter for decades. Içli köfte, stuffed mussels, fresh simit still warm from the oven. Meze and tea in Asmalımescit, sweet treats and Turkish coffee, final bites in Galata Square as the tower watches over the neighborhood from above. An introduction to Istanbul through the thing it does first and best.
The morning moves through the heart of what was once the greatest city on earth.
Hagia Sophia first, its interior one of the most affecting spaces in the world regardless of what it is called or what it contains. Your expert local guide gives you the fifteen hundred years that connect its mosaics to its minarets. The Blue Mosque follows, its six minarets and cascade of domes rising above the old city, its interior a study in Iznik tile and filtered light.
The afternoon moves into a private carpet studio, an experience that is normally closed to visitors. You watch master weavers at work on looms that produce textiles by hand using techniques unchanged for centuries. The craft is alive and entirely unhurried, and understanding it changes how you look at every carpet you will ever see again.
As the afternoon light shifts toward evening, a private yacht takes you out onto the Bosphorus, the strait that divides Europe from Asia. The two continents pass on either side as the boat moves through the water, mosques and palaces and fortresses lining both shores. Dinner aboard as the city lights up around you, the panoramic views doing what Istanbul views always do in this light.
The morning begins with a private Ebru workshop, the ancient Turkish art of water marbling in which pigments are floated on water and manipulated into patterns before being transferred onto paper or fabric. An intricate tradition passed down through generations, practiced with a patience and precision that makes watching it as absorbing as doing it. Your session is led by a local artist for whom this is not a demonstration but a daily practice.
Lunch at a restaurant in Kadıköy, on the Asian side of the city, a neighborhood that most tourists never cross to and that offers one of the most honest versions of Istanbul's daily life available. The market, the fishmongers, the coffee houses, a city that functions without any reference to the tourist trail.
The afternoon closes with a hammam ritual in one of Istanbul's historic marble steam baths. The sequence of heat, scrub, and cold water that has been practiced in this city since the Ottoman era is one of those experiences that resets something in the body that city life has been tightening for years. It is not a spa. It is older than that.
The evening is yours to explore Istanbul at your own pace, a final night in a city that rewards wandering without agenda.
This morning belongs to you. A late breakfast, a slow coffee, a last look at the city from your window.
When the time comes, your Solaya team handles everything. Transfer and airport assistance that takes the friction out of leaving.
Istanbul will do the rest of the work of staying with you.
Turkey • 9 Days • Exclusively Private
Clients who wantTurkeyin two completely different registers. Three days inside one of the world's most layered cities, then a pivot to the Aegean coast where the agenda is turquoise water, ancient ruins glimpsed from a boat, a ghost village, a goat farm, and a farewell dinner on the water above a sunken city. Built for travelers who want the imperial and the elemental, the contemplative and the coastal, in a single unhurried journey.
Upon arrival in Istanbul, you will be met inside the terminal by your Solaya representative who will assist with immigration procedures, luggage collection, and airport fUpon arrival in Istanbul, you will be met inside the terminal by your Solaya representative who will assist with immigration procedures, luggage collection, and airport formalities through a personalized meet and greet service.
Transfer by private vehicle to your hotel. The evening is an unhurried welcome dinner, the tone set by a city that has been receiving travelers for two thousand years and has never stopped knowing how to do it well. ormalities through a personalized meet and greet service.
Transfer by private vehicle to your hotel. The evening is an unhurried welcome dinner, the tone set by a city that has been receiving travelers for two thousand years and has never stopped knowing how to do it well.
Today moves through the heart of what was once the greatest city on earth, and in many ways still is.
Hagia Sophia first, a building that has been a church, a mosque, and a museum and is now a mosque again, its interior one of the most affecting spaces in the world regardless of what it is called or what it contains. Your expert local guide gives you the fifteen hundred years that connect its mosaics to its minarets.
The Blue Mosque follows, its six minarets and cascade of domes visible from almost everywhere in the old city, its interior a study in Iznik tile and filtered light. Then Topkapi Palace, the nerve center of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries, its Harem and Treasury the two spaces that most honestly reveal the scale of what was administered and accumulated here.
The Grand Bazaar closes the afternoon, its four thousand shops and sixty covered streets a living piece of Ottoman urban planning that has been trading continuously since 1461.
As the light turns golden, you reach a rooftop above the historic peninsula. The skyline behind you, the Bosphorus ahead, the minarets catching the last of the sun. One of the great views of the city and one of the great hours to see it.
Today steps away from the monuments entirely and into the city that lives between them.
The morning begins in Balat, the old Jewish and Greek quarter on the Golden Horn, its crumbling Ottoman lanes painted in faded colors that photographers have been returning to for decades. Your guide walks you through a neighborhood that resists gentrification with a stubbornness that makes it more interesting by the year.
The Spice Bazaar follows, approached not as a shopping stop but as a tasting experience. Your guide knows which stalls are worth stopping at and which spices, dried fruits, and Turkish delights are worth eating on the spot.
