Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay on Monday announced that the area surrounding the village of Şirince in İzmir province will be among the areas his ministry plans to put under protection.

Speaking at a meeting to review tourism activities in the region, Günay stated that Şirince will be a protected area, as well as Bozdağ, in the southwestern province of Denizli, and Karakaya and Hekimdağ in the eastern province of Malatya.

Şirince became a center of attraction for believers in a prophecy based on the Mayan calendar that the world would end on Dec. 21, 2012. In the village, there are two 19th-century churches — one restored, one in the process of being restored — that survive from the period before the 1924 Greco-Turkish population exchange there. The town was a former Ottoman Greek settlement whose elegant wooden-framed houses were built on terraces on the hillside.

The minister further stated that tourism activities have been affected by the violence in Syria. “Normally we host around 1 million Iranian tourists each year, but this year there was a 40 percent drop in the number of the tourists coming from Iran,” said Günay.

The minister added that they will increase the bed capacity in the protected areas, with 18,000 beds planned. “Turkey is now among the top 10 countries in tourism in the world and we aim to be among the five with a steady growth in tourism,” added Günay.

According to data released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in December, the number of foreign visitors to Turkey rose by 0.6 percent between January and November 2012, reaching 30.4 million visitors. Turkey’s total revenue from tourism in 2011 equaled $23 billion, while the figure for the first three-quarters of last year was $17.3 billion.