Some years ago in a dusty antique shop in Beyşehir I was shown a black-and-white postcard of a strange, lumpy-looking block of stone…
Here I am in Afyon, a conservative town as I know both from reputation and from previous visits. Accordingly, I head straight out…
“My daughters say I should market it as for the young and the deaf only.” I was chatting to the urbane female owner…
On the eastern flank of Eğirdir in the Turkish Lake District there stands a caravanserai in such an abject state of ruination that…
It didn’t look very different from any other pide I’d eaten over the years actually. Perhaps the dough was a little thinner, more…
In front of the entrance to Eğirdir’s magnificent Dundar Bey Medrese Tahir Usta is stirring a vast cauldron of a curious yellow paste.…
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…
Last year I made a hare-brained dash to Şavşat in northeastern Turkey in the depths of winter. The reason? Nearby Veliköy is the…
I remember the heat. I remember the dust. I remember the curiously impassive faces. I remember the rumble of the giant Caterpillar trucks.…
When I first started travelling around Turkey I was completely mystified by local bed-making habits. There it was, this otherwise clean and welcoming…