City Guide · Black Sea

Giresun Travel Guide

Kuşköy's Whistling Language, Kuzalan, and the Hazelnut Coast.

Show Me Türkiye May 2026 8 min read

Field notes

Giresun: tips for first-timers.

01 Stay in central Giresun. Small city, walking distance to the harbour, the island view, and the food street.
02 Boat to the island independently. Don’t pay for organised tours. Local boatmen run by the hour for less.
03 Kuşköy is half a day. The whistling-language village is two hours inland. Combine with Kuzalan waterfall to make it a full trip.
04 Avoid the August harvest. Hazelnut trucks thicken the coast road, so expect slower going along the D010 in late summer.
05 Watch for the fog. In the Giresun highlands (Kümbet/Gölyanı), thick fog can roll in within minutes, even in summer. Always keep your headlights on and drive slow when visibility drops.

In this story

7 chapters, one story.

01Kuzalan Nature Park1 min
02Mavi Göl and the Goksu Travertines1 min
03Kümbet Plateau1 min
04Gölyanı Plateau1 min
05Çağlayan Waterfall1 min
06Kuşköy, the village that whistles1 min
07Deliklitaş Beach1 min

Giresun is the Black Sea province most people pass through on the way to Trabzon. That is the mistake. The interior here has more nature parks per square kilometre than any single itinerary can absorb, and one village in particular speaks a language you cannot find anywhere else on Earth.

The province takes its name from kerasos, the Greek for cherry, Giresun is supposedly where the first cherry tree to make it to Rome came from in 74 BC, brought by the general Lucullus. The agriculture has changed since then. Today Giresun sits at the heart of Turkey's hazelnut belt. Turkey produces around 70% of the world's hazelnuts, most of it along this eastern Black Sea coast, and the Giresun Tombul variety is the most prized of them all. The upper slopes are organised around tea, dairy, and the village rhythms of the eastern Black Sea.

The seven stops below are inland, with one final return to the coast. Take them as a two-day loop. The road climbs and twists, so allow more time than a map suggests. And if you want to see these places in motion before you go, there are a few of our own films from the region further down the page.

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01Nature Park

Kuzalan Nature Park.

A waterfall, a viewing platform, and forests that go on.

1 min read

Kuzalan sits inland from Dereli, about forty-five kilometres up from Giresun on the coast, deep in the kind of beech-and-spruce forest that the eastern Black Sea does better than anywhere else in Türkiye. The main draw is the waterfall, a long, multi-stage drop you can view from a series of platforms cantilevered out over the gorge.

The walk down from the upper parking area to the lower viewing platform takes about twenty minutes on a wooden boardwalk. The return up takes longer. Wear shoes you can actually walk in. The forest itself is what stays with you. You come for the waterfall and end up sitting on a bench listening to the wind move through several million leaves at once.

Best in late spring through mid-summer. The waterfall flow peaks in May and June after the snowmelt. By August the volume drops noticeably.

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02Geology · Two short stops

Mavi Göl and the Goksu Travertines.

A small blue lake and a working travertine formation.

1 min read

Mavi Göl, the Blue Lake, is exactly what the name says, a small lake whose water reads as a clear turquoise blue because of the mineral content and the depth. It is fifteen minutes off the main road, easy to reach, and almost always empty of crowds.

Further on, the Goksu Travertines are the eastern Black Sea's miniature answer to Pamukkale. Hot mineral water has deposited carbonate over thousands of years, building shallow terraces down a slope. The scale is much smaller than Pamukkale's, but the geology is the same and there is nobody else there.

Pair them as half a day. Both are quick. The drive between them is the slow part. Tip: Mavi Göl's color is weather-dependent. If it has rained heavily the night before, the water may lose its signature turquoise hue. Mid-summer days are your best bet for the perfect photograph.

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03Yayla · 1,650 m

Kümbet Plateau.

High summer pasture with a long horizon.

1 min read

Kümbet is the kind of yayla you can drive to, park, walk twenty metres, and immediately understand why people who grew up on the coast spend their summers here. The temperature drops noticeably. The grass is short and green. Cows graze. The air has a particular highland smell that we cannot describe without sounding like a brochure.

There is a small festival here in July (the Kümbet Yayla Festival) which is worth catching if you can. Otherwise the plateau is a place to sit, drink tea at one of the small cafes, and walk along the ridge.

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04Yayla · Less visited

Gölyanı Plateau.

The quieter alternative to Kümbet.

1 min read

Gölyanı is what Kümbet was twenty years ago. The road is rougher, the facilities are simpler, the views are similar. If you want to see a Black Sea plateau without the festival crowds, this is the one to drive to.

Take a 4x4 or a high-clearance car. Bring food because there's not much in the way of restaurants. Stay until the light starts to change because the sunset across the ridge from Gölyanı is one of those views that, frankly, the eastern Black Sea has more of than any region needs.

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05Waterfall · Yağlıdere

Çağlayan Waterfall.

A short stop on the road back toward the coast.

1 min read

Çağlayan Şelalesi is in the Yağlıdere district inland from the coast. It is a roadside waterfall in the best sense, visible from the parking, easy to walk up to, and refreshing in the literal sense if you stand close enough.

There are local restaurants near the falls that grill alabalık (river trout) raised in ponds fed by the same water. Lunch here is the obvious move. Plan thirty to forty minutes for the falls, longer if you stay for the trout.

The Black Sea version of a perfect lunch: river trout, a half-litre of ayran, the sound of a waterfall through the open window.

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06The Whistling Village

Kuşköy, the village that whistles.

A Black Sea valley where conversation crosses kilometres.

1 min read

Kuşköy means Bird Village, and the name comes from the way locals communicate across the deep valleys here, by whistling. Not signalling, actually speaking: full Turkish vocabulary, encoded into whistled tones that carry across distances where shouting wouldn't work.

It is one of the strangest and most beautiful linguistic survivals anywhere. UNESCO inscribed the whistling language of Kuşköy on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2017. It is still spoken, though older speakers worry that mobile phones are killing it faster than the previous century of paved roads.

There is an annual Whistling Language Festival in July, and a small visitor centre in the village where, if someone is around, you can hear a demonstration. Whether or not you catch a demonstration, the drive in, through the steep tea-and-corn slopes of the upper Çanakçı valley, is worth the trip on its own. Kuşdili (the whistling language) is not a performance; it is a living tradition used by villagers to communicate across deep valleys. Respect the locals if you visit; it is their daily tool, not a tourist show.

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07Beach · Coast

Deliklitaş Beach.

A natural arch and a swimmable cove.

1 min read

End the loop at Deliklitaş, a small cove out near Görele, east of Giresun centre toward Trabzon, where a natural arch of dark volcanic rock juts out of the sea. The name means "holed stone". You can swim through the arch in calm weather.

The beach itself is short, the water is clean, and the rock formation gives the place a graphic, photo-friendly quality that almost no other Black Sea beach has. Local families come for sunset because the western light hits the arch exactly the right way.

Mavi Göl, the Blue Lake — high above the coast in Giresun’s plateau country.

Watch the film

See Giresun in motion.

A short cinematic film from our journey.

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