Turkish provinces, found on the map
Eighty-one provinces, the finest cut of any map here, from Edirne on the Greek border to Hakkâri where Iran and Iraq meet. There are more of them than of anything else on this site, so the run is long, but the coast, the borders and the big lake in the east give every question something to reason from.
81 to find, 8 a run.
11 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.
81 provinces · 7 regions
What the map tells you about each one
The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for the 16 of the 81 that have one. Reading them first is not cheating.
Marmara11 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapBalıkesir · Bilecik · Bursa · Kırklareli · Kocaeli · Sakarya · Tekirdağ
Aegean Türkiye8 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapAfyonkarahisar · Aydın · Denizli · Kütahya · Manisa · Uşak
Mediterranean Türkiye8 on the map
- 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.
- Hatay
- Hatay was part of French-mandate Syria until 1938, when it briefly became the Republic of Hatay and then joined Türkiye 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.
Also on the mapAdana · Burdur · Isparta · Kahramanmaraş · Mersin · Osmaniye
Central Anatolia13 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapAksaray · Çankırı · Eskişehir · Karaman · Kayseri · Kırıkkale · Kırşehir · Niğde · Yozgat
Black Sea Türkiye18 on the map
- 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.
Also on the mapAmasya · Artvin · Bartın · Bayburt · Bolu · Çorum · Düzce · Giresun · Gümüşhane · Karabük · Kastamonu · Ordu · Rize · Samsun · Sinop · Tokat · Zonguldak
Eastern Anatolia14 on the map
- 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.
- 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.
Also on the mapAğrı · Ardahan · Bingöl · Bitlis · Elazığ · Erzincan · Erzurum · Hakkâri · Iğdır · Malatya · Muş · Tunceli
Southeastern Anatolia9 on the map
- 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.
Also on the mapAdıyaman · Batman · Diyarbakır · Gaziantep · Kilis · Mardin · Siirt · Şırnak
How this one works
How many provinces are on the map?
81. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.
What is a round?
A run of 8 questions, and 6 right passes it. 11 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the Türkiye page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. A round is always the places you have not found yet, and when fewer than five are left it is topped up with a few you have found as review, so the last round is never one or two questions. Three quarters of it passes it.
Can I start the map over?
Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 81 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of Türkiye keep their progress.
Do I need an account?
No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.
What happens when I get one wrong?
The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.
The other maps of Türkiye
The same map for other countries
North America
Africa
All of Türkiye’s maps together on the Türkiye atlas page, the country itself on the Türkiye guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.