2 Best Sights in Turkey

Atatürk's picture is on every single piece of Turkish currency, his visage hangs in just about every office and official building in the country, and his principles and ideas are the foundations of modern Turkish political thought. So his vast mausoleum, perched on a hilltop overlooking the capital city he built, is on a scale suitable to his stature in Turkey. A marble promenade flanked with Hittite-style lions leads to the imposing mausoleum, where a huge sarcophagus lies beyond a colonnade with inscriptions from his speeches and below a ceiling of brilliant gold mosaics. An adjoining museum contains personal belongings from the revered man's life, including his clothes, automobiles, and personal library. The corridors underneath the tomb house an in-depth exhibit on the 1919–22 War of Independence. To reach the mausoleum, you can take the metro to Tandoğan and walk up the long road that ascends from the main entrance at the northern end of the grounds. A quicker way is to take a taxi to the alternate entrance on Akdeniz Caddesi, on the southeast side.

The cape on the southernmost tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula has a massive, four-pillared memorial to Turkey's World War I dead. No one knows how many fell in battle, though estimates suggest there were around 250,000 Turkish casualties, including at least 85,000 deaths. If you take the ferry from Gallipoli to Çanakkale, look for the memorials to the campaign carved into the cliffs. The large one at Kilitbahir reads: "Stop, O passerby. This earth you tread unawares is where an age was lost. Bow and listen, for this quiet place is where the heart of a nation throbs."