What makes the ideal skiing destination? High mountains and plentiful snowfall are obviously a must. Modern resorts and well-connected airports also help. Add in famously delicious local cuisine and a lively apres-ski scene, and you’d be getting close to perfection. Now, imagine you could have all that and pay less than £12 a day for your lift pass. Sounds too good to be true. Well, chances are you (or someone you know) may have already been there and just didn’t think of it as a skiing destination.
According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, Turkey was the fourth most-visited country in the world last year, behind France, Spain, and the USA. Yet the vast majority of the 50 million tourists who headed there in 2022 chose to travel during the summer. And admittedly, checking in for a flight to Istanbul with a snowboard bag in tow felt strange when I visited. But there was an icing sugar-like dusting of snow on the tarmac as we landed, and after a short internal flight to Kayseri (in the centre of the country), we stepped out into a full-blown blizzard.
Erciyes ski resort boasts 150km of pistes
(Tristan Kennedy)
The temperature was several degrees below zero. Around 30 centimetres of snow had come down in the past 24 hours, and it showed no signs of abating. Luckily, a Mercedes minibus quickly whisked us away on the 40-minute drive to the nearby ski resort of Erciyes. There, a warm welcome awaited us from Erdem Kurt, founder of Ski Turkish.
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A keen snowboarder with an infectious laugh, Kurt is an evangelist for Turkey’s potential as a winter sports destination. He set up his agency in 2018 to help spread the word. “We have mountains,” he said, while pointing out that Turkey has more than 60 peaks reaching over 3,000 metres, and that its highest, Mount Ararat, is taller than Mont Blanc. “And we also have snow, as you can see”, he laughed, pointing out the window.
Turkey has more than 60 mountain peaks reaching over 3,000m
(Tristan Kennedy)
On top of that, Kurt explained that Turkey has a surprisingly long history of skiing. The first sets of skis were imported almost a century ago by Atatürk, the father of the Turkish Republic, as part of his drive to modernise the culture; Turkey fielded its first Winter Olympic Games in 1936. But for years, the sport remained the purview of the…
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