Karaisalı and Pozantı are a pair of nearby towns in the mountainous north of the Cilician Plains.

Here the interconnected Cilician Gates (the modern Gülek Pass) and Çakıt Valley have allowed passage through the sheer Taurus Mountains en route between the Anatolian plateau and Cilicia (and by extension between Europe and the Middle East) since antiquity. This distinctive geography endowed the area with numerous natural and historical attractions.

Karaisalı has a population of about 7,000. Pozantı is slightly larger at about 10,000. Both are districts of Adana Province.

Gülek, with a population of about 2,000, is officially a part of the Tarsus district. However, it is a mountain town sharing little in common with Tarsus of the coastal plains, and you have to go through it when travelling between Karaisalı and Pozantı by car, so it is also covered in this article.

In the late 19th century, the rivalry among major European powers forced the German Empire to search routes to its far flung colonies in Africa and the Pacific bypassing the maritime choke points controlled by the British, which included Dover, Gibraltar, and Suez. At about the same time, the Ottoman Empire was quickly losing grip in its outlying territories and wanted to maintain at least its Muslim-majority southern provinces. So the two empires almost spontaneously found themselves in an alliance over the ambitious idea of a railway project that would link Berlin to the ports on the Persian Gulf through Constantinople. Thus began alliance would last well into World War I.

At first, a rail line across the flatter Anatolian plateau was considered. But the Russian Empire, which had recently enlarged its borders to include parts of Eastern Anatolia, opposed that plan. The other idea was to run the line over the coastal plains along the Mediterranean, but that was found to be too dangerously close to the range of the British navy, which controlled Cyprus by that time — not to mention Britain made its objection to the project clear, viewing it as a "gun pointed at India", its most profitable colony at that time. So there was only one option left: the sheer undertaking of laying the line down through the Taurus Mountains.

The engineers initially hoped to cross the mountains through the well-trodden Cilician Gates, but the incline there was found to be too steep for railway equipment. So they drew the shortest straw ever, and got to work along the Çakıt Valley.

What they accomplished is an astonishing engineering feat, especially considering it was carried out primarily manually with the late 19th–early 20th century technology, with imported materials and workforce in a very rugged area hard to access, and under war conditions during its final phases. However, the project failed to meet its original objective, as the final gaps on the line could only be plugged in literally during the final days of the war, and as the losing side of it, Germany was stripped of its colonies and Ottoman Turkey of its southern territories soon afterwards.

The Taurus crossing required the construction of 37 tunnels, 12 of them in the 17-km section between Hacıkırı and Belemedik alone. The majority of this section is within tunnels, and much of the remaining, open track needed bridging: the most impressive piece is the Varda Viaduct, which took seven years to complete between 1905 and 1912. Not only its stone masonry arches rise up to 99 m above the ravine of the Gavur Dere, a tributary of the Çakıt, but the viaduct also gently curves in its 172 m span due to the course of the railway it carries across. The locals know it as Alman Köprüsü ("the German Bridge") or affectionately as Koca Köprü ("the big / old fellow bridge"). "Varda" isn't the name of any geographical feature nearby, nor does it have a meaning as a word in Turkish. The local story ascribes it to the vardı ha! ("it's almost there!") or var daha! ("there's a ways to go!") exclamations of the workers roping building material down to their colleagues at the bottom of the ravine, or a German engineer's wife named Verda. The pedestrians are nominally forbidden to enter the viaduct by signposts, but many visitors are happily ignoring them and the Turkish Railways installed guardrails just in case. The viaduct became particularly famous after it was featured in the opening scene of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall.

Just west of the northern head of the Varda is a pair of tight tunnels dug into solid rock. A narrow gauge railway used for bringing material across during the viaduct construction ran through them. This line has since been decommissioned and its path became a single-lane road. About 400 m up this road are the remaining piers of a bridge belonging to the old narrow gauge line.

Thanks to the tunnels and bridges in-between, travelling by train to the next station northwards, Belemedik, is a breeze taking about 15 minutes, but by car it means embarking on a roundabout journey of about 80 km via Bucak, Yanıkkışla, and Gülek.

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Map of Karaisalı-Pozantı

This area can be visited as a long day trip from any of Adana, Tarsus and Mersin, or as a side trip on the way to or from Konya, Cappadocia and Ankara to the north of them.

Pozantı and Gülek are on state highway D750 snaking its way through the Taurus Mountains. Pozantı has two exits from paralleling toll motorway O-21/E90, and the exits at Akçatekir and Çamalan can be used for Gülek and nearby sites. Karaisalı is off the major highways; 33-02 connects it via Bucak to D750 (Çamalan is the nearest access to O-21/E90 in this direction) and 01-75 via Salbaş to D400 and O-51/E90 west of Adana. Both approaches are well-paved rural roads.

