bloggingaboutturkey

In front of the entrance to Eğirdir’s magnificent Dundar Bey Medrese Tahir Usta is stirring a vast cauldron of a curious yellow paste. I peer into it suspiciously. There are patches of oil on the top and pistachios floating haphazardly round the edges. “What is it?” I ask. “Irmak helva,” comes the reply. For...

It’s an oft-commented fact that once a place has been sanctified by the erection of a religious building it tends to remain sacred even after the dominant religion changes. So in the East End of London it’s possible to come across the odd building that has served in turn as a...

Last year I made a hare-brained dash to Şavşat in northeastern Turkey in the depths of winter. The reason? Nearby Veliköy is the one village in the country where men engage in the deeply unTurkish sport of kar güreşi (snow wrestling).I say deeply unTurkish because anyone who has lived here for...

It was one of these days we all have when we wish that we’d just stayed in bed with the duvet over our head. I’d planned to take the fast-ferry across the Sea of Marmara from Yenikapı to Bandırma. There I’d planned to pick up a bus to Gönen to catch...

I remember the heat. I remember the dust. I remember the curiously impassive faces. I remember the rumble of the giant Caterpillar trucks. I remember our minivan creeping into town in the early hours of daylight like a child late for school and fearing retribution.

Just two weeks earlier the horrific Marmara earthquake had ripped through Adapazarı at 3.02 am, killing thousands of its citizens and reducing to rubble the homes of many, many more. It was a tragedy that held all Turkey transfixed and from all over the country people rushed to help. In Göreme a group of us commandeered an empty shop and set up a collecting point for anything anyone, local or tourist, felt able to donate. Then after much bureaucratic shenaniganing we set off to deliver it, our minivan racing ahead with a heavy potato truck from Derinkuyu full of donated items bringing up the rear.

When I first started travelling around Turkey I was completely mystified by local bed-making habits. There it was, this otherwise clean and welcoming hotel, but when it came time to go to bed I’d find myself confronted with what appeared to be a package of sheets and blankets neatly laid out...

  It’s a story that has become set in stone. It goes something like this. In 2008 sculptor Mehmet Aksoy started work on a 30-metre-high statue of a man and a woman in Kars in northeastern Turkey. He called it Insanlık (Humanity) or posssibly Dostluk (Friendship) – opinions seemed to...

“The most complete cycle of frescoes this side of Ani,” said my copy of the Rough Guide to Turkey which was enough to have me hotfooting it back to the dismal mining and dam-building town of Borçka in Turkey’s remote north-east, a town I’d sworn never to revisit when last I...

The köy arabası (village van) is a phenomenon, the beaten-up, broken-down last link in the long chain of Turkey’s fantastic public transport system, a system designed to ensure that there’s hardly a place in the country with more then five occupants that doesn’t have some kind of link to the outside...

Dear Turkish hotelier, As a result of my work I spend far too many nights sleeping in hotels and I can certainly vouch for the quality of many of the places that I stay in, even though they rarely fall into the five-star luxury bracket. On the other hand there’s still...