Travel tips for Turkey: When to go there?

Late May and June are when nature is at its most glorious: mountains still have a lot of snow, rivers are wild and the excitement of the yayla season is in the air. Most moun¬tain festivals take place in June. July and August are pleasantly warm. Some high mountain passes, eg. the Kaçkar and Yalnizçam passes, are only reliably open in this season. Late September and October offer the best chances of bright, clear days, although they are too late for swimming. Nobody travels east of Istanbul in winter, simply because nobody has traveled there
in winter to tell how beautiful it really gets. CLIMATE
Black Sea climate is mild and very rainy. Rainfall increases as one goes east. Rizc gets 173 rainy days per annum on the aver¬age, spread evenly throughout the year. (Çamlıhemsin gets over 200 days of rain in most years. Trabzon averages 141 days. Samsun 133 with much drier summers. In terms of total amount of precipitation. Rizc leads the national leagues with 2.3 tons per Antalya in the summer months.
Temperatures are moderate, without extremes of either hot or cold. The average daily maximum at the coast is a pleasant 26 degrees C in July and August, and 23 degrees C in May and September. Winter is mild, with limited snowfall and (especially in Rize) hardly any frostever.
Bright sunshine is not rare, either. On many days it can alternate back and forth with rainy weather. Sea water averages a perfect 24 degrees C in July and August, although it tends to be on the chilly side in June. The sea is Usu¬ally clean, but may sometimes get murky near
the shore after rainfall. There are no tides. Higher altitudes have more sunshine and sharper changes in temperature. On a typical day, clouds gather below 1200 m in the morn¬ing and gradually move upward to the moun¬tain peaks with warming air. So it is better to plan to cross high mountain passes early in the day. Permanent snow is seen above 3000 m. The region "behind the mountains" tends to be warmer in summer. and colder in winter. The amount of precipitation varies drastically according to altitude (higher gets more rain), distance from the coast (closer gets more), and direction (facing north gets more). Some of the wettest and driest spots in Turkey are found within several miles of each other in the Yusufeli district.