The passenger trains form an interesting (and appropriate) approach to the area, if infrequent. Northwards, the Toros Express^{[dead link]} (inherited its name from the Middle Eastern counterpart of the famed Orient Express) leaves Adana at 07:00 and picks up at Yenice (for Tarsus) at 07:27, and calls at 37.1915134.939121 Karaisalıbucağı (the station for Karaisalı, although it is 18 km southwest of the town, and it's uncertain whether there is a public transportation service in-between) at 08:04, 37.252134.98092 Hacıkırı (unusually named differently from the village it serves, Kıralan) at 08:20, 37.355234.91083 Belemedik at 08:35, and 37.422934.8734 Pozantı at 08:47. The Erciyes Express^{[dead link]} is the evening service, leaving Adana at 16:30 and Yenice at 16:58, and then calling at Karaisalıbucağı at 17:29, Hacıkırı at 17:39, Belemedik at 17:52, and Pozantı at 18:03. Southwards, the timetables are reversed so the morning service, the Erciyes Express leaves Kayseri at 07:30, Niğde at 09:51, and Kemerhisar at 10:14, to continue onto Pozantı at 11:48, Belemedik at 11:59, Hacıkırı at 12:13, and Karaisalıbucağı at 12:23, while the Taurus Express leaves Konya at 15:00 and Karaman at 16:41, to arrive at Pozantı at 20:17, Belemedik at 20:28, Hacıkırı at 20:45, and Karaisalıbucağı at 20:56. The tickets are bookable via the TCDD Taşımacılık website^{[dead link]}.

Public bus line 188, run by Adana Metropolitan Municipality, serves the route between Adana and Karaisalı every two hours from morning to evening, but doesn't go anywhere near the main sites of interest.

You need your own vehicle. Take your time, the roads are narrow and twisty.

• 37.255835.05931 Karaisalı is drab modern low-rise. You'd only stop to refuel yourself or the car.

• 37.233535.0152 Kapıkaya Canyon is usually entered from its southern downstream end, above Kapıkaya village 6 km southwest of Karaisalı. This gorge of the Çakıt River was occasionally used as an alternative route to Gülek Pass, and a 7 km trail has been etched into the canyon walls. The river in spate is a white-water torrent. In places the trail is close to the river, made tricky by landslips, and since 2022 you have to ford the river then cross back. Midway there's a waterfall and a rope bridge crossing.

• 37.279234.99823 Yerköprü is a picnic area at the northern upstream end of the canyon, also accessible by road from Karaisalı. The name means "land bridge" as the river disappears under the rock to reappear 250 m downstream.

• 37.243434.976784 Varda Viaduct is the most dramatic product of the project to build a railway along the Çakıt river valley. Construction began in 1906 and it opened in 1916, with a length of 172 m and height of 98 m. It's the one James Bond falls off roughly twice a week, whenever Skyfall is repeated on TV. Don't stray onto the railway, it's still active.

Thanks to the tunnels and bridges in-between, travelling by train to the next station northwards, Belemedik, is a breeze taking about 15 minutes, but by car it means embarking on a roundabout journey of about 80 km via Bucak, Yanıkkışla, and Gülek.

Past Bucak, the road comes near 37.178434.92825 another railway viaduct with several stone arches but this is kind of anticlimactic after the Varda.

Past the nondescript, pear cactus-ridden village of Yanıkkışla, the road joins D750. Northwards, the next major village is 37.19834.816 Çamalan. There is a pair of World War I military cemeteries here, the Turkish one is in the northern outskirts of the village, while the smaller German one is on the southern approach.

