Turkish provinces, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Turkey guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

İstanbul

İstanbul is the only major city in the world on two continents, with about a third of its 15 million people living on the Asian side. It was Byzantium, then Constantinople from 330, capital of the Roman empire in the east for over a thousand years and of the Ottoman one from 1453. It stopped being a capital in 1923.

Ankara

Ankara was a town of about 20,000 when Atatürk made it the seat of the nationalist assembly in 1920, and the capital of the republic in 1923. The choice was deliberate: it was defensible, central, and not the imperial city. It now has around 5.7 million people and is the second largest in the country.

İzmir

İzmir was Smyrna, a Greek city from about the eleventh century BC and one of the seven that claimed Homer. It burned in September 1922 at the end of the Greco-Turkish war, and the population exchange that followed in 1923 moved around 1.2 million Greeks out of Anatolia and 400,000 Muslims out of Greece.

Antalya

Antalya is the tourist coast, with mountains rising to over 3,000 meters directly behind a shoreline of about 640 kilometers. The Lycian Way, a marked footpath of some 540 kilometers, runs along the western half of it past the rock tombs the Lycians cut into cliffs in the fourth century BC.

Konya

Konya covers about 41,000 square kilometers, larger than the Netherlands. It was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the poet Rumi lived and died there; the order his followers founded is the one whose ceremony is performed by whirling dervishes.

Van

Van sits at about 1,650 meters beside a lake so alkaline that only one fish, the pearl mullet, lives in it. The kingdom of Urartu had its capital here from the ninth century BC, on the rock above the modern town. The Van cat, white and often odd-eyed, is named for the province and unusually willing to swim.

Hatay

Hatay was part of French-mandate Syria until 1938, when it briefly became the Republic of Hatay and then joined Turkey in 1939, a transfer Syria did not recognize for decades. Its capital Antakya was Antioch, one of the largest cities of the Roman world and where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

Edirne

Edirne was Adrianople, and was the Ottoman capital from about 1369 until Constantinople fell in 1453. The Selimiye mosque there, finished by the architect Sinan in 1575 when he was in his eighties, is the building he called his masterwork; its dome is slightly wider than that of Hagia Sophia.

Çanakkale

The strait is the Dardanelles, the Hellespont of antiquity, about 1.2 kilometers across at its narrowest. Troy stood on the Asian shore. The Gallipoli landings of April 1915 were on the European side, and the campaign that followed cost around half a million casualties on both sides before the Allies withdrew.

Trabzon

Trabzon was Trebizond, the end of a branch of the Silk Road and, after 1204, the capital of an empire that outlasted Constantinople by eight years. The coast here gets over 800 millimeters of rain a year and grows most of the country’s hazelnuts, which is around 70 percent of the world crop.

Şanlıurfa

Göbekli Tepe, about 15 kilometers northeast of the city, is a set of carved stone enclosures built around 9500 BC, some six thousand years before Stonehenge and before farming or pottery in the region. The Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates in the north of the province irrigates the plain around it.

Muğla

Muğla has the longest coastline of any province, deeply cut into bays and peninsulas. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, stood at what is now Bodrum until earthquakes brought it down; the crusaders used its stone to build the castle that still stands over the harbor.

Nevşehir

This is Cappadocia. Ash from the volcanoes around it settled into soft tuff that weather has cut into the pillars called fairy chimneys, and that people cut into houses, churches and at least two underground cities. Derinkuyu goes down some eighteen levels and could shelter thousands with their livestock.

Kars

Kars sits at about 1,750 meters and is one of the coldest inhabited parts of the country. Russia held it from 1878 to 1918, which is why the center is laid out on a grid with Baltic-looking stone buildings. The ruins of Ani, the Armenian capital of the tenth century, stand on the border gorge east of the town.

Yalova

Yalova is about 850 square kilometers and was split off from Kocaeli in 1995. It sits on the North Anatolian Fault, and the earthquake of August 1999 centered just east of it killed more than 17,000 people across the region in forty-five seconds.

Sivas

Sivas is the second largest province by area. The congress held there in September 1919 pulled the scattered resistance movements into one and set the course of the war of independence. The Kızılırmak, the longest river entirely inside the country, rises in its northeastern hills.

How this one works

The other maps of Turkey

China has the same map in Chinese provinces. South Korea has the same map in Korean provinces. All three together on the Turkey atlas page, the country itself on the Turkey guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.