Turkey Travel Guide

Turkey is a large country in the shape of a rectangle – the only country bordered by four seas. the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Marmara, the smallest sea in the world. Teeming with fish, it belongs solely to Turkey where it is known as the “sweet sea”.

The country’s size is such that it takes seventy-five minutes for the sun to rise on all sixty-seven provinces. Turkey is a glorious, fascinating country, a perpetual divide between West and East, the past and the present, secularism and Islam, and between conservation and progress.

The natural beauty of the landscape, from the steep mountains in the interior to the undulating steppe, from the lunar landscapes of Cappadocia to the translucent seas, from the pebble and sandy beaches to the remains of ancient temples and other traces of the past, all make this a most enchanting country. Herodotus, who was born here, said that the Turkish coast and sky were the most beautiful in the world. It is a country where over the centuries twelve civilisations have taken root, each one building on the former, and where each one has left its mark giving shape and origin to an immense culture of which we are all, at least in part, children and heirs.

After Palestine, it is the country where Christians can rediscover the origins of their faith – the source of both the Tigris and Euphrates, the biblical rivers of Paradise and the progenitors of humanity.

Turkey is also a country described in art and literature as a dissolute place, where voluptuousness and sensuality ruled in the harem where the Sultan reigned over plump and ravishing odalisques. Lycian society, in Turkey, governed by a parliament, was the world’s most ancient republic.

Turks are hospitable, generous and helpful. In the big cities people are frenzied and always in a hurry, but in the interior people live according to the same nomadic and peasant rules and traditions that have existed for centuries.

For nine thousand years, stretching back to the Neolithic period, women in Turkey have woven and stitched carpets; mostly Kilims which abound in religious and mythological symbols, and are called, not by chance, the “carpets of the gods”. Turkish cuisine, the third most important in the world after French and Chinese, has a long tradition of giving pleasure in order, at one time, to titillate the sophisticated palates of the Sultans. Indeed the ancient Roman employed Turkish cooks to work in their kitchens.

Turkey is the paradise of the olive, the vine, citrus fruits and vegetables; it ranks sixth in the world in terms of wine production. It is the country of cashmere, the highly prized wool, and of cotton and linen; in the south of the country cast acreages of plantations are found alongside modern oil refineries. Turkey is a country with fifty seven million inhabitants, and it has been a republic since 1923 when Ankara became the capital.

This great city is modern, accessible and filled with tree-lined boulevards. It is also a European political city and the seat of parliament.

But Istanbul is still the centre of ancient attractions that will never be forgotten in the souls of the Turks. Today the city looks like an old lady, with its silhouette of minarets and its long bridge, a city of magic and mystery.

It has kept its magnificent ruins of the past and the glory of a place at one time dominated by three empires, fabulous Byzantium, then Constantinople the magnificent, and today beautiful Istanbul.