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It's a long bus trip between Istanbul and, say, Munich (36 hours), and can be more expensive than a cut-rate airfare, but if you want to travel between Turkey and Europe by bus, you can.

Note that you may need transit visas for the countries that the bus passes through such as Bulgaria and Serbia, depending on your passport. Check with the bus company and the countries' diplomatic posts for requirements.

Here are the principal companies running buses to cities in central Europe. (See also the pages on buses to Bulgaria and Romania, and buses to Greece.)

VARAN (Büyük Otogar Office Nos. 15-16)
Varan operates buses weekly to Austria from Istanbul's Büyük Otogar.

Buses to Austria depart at midnight on Tuesday and Friday, stopping at Vienna (27 hours), St Pölten, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Bludenz, Feldkirch, Dornbirn and Bregenz (39 hours).

The fare is TL240 from Istanbul to Vienna, €110 from Vienna to Istanbul.

The Varan website is pretty good and easy to use, even the English-language section.

ULUSOY (Büyük Otogar Office No. 127-128)
Ulusoy runs one bus weekly between Istanbul and Germany, departing Wednesday morning. The bus boards a ferry at Igoumenitsa, Greece, sails to Ancona, Italy, and stops at Verona, then Innsbruck, Munich, Nürnberg, Ulm, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, finally arriving in Frankfurt on Friday morning after a 48-hour trip.

The return trip starts Saturday morning from the Frankfurt bahnhof (train station; tel (49-69) 23 47 73, 23 44 43).

One-way fare between Istanbul and Frankfurt is TL250, round-trip/return is TL380. Fares to other cities are less. The fare for the 16-hour ferryboat voyage is not included, and must be paid by each passenger. Cabins are available on the ferry—best to reserve in advance.

The Ulusoy website is poorly designed, buggy and difficult to use, with mysterious navigation. In the English section, put your cursor over "Customer Solutions Center" on the left side of the screen, and choose "International Travel Routes." This should take you to the international routes, but when I last did it I got "Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0411'." Helpful!

METRO TURIZM
One of Turkey's largest and best bus companies has a website that I find nearly impenetrable, so I'm afraid I can't give you much information on Metro's European routes. The website is a dancing-baloney web designer's fantasy come true: it flashes, it jerks, it beeps, but to find out where Metro buses go in Europe, you must...already know where Metro buses go in Europe! You must also know which days they go, because if you enter a date into the cryptic online ticket form on which a bus does not run, you receive the message "No departure was found that fits your criteria. Please change your criteria and try again."

How is it possible for such a huge, good company to have such a miserably unusable website?

TurkeyTravelPlanner.com also has a page for buses to Bulgaria and other Balkan countries.