Anavarza Ancient City (UNESCO Tentative), Yılankale and Misis Mosaic Museum

Stretching east of Adana toward Kozan and Ceyhan across the flat green carpet of the Çukurova Plain rises a chain of dramatic, isolated limestone crags, each crowned by a medieval Armenian-Crusader-Mamluk fortress built so that a beacon fire lit on one castle tower could be seen immediately by the next castle twenty kilometres away. A half-day or full-day drive along this eastern corridor links Misis, Yılankale and the monumental Roman metropolis of Anavarza.

1. Misis Roman Bridge (27 km east) & Yılankale ("Castle of the Snakes", 45 km east)

Following the old Silk Road east from Adana, stop first after 25 minutes at Misis (ancient Mopsuestia, founded according to legend by the seer Mopsus after the Trojan War) to cross the nine-arch 4th-century AD Roman Misis Bridge over the Ceyhan River. Twenty minutes further east, turn off the highway up to the sheer limestone rock of Yılankale ("Snake Castle", medieval Kovara). Built in the late 12th century during the Cilician Armenian Kingdom under King Leo I to guard the Silk Road pass (and associated in Çukurova legend with Şahmeran, the mythical half-woman, half-serpent ruler), its eight rounded horseshoe towers, three terraced baileys and garrison chapel command a 360-degree view across the Ceyhan plain (free entry).

2. UNESCO-Tentative Anavarza Ancient City (70 km north-east of Adana at Dilekkaya)

Thirty minutes north of Yılankale rises a colossal 4.5-kilometre-long, 200-metre-high vertical limestone ridge out of the flat plain like a stone battleship: Anavarza (ancient Anazarbus), birthplace of Pedanius Dioscorides (the 1st-century AD Roman military physician whose five-volume encyclopedia De Materia Medica remained the standard pharmacology textbook of Europe and the Islamic world for 1,500 years). Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, Anavarza is completely free to visit and wonderfully uncrowded:

• The Triple-Arched Triumphal Gate (Alakapı, c. 200 AD): standing 22.5 metres wide and 10.5 metres high with six black granite Corinthian columns, leading onto the 2,700-metre-long colonnaded main avenue (the widest ancient street in Cilicia).
• The 1,500-Metre Double City Wall & Rock-Cut Road: walk through the monumental rock-cut defile chiselled twenty metres deep straight through the mountain ridge to allow chariots into the Amphitheatre, Stadium and Theatre, and look up at the 11th/12th-century Upper Castle and the Church of the Apostles on the cliff top.