Hoş geldiniz!
Welcome to turkeyfromtheInside, the website that aims to help you make the most of your time in the country. Come here to find out not just about the most popular places to visit such as Istanbul, Ephesus and Cappadocia but also about more off-the-beaten-track destinations that you may well have to yourself.
I have had the great privilege of enjoying a relationship with Turkey/Türkiye that goes right back to 1974 when I first came to what was then a very different country straight from school in England. After several return trips, in the 1990s I started to write about the country professionally for a variety of publications but at that time mainly for the Lonely Planet guidebook company, which gave me the opportunity to travel all over the country from Edirne to Rize and from Datça to Hakkari.
In the 2000s I started to write a Turkey travel page for a local newspaper which allowed me to fill in the off-the-beaten-track gaps in my knowledge such as the beautiful ruins at Arykanda and Yedikilise. At the same time I also wrote a travel page for Time Out İstanbul in English which focused on destinations within easy reach of Istanbul such as Enez and Trilye.
In 2010 I co-authored Istanbul The Ultimate Guide/Istanbul Hakkında Her Şey which covers some of the less well-known corners of the city as well as its highlights and also wrote the award-winning Istanbul Select for Insight guidebooks. At the same time I worked on The Little Hotel Book which let me visit many of Turkey’s boutique hotels while work for Northstar Media took me to many of the country’s four and five-star chain hotels.
From 1998 to 2016 I lived in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. While living there I wrote A Handbook for Living in Turkey, the first specialist guide to life for expats in the country.
In 2023 my first book of travel literature was published by Trailblazer Publications in the UK. Researching Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell gave me another fantastic opportunity to explore the country’s remoter corners, this time on the trail of a great British explorer whose travels here had gone largely unnoticed.