“Ah, have a good day!” he yelled in English, breaking a wide grin, to which all I could do was reply “cok iyi,” meaning very good, the Turkish words I had learned on my first day here in an impromptu lesson from a taxi driver.

And so the friendliness of Turkish strangers accompanied me for the three weeks I spent in Istanbul and along Turkey’s Aegean coast, where I found a wealth of antiquities, architecture and art with few parallels in the Mediterranean, not to mention impossibly blue seas and feasts of small plates known as mezes at non-euro prices.

From Istanbul, I made a daylong drive to the stunning northern Aegean village of Assos. Swimming off its pebbly beach into empty green-blue waters, under cliffs studded with olive trees and humming with cicadas, near ruins visited by both Aristotle and St. Paul, was such perfection that I nearly spent the rest of my vacation there. After all, the camel I saw slurping tree leaves off a dusty road seemed happy to stay where he was.

But Greco-Roman sites, Byzantine and Islamic art masterpieces, and untouched Mediterranean scenery beckoned, and everywhere, people went out of their way to make this stranger welcome.

GRECO-ROMAN SPLENDOR: To grumble, as many tour books do, that there is not much to see at Troy is akin to calling the Eiffel Tower a jumble of iron bars. True, technically, but that is to ignore the breathless feeling of gazing at walls and columns where Homeric heroes lived 3,000 years ago, of looking over the same cultivated plain baking in the midday heat.

Ancient Greek civilizations built acropolises a few hours south of Troy, none more “high city” than Pergamon, where the remains of a superb temple and a theater from the third century B.C. are carved atop a barren mountain. Not far off are evocative ruins of three Ionian cities, including the giant theater of Miletus and the elaborately carved columns of the Dydima temple, so tall that you feel Lilliputian. My favorite is Priene, lying on the side of a pine-covered hill so utterly off the tourist routes that the only noise I heard was the tinkle of sheep bells amid the 2,300-year-old streets.

None of these sites, nor most ancient ruins anywhere, can top the exuberance of nearby Ephesus, the Roman city halfway down the Aegean coast that dominated the Eastern classical world.

You can still walk its main marble road to the richly carved library and gigantic theater, past squares, statues, and what must have been the wealthiest Romans’ penthouse apartments.