Power isn’t just muscle, it’s tactics,” says our guide Ulaş, finger-pointing towards the palaestra – a 2,000-year-old open-air gymnasium where Roman men once trained for glory. Here, in this sun-baked pit, they’d strip naked, lather themselves in olive oil and wrestle. A contest not won by bicep circumference alone but by cunning feints and well-timed handfuls of dust. Frictionless and, to me at least, faintly homoerotic, these ancient bouts are just one of the many odd, delicious nuggets you pick up wandering Sagalassos – a once-thrumming Roman city of several thousand people folded into the mighty Taurus Mountains, far from the poolside piña coladas of modern-day Antalya.
A mosque in Egirdir
Christy Spring
Of the 40 million holidaymakers who surge through Antalya airport each year, most don’t come for the Greco-Roman ruins. They come for the bursting buffet spreads, bottomless Efes, a new nose and maybe a fresh crop of hair follicles. But venture a few hours inland and you’ll find Pisidia – an ancient Anatolian region tucked into the Taurus foothills. It was once a critical node of agro-commerce, swarming with trade from pre-classical times through to the Byzantines. But thanks to a diet of earthquakes and the end of the Roman empires, it has been slimmed down to a thin frame of villages, orchards and wild horses rarely visited by a tourist’s Birkenstock. Which is precisely why I’ve come to pedal through these lesser-visited hills with The Slow Cyclist – a company offering cultural cycling holidays with more emphasis on story than Strava.
Of the 40 million people who surge through Antalya airport each year, most don’t come for the Greco-Roman ruins
Having recently returned from a group holiday with friends my age in their 20s, disgruntled from Splitwise feuds, perpetual hangovers and second-hand vaping, I tentatively vowed never to do it again. Just a few weeks later, travelling with a peloton aged at least three decades north of my own, I seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid pretty hard. Robin, the eldest, is a sprightly 85 – the oldest pedaller The Slow Cyclist has yet hosted. With my grandparents long gone to the twin delights of cancer and Alzheimer’s, this is the first time I’ve embarked on a multigenerational trip with anyone except my parents in decades.
Five Slow Cyclists pedal together on day two from Egirdir to Yenikoy
Chris Jourbert
While you may suspect Robin of some bionic enhancements, the beauty of The Slow Cyclist is that it democratises the two-wheeled holiday with the miracle of the e-bike. These sleek machines hum along in three power modes (four, if you fancy pedalling unassisted like a Tour de France sadist), making the cardiogram ascents and descents of the Taurus mountains feel like the manageable terrain of the Netherlands, or close enough. As with all multigenerational trips, you need a parent, and ours comes in the form of four (how modern!) – Katya, Ulaş, Gürcan and Veysel, who work with The Slow Cyclist. They appear like kindly shepherds guiding us on bends and ridges, bearing lemonade and encouragement, slipping jars of nuts into our panniers when we’re not looking.
Our five-day route – 142km in total – begins on the glassy shores of Lake Eğirdir, before we push south towards Adada, a remote 2nd-century city found up a steep scrabble of hairpins. The roads are empty but for wild tortoises and trucks stuffed with onions, perfuming the verges with an allium tang. On a normal bike, the climb would obliterate the senses and extinguish all joy. Instead, I find myself noticing the goat bells and the scent of wild oregano under tyre.
A herd of sheep at sunset in the village of Yenikoy
A picnic bench at the campsite
Christy Spring
Our first lunch appears at the village of Yeniköy in a wooden house on stilts, beside a wire-fenced chicken coop. Yılmaz, our host, ladles out tomato soup bulked with bulgur, plates of grilled aubergine and a shepherd’s salad. For dessert: chocolate mousse, an incongruous legacy from Yılmaz’s former life as a pastry chef in Antalya. When his mother fell ill, he gave up the city, the career and the marriage to return and care for her – a sacrifice which feels somewhat radical when compared to the British tendency of tucking your seniors away beneath the halogen lighting of a care home. Afterwards, we’re offered tea or coffee. The former is drunk so prolifically by the Turkish that Gürcan tells us people often put hard sugar lumps under their tongue (a practice called kitlama), to ensure every sip of liquid is sweet. Swerving the molar decay, I choose Turkish coffee, and once the last drop is drained, Veysel flips my cup onto its saucer to read my fortune in the grounds as many Turks still do.
