For 30 years, Ceylan Şensoy worked in Turkish tourism from the ground up, ending as product marketing and development director at the national tourism board. His current job is harder: turning Rize and Artvin, a corner of the northeastern Black Sea known for cheap summer breaks, into a year-round adventure destination. The lever was not infrastructure. It was persuading the people who live there.
The Kaçkar mountains run along the Black Sea coast near the Georgian border, an extension of the Pontic range with alpine geology and climate. Şensoy describes a destination that had boxed itself in.
“It was mostly preferred by Middle Eastern and Turkish tourists who like to escape from hot summer days,” she says. They came for the high plateaus, the cool air and the rivers, stayed in bungalows, and did little else. “They would just get there and not move around, not spend much money, just rest by the shores of the rivers.”
A narrow product, in other words, sold to a narrow market across three months of the year. The Discover Kaçkar initiative set out to widen all three: the season, the visitor base and the range of things to do, repositioning the mountains as a full nature, adventure and sports destination.
“I’m not sure if they really were interested in having a longer season, or having more tourists,” Şensoy says. Residents feared that newcomers and foreigners would ruin the place. So she spent his time talking, to tourism stakeholders first and then to anyone she could find, trying to understand what the community actually wanted.
What she found was generational. As people aged, they wanted their children to be proud of the destination, and they wanted them to stay rather than leave for the big cities to earn a living. Building a tourism model around that, she says, was the right starting point.
The second problem was capacity. The region could build the infrastructure and market itself abroad, but it lacked the trained guides, restaurateurs and hoteliers to serve the visitors it wanted to attract. That meant training people, and that is not a one-year job.
“It’s a long, several-years, lifetime project,” she says. “The biggest challenge was to make the locals feel it and accept it internally, without the pressure coming from above. If they accept and embrace the project, it will last.”
The early numbers suggest it is taking. After Kaçkar by UTMB, the first UTMB World Series ultramarathon held in Türkiye, which brought more than 1,800 athletes to Ayder in September 2025, average length of stay rose from 1.1 nights to 3.4. Şensoy says visitor expenditure increased roughly tenfold, and rated the event above 85% in participant reviews. Other international events are now approaching the region unprompted.
Trail, cycling and walking routes for the region are published at www.discoverkackar.com.