Over 385 thousand Iranian tourists have visited Turkey in the first 9 months of the current year marking a 12 percent growth in the numbers of Iranians visiting the country as compared to the same period last year, IRNA reported from Ankara.

The number of Iranian tourists visiting Turkey in the first nine months of the year 2002 amounted to 343,497 showing an increase of 33.05 as compared to the same period the previous year.

According to statistics released by Turkey's Ministry of Tourism, the number of Iranian tourists traveling to Turkey just in September amounted to 84,977 and the figure shows a 55.35 percent increase in the number of Iranian tourists visiting the country as compared to the figure for the same period in 2002.

Iranian nationals constitute 3.3 percent of the total number of foreign tourists visiting Turkey.

In 2002, 432,224 Iranian tourists visited Turkey, registering a 32.12 percent decline compared to the figure for the same period the year before.

Iranian tourists mostly visit Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and the Turkish port cities on the Mediterranean Sea, specially Antalya. Turkey's tourism sector attracted 6,772,331 tourists in the first seven months of 2003. The number of tourists showed a 2.45 percent decline compared to the same period in 2002.

Turkey earns about dlrs 10 billion out of tourism a year.