The ancients here were less subtle in their divinations: the Romans read omens not in hot drinks but in the entrails of burnt animals, explains Ulaş as we pass the ruins of one such oracle centre after lunch. It’s now reduced to a pile of stones and fallen columns. We then follow in the footsteps of Saint Paul along a Roman road for a short hike – a man whose journey from Antalya to Antioch in Pisidia, north of Lake Egirdir, was pivotal in the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and the Western world. Today, however, the region is predominantly Muslim, the roads marked by slender minarets and shimmering silver domes, the air punctuated five times daily by the echoing calls of competing muezzins.
The village of Yeniköy
Christy Spring
After finishing our hike and pedalling for the day, we visit Raziye, a woman from one of the many nomadic tribes still found in these hills. Her house doubles as a museum – living room overflowing with her embroidery and paintings, tables strewn with rose oil bottles, cellophane-wrapped apple cake and bags of tea. She takes us upstairs to the attic – a room coloured crimson by the Turkish flag draped over the skylight and a trove of nomadic dresses, metal crockery, rugs and rosy-cheeked dolls. Denied a university education by her father, widowed at 49 by a heart attack, her only son taken by a car crash – she channels her losses into craft. With some of the museum’s proceeds, she sponsors the education of eight local children, six of whom are girls, giving them the chance she never had in a corner of Turkey where secondary school rates, especially for women, still lag.
I wake the next morning in the village of Yeniköy to the boom of the morning call to prayer – so loud I half-expect the muezzin to be standing at the foot of my bed. We saddle up for our longest ride: 40km of higher ground, signalled by cedar and juniper, and powered by tahini, yoghurt and rechargeable lithium. Much of the route from Pazarköy to Ibisler is downhill – requiring little more than a thumb on the brake and hair poised for a Mariah Carey wind-machine moment. We break for tea in a shaded veranda next to a whitewashed building in a village in Kasımlar, where inside, beetle-browed men comb their moustaches mid-game of okey (the distant cousin of rummy). We continue downhill, arriving near Ibisler, where we stop beside a long wooden table and chairs set next to a burbling river.
A man concentrates playing a game of okey in a village in Kasımlar
Raziye's museum in her roof
Christy Spring
Although these postcard-perfect lunch stops seem serendipitous, there’s immense planning behind each meal. As Veysel explains, he and Emily Sykes from The Slow Cyclist came here a year or so before the inaugural trip took place, combing village squares and cafés, asking who was the best cook or where the best lodgings could be found. Today, it’s Ayşe, who serves up braised lamb atop buttery rice, tomato runner beans, and a syrup-drenched semolina cake so good it dilates pupils. She stands quietly at the river’s edge afterwards, bundling up pans and plates in bedsheets to carry back to her house across the water.
After lunch, Margaret and I duck behind the bushes for a wild wee (many loos in this part of Turkey are squat holes – the bush often wins). She’s a fellow slow cyclist travelling with Elsbeth; the two of them are friends in their seventies who met at the Ski Club of Great Britain and whose husbands aren’t well enough to come. Relieved, we stand listening to the birdsong. “House martin,” she says, pointing to the trees. It’s the third bird she’s identified this trip and I wonder if recognising birdsong is something you grow into. I hope so, and that my chronically online generation might one day know a swift from a swallow.
Margaret isn’t the only Slow Cyclist that I have lots to learn from. Alison, a budding horticulturalist, answers all my flora-related queries on a 2.5-hour hiking loop from Kesme on day four. With Attenborough-like depth, she identifies wild orchids, lupins, geraniums, and shoulder-high fields of flowering brassica. She patiently works out why my tomato plant bears no fruit, horrified that I pinched off the flowers from which tomatoes develop. In between plant IDs, we pass a peppering of Hellenistic tombs as we stroll across the flower-studded grassland. Ulaş points out holes drilled into the stone, meant for pouring water to keep the dead hydrated in the afterlife.
