Hattusa
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Hattusha: The Hittite Capital, 1986); Capital Of The Hittite Empire, Roughly 1650 1200 BC · Bogazkale, Corum
For four hundred years Hattusa was the capital of an empire that fought Egypt to a standstill and then signed the oldest surviving peace treaty in the world with it - a copy of the Treaty of Kadesh hangs in the United Nations. The Hittites were forgotten so completely that they survived only as a puzzling name in the Old Testament until cuneiform archives were dug out of this hillside and read in the twentieth century. What is here is a whole walled capital spread over six kilometres of ridge and valley: the Lion Gate and the King's Gate in the upper city, the great rampart at Yerkapi with a seventy-metre stone tunnel driven through it that you can still walk, the royal citadel where the tablets were found, and the temple quarter below. Two kilometres away at Yazilikaya, sixty-odd gods are carved into a natural rock gallery in procession. Everything found here is in Ankara, so that museum is half the visit.
Bogazkale Ilcesi, Hattusa Oren Yeri, Corum, Bogazkale, Corum, Turkiye
Open daily with longer summer hours and an earlier winter close. The site is a circuit of six to seven kilometres driven by car, with parking at each monument; walking it is possible and takes most of a day. Yazilikaya, two kilometres away, is covered by the same ticket and keeps the same hours. Snow can close the upper circuit in winter.