At the southern access on-ramp to the motorway, follow the road signposted to 37.345534.91297 Belemedik . The road will turn round to meet the railway under the motorway viaduct and will eventually bring you to the gorge of the Çakıt. Since the most daunting work would have to be managed hereabouts, the engineers of the Baghdad Railway chose this spot for a construction camp, which grew to a town housed a multinational population claimed to be as much as 20,000 at its peak, which included prisoners of war, mainly Commonwealth and French, during the latter episodes of World War I. The village barely has any full-time residents nowadays, and its name is rumoured to be a German-corrupted form of bilemedik, "we couldn't guess", the apparently all too often response of the workers who started digging a tunnel from each end, but failed to meet at the precise midpoint. The ruins of the German town are extensive, with informational signposts and illustrated site plans posted here and there. The ruins include residential and service buildings (e.g., a hospital) and various industrial plants such as a limekiln. Over time, a German cemetery grew on a hillside above the town, not necessarily because of occupational accident-related deaths as the construction activities took about two decades, much longer than predicted. The tunnels 19–14 consecutively extend just next to or a short distance away from the road north along the river gorge, while the tunnel 20 at the southern end of the village is the favourite of photography enthusiasts as the line runs across a grove of plane trees before plunging into the tunnel portal, particularly photogenic in autumn. Past this point, the road degenerates to dirt and starts climbing up the hill: this 20-km section is locally known as the 37.301134.92758 German Road (Alman Yolu) or Taşdurmaz ("[even] the stone doesn't balance"), which twists and turns southeast to Kıralan (Hacıkırı), just north of the Varda Bridge, in places right next to the railway line (or its tunnel openings and other infrastructure) and elsewhere a fair elevation above it. This was dug along the cliff face high over the Çakıt gorge to survey the possible routes for the upcoming rail line (no aerial, let alone satellite, support back then), and then served to move construction material around — even this manifestly provisional route required tunnels of its own in a couple spots. It's now a hiking trail (but has no water sources along its entire length), littered at intervals with various abandoned industrial fittings such as rusty pieces of an equipment hauling water up from the river. Sturdy and experienced mountain bikers and motorcyclists are known to do the route, but it's covered in loose scree along its entirety, partially very prone to rockslides (to the extent that a path barely wide enough to let pass a single tire right on the cliff edge is commonly all that is left after a recent avalanche), has gullies washed out a fair bit of its width, and there is nothing between you and the whopping drops to the river below. You should be mad to attempt to cover this route end-to-end in anything remotely coming close to the width of a standard car.

The 37.4711134.861949 Şekerpınarı Bridge (Şekerpınarı Köprüsü), also Akköprü ("white bridge"), is a stone humpback Roman bridge over the Çakıt. It's just to the west of D750, about 5 km north of Pozantı.

The main towns and villages in the area and on its approaches, including Salbaş, Karaisalı, and Akçatekir, have well-stocked grocery stores.

Around the main sites of interest, including Kapıkaya Canyon, Yerköprü, and the Varda Viaduct, you will find family-run businesses, often in unpretentious shacks, offering gözleme — pancakes filled with cheese, spinach, potato or meat, the most common meal taken in the Turkish countryside while on the go. Whether you can find them active may depend on the season.

Along its course between Çamalan and Pozantı, D750 features a lot of roadside restaurants, often in the scenic viewpoints.

Belemedik Restaurant is on the farther side of the ruins at Belemedik, and is run by Pozantı Municipality. It features kebabs and other grills, and any order comes with two big bowls of salad, one of tomato and other vegetables and the other onion. Daily 09:00-23:00. 75-90 TL (Oct 2022).

Nothing in Karaisalı itself.

• 37.345134.91111 Belemedik Bungalov Evleri, ☏ +90 530 234 4001. Well-maintained mountain bungalows run by Pozantı Municipality. B&B double 5000 TL. (updated May 2025)
• 37.354434.91672 Belemedik Butik Otel, Küme Evleri 166, ☏ +90 531 869 0140. Friendly efficient place on a hillside above the canyon, also Municipality-owned. B&B double 4000 TL. (updated May 2025)

History buffs and railway enthusiasts will find the rail infrastructure all over the place definitely enticing, but don't be deceived by the ancient looks of it: this is a very actively used line, and take any precautions as needed to keep you alive and in one piece.

As of May 2025, Karaisalı and its approach roads have 4G from Türk Telekom, but only a poor patchy signal from Turkcell and Vodafone. 5G has not rolled out in Turkey.

• Southwards the next large town is Tarsus, where the roads and railways diverge west to Mersin for the Mediterranean coast or east to Adana, the regional capital.
• To the north, trains and highways bring you to Konya, a major city with many Seljuk monuments and the mausoleum of Sufi poet Rumi, Aksaray en route to the national capital Ankara, and Kayseri, the gateway to Cappadocia.
• The Göksu Viaduct near Adıyaman far to the east is another impressive railway viaduct locally known as the "German Bridge". It's longer than the Varda, but lower — it spans over a river in a far more docile environment. Built in 1929, it isn't related to the Baghdad Railway and is far to the north of that project's course.

Ankara ← Niğde ←	N  S	→ Adana → Gaziantep
Ankara ← Aksaray ← (W / E) ←	N  S	→ Tarsus → Ends at