Making gözleme
Christy Spring
Gürcan is equally enthusiastic about plants. “We have lots of erotic trees in Turkey!” he says, brushing his hand over a trunk. “The eucalyptus, juniper, and oriental planes all shed their bark and get naked!” He explains the fierce protection of nature in Turkey and that the last Ottoman ruler threatened to behead anyone who cut down a tree unlawfully. Today, beheading is off the table, but you still can’t fell one unless you’re local, and only for your firewood quota.
We see that wood burning in an open hearth in the village hall kitchen of Cukurca – a cool, dark stone room where two women sit on cushions at a low wooden table strewn with newspaper. They are rolling out gözleme – the beloved Turkish flatbread – ours stuffed generously with spinach and feta. It’s not my first; I’ve inhaled many on Kingsland Road when hunting for necessary ABV absorption. But here, watching dough shaped with mechanical precision and flipped on rolling pins with a flick of the wrist, it’s hard not to be impressed. I try it myself, with all the grace of a collapsing deck chair. I’m told it’s a skill every good homemaker needs. Apparently my bid for wife of the year remains on shaky ground.
The gözleme making trio
After lunch, we retire to what had been our home for the past two nights – a tented camp pitched high above the Köprüçay river canyon. In a place as remote as this, hotels are as rare as traffic lights, but our camp is far from spartan: canvas bell tents with proper beds, Turkish rugs, fairylights, and thick duvets. Turn-down (yurt-down?) service arrives nightly from Katya, bearing hot-water bottles and portable chargers. Our nearest neighbours are goats, sheep, and two shepherds. Gürcan insists you can tell them apart because the goat-herder swears constantly.
We dine each evening in a large communal tent on food cooked by Zaynab – fish wrapped and steamed in vine leaves, mercimek köftesi and hung yoghurt – accompanied by the strum of a folk band from Antalya. The nights are seamless; you forget the effort behind hauling food, washing up and keeping the lights on in such a remote campsite. Going to bed in a canvas yurt to the percussion of a thunderstorm is, I suspect, as close as you’ll ever get to the womb without a time machine.
Inside the bell tent
Our final full day of cycling is a 28km descent to Çaltepe, marked by the disappearance of juniper trees and the coniferous scent of pine reminiscent of childhood holidays spent in northern Spain. We finish at a stone guest house framed by rose fields, the men sent to the Turkish barber, the women to a masseuse. Over dinner, I ask Robin why he comes on these trips. “I used to ski with Margaret and Elsbeth, but my undercarriage is gone, so I had to retire,” he says with a smile. “I like a party and for things to be organised, so The Slow Cyclist is perfect.” When Gürcan notes that this is the youngest and oldest group he’s hosted, Robin laughs and vows never to put his age on a form again.
It’s a fitting bookend to a week that’s been about making distances feel smaller – not just the switchback roads and cedar-lined climbs smoothed by an e-bike motor, but the gap between people who might otherwise never travel together. In the space of a few days, I’ve learned bird calls, wildflower names, what it’s like to fly Concorde and the importance of leaving tomato blossoms alone – lessons that didn’t come from guidebooks, but from the people pedalling beside me. The villages we’ve rolled through have offered their own lessons too: the simple pleasure of shared meals, the importance of understanding the land that feeds, and the unspoken pact to care for those closest, no matter what the sacrifice. Coming from somewhere where the generational weave is far looser, that has been as striking as the scenery.
Coming from somewhere where the generational weave is far looser, that has been as striking as the scenery
On our final 10km ride before Antalya on day six, I think back to Ulaş at Sagalassos. The terrain here would be a lung-bursting ordeal without the motor of an e-bike – the kind of trip reserved for Lycra-clad masochists. With one, it’s open to the rest of us: a journey into a part of the world you’d never otherwise reach, in the company of people you might never otherwise meet. As the road tips skywards, I click into turbo on my e-bike and fly up the asphalt. I suppose power isn’t just muscle – it’s tactics. And sometimes, it’s the flick of a thumb.
Five-night trip to the Taurus Mountains from £3,495 per person; theslowcyclist.com
