Turkey
Gaziantep
Pistachio baklava layered by hand in copper-scented bazaars, a UNESCO city of gastronomy.
The scent reaches you before anything else: roasting pistachios, clarified butter bubbling in copper pans, the sweet caramel edge of baklava baking in sheets. The bazaar is a maze of syrup-slicked counters, charcoal-grilled meats and spice pyramids in ochre and crimson. This is not a city that has good food; it is a city that is food.
Gaziantep is Turkey's culinary capital, recognised by UNESCO as the country's first Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015. The food culture is a living, competitive obsession: baklava houses display their lineage like royal crests, and families argue over lahmacun the way others argue over football. Beyond the kitchen, the Zeugma Mosaic Museum holds a Roman mosaic collection with few rivals anywhere, rescued from the city of Zeugma before the Birecik Dam flooded it, with the famous Gypsy Girl at its heart. The hilltop castle carries the story of the ten-month French siege of 1920-21 that earned the city its honorific Gazi, and beyran, the dawn-hour garlic lamb soup, is breakfast institution and hangover cure in one.
Solo
Gaziantep is best explored stomach-first. Move from baklava shop to kebab counter to beyran stall without a schedule; the city rewards spontaneity over planning.
Couple
A baklava tasting across three rival shops, then lahmacun in the bazaar and the Zeugma mosaics: a day that feeds every sense.
Family
Children eat well here; baklava needs no translation, and watching lahmacun slapped into ovens is pure theatre.
Friends
Gaziantep turns eating into a competitive sport. Challenge each other to find the best baklava, the hottest isot dish and the earliest beyran; the city will oblige.
- The Zeugma Mosaic Museum's Roman mosaic collection is among the largest on earth, including the Gypsy Girl.
- Antep baklava, made with local pistachios and sheep's-milk butter, carries protected geographical status, like champagne.
- The copper bazaar is still a working street of copper-beaters, hammering trays and pots to order.
- The city endured a ten-month French siege in 1920-21, earning the honorific Gazi that it wears in its name.
Baklava of forty paper-thin layers, Antep pistachios and sheep's-milk butter, cut in the bazaar.
Beyran çorbası, dawn-hour lamb soup laced with garlic and chilli, the city's cure for everything.
Ayacucho
Peru
Thirty-three colonial churches in a city whose Holy Week is Peru's most devoted.
Schellenberg
Liechtenstein
Schellenberg keeps two ruined castles on one ridge; the bigger one lets you barbecue inside.
Graaff-Reinet
South Africa
Whitewashed Cape Dutch streets end at a valley of leaning dolerite pillars.
St Bathans
New Zealand
A gold-rush village of mud brick beside a flooded mine pit turned sapphire lake.
Camili Valley
Turkey
Turkey's only UNESCO biosphere reserve, a Caucasian rainforest valley reached by one unpaved pass.
Cappadocia
Turkey
More than a hundred balloons rise at dawn through a forest of stone pillars.
Sumela Monastery
Turkey
A monastery clinging to a cliff 300 metres above a misty Black Sea valley.
Ihlara Valley
Turkey
A 100-metre-deep gorge sliced through volcanic rock, its walls honeycombed with painted Byzantine churches.