Lunch at a waterfront restaurant in Karakoy overlooking the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge and the old city visible across the water, the ferries moving back and forth with the unhurried regularity of a city that has always lived by its waterways.
The afternoon moves into Karakoy and up toward Galata, the former Genoese trading quarter whose tower has been watching over the city since the 14th century. The neighborhood below it is now Istanbul's most interesting creative district, its independent coffee houses, bookshops, and galleries occupying the ground floors of buildings that have been here for centuries.
DAY 4 — Into the Volcanic Landscape
A morning flight to Cappadocia, where the landscape changes completely and immediately.
Volcanic rock, fairy chimneys, cave dwellings carved from the tufa by civilizations that needed to disappear underground and did so with extraordinary ingenuity. The silence here is one of the most complete available anywhere in Turkey, a silence that Istanbul, for all its magnificence, never offers.
The afternoon covers the Goreme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO-listed collection of rock-cut churches decorated with Byzantine frescoes that survived underground for a thousand years. Then Pasabag Valley, where the fairy chimneys cluster in formations that have no geological equivalent anywhere else on earth.
A hands-on pottery workshop in Avanos follows, a town that has been producing ceramics from the red clay of the Kizilirmak River since Hittite times. The craft is alive in the hands of families who have practiced it for generations.
A private sunset viewpoint over the valleys closes the day, the light over the fairy chimneys at this hour making the landscape look like it belongs to another planet entirely.
A morning flight to Dalaman, where the landscape shifts from the dense layered energy of Istanbul to the pine-covered mountains and turquoise waterways of the Aegean coast.
A private transfer to Dalyan, a town built along a river that moves slowly through reed beds toward the sea. Check-in at your selected boutique property, the water visible from your window.
The evening is a welcome dinner of Turkish cuisine overlooking the Dalyan River, the traditional wooden boats moving quietly on the water below.
Today belongs entirely to the water.
A full day boat cruise through the turquoise waters of Ekincik Bay, stopping to swim in hidden coves and tranquil bays where the water is clear enough to see the bottom from the surface. Along the way, the ancient rock-cut tombs and ruins of Kaunos emerge from the cliffside, a Carian city that was trading with the Greeks before Rome existed.
The bay is also home to one of Turkey's protected loggerhead sea turtle populations. Sightings are not guaranteed, but the possibility of watching one move through the clear water below the boat is one of those small, unrepeatable moments that stays with a traveler long after the monuments have blurred together.
Lunch on board. The afternoon is the water, the light, and nothing else required.
The morning takes you into the mountains near Tlos to visit an artisan goat dairy, a working farm producing hand-crafted cheeses in a tradition that predates most of what you have seen on this journey. You taste the cheeses paired with local produce in a village setting that feels entirely removed from the coastal tourist trail.
The afternoon descends to Fethiye for an immersive walk through the town with your local guide. The marina, the colorful markets, the carpet shops and taverna-lined lanes. Fethiye is a working town as well as a beautiful one and the walk reflects both.
The morning brings Ölüdeniz, one of the most photographed bays in the Mediterranean, its protected lagoon a color of blue that does not appear elsewhere in nature. A morning swim in water this clear and this calm is one of the simplest and most complete pleasures available on the Turkish coast.
The afternoon moves to Kayaköy, the ghost village, a settlement of several thousand stone houses and Byzantine churches abandoned in the 1920s population exchange between Greece and Turkey, its streets and doorways open to the sky. A guided walk through its ruins is one of the most quietly affecting historical experiences on the entire coast.
A traditional alfresco BBQ dinner as the evening settles over the village.
A morning in Kaş, one of the most charming towns on the Turquoise Coast, its whitewashed houses and bougainvillea-covered lanes climbing the hillside above a harbor that has been sheltering boats since antiquity. Your guide walks you through its history, its waterfront promenade, and its markets.
From Kaş, you board a local fisherman's boat for a cruise along the turquoise coastline to a secluded beach. Lunch by the water, a swim, the afternoon belonging entirely to the sea.
The farewell dinner that follows is exceptional. A private boat at sunset, sailing above the sunken city of Kekova, an ancient Lycian settlement submerged by an earthquake in the 2nd century, its walls and staircases still visible beneath the surface in the clear water below. Dinner on deck as the last light leaves the sky, local dishes, the coast on one side, the sea on the other, the ruins of a city beneath your feet. There is no better closing chapter for a journey along this coastline.
This morning belongs to you. A slow breakfast, a last look at the water.
When the time comes, your Solaya team handles everything. Transfer to Dalaman airport and assistance that takes the friction out of leaving.
Turkey will do the rest of the work of staying with you.
There are many incredible places to stay in Türkiye. Here are some of our favorites.
The Rooftop at Golden Hour
Balat, the City Between the Monuments
Dawn Over Cappadocia
The Hammam
The Hammam
Bosphorus at Sunset
