BY Koray Kuzu In 2015, UNESCO named Gaziantep a Creative City of Gastronomy — the only Turkish city on that list, placing it alongside Lyon and Parma. The honor wasn’t awarded for a single famous dish, but for an entire culinary system: a cuisine with roughly 6,000 years of continuous development, 291 officially registered local dishes, and a […]
BY Koray Kuzu Most first-time visitors picture Turkey as sun-bleached coastline and arid Anatolian plains, which makes the Black Sea region genuinely surprising: dense forests, emerald highland lakes, and tea plantations climbing green mountainsides, all on the same stretch of Turkish coast most itineraries never touch. Trabzon, the region’s largest city, is the gateway to this entirely different […]
BY Koray Kuzu Ephesus is the best-preserved ancient city on the Mediterranean, and it’s not close — no other site in the region combines this scale of intact Roman architecture with this much layered history: Greek foundations, Roman imperial wealth, and a central role in early Christianity, all within a single walkable archaeological park near the Aegean coast. […]
BY Koray Kuzu In Turkish culture, a guest isn’t a social obligation to manage — they’re treated as a gift sent by God. The phrase “Tanrı misafiri” (God’s guest) captures this directly, and it explains an enormous amount about daily life in Turkey: the endless tea, the table that keeps refilling no matter how full you are, and […]
BY Koray Kuzu When a travel agency sells a 30-person group tour of Turkey, the client sees an itinerary. What they don’t see is everything underneath it: block-booked hotel rooms, a coordinated fleet of coaches with licensed drivers, a guide who’s confirmed availability weeks in advance, and a local team ready to solve the problem the moment a […]
BY Koray Kuzu Turkey drinks more tea per capita than any other country in the world — roughly 3.5 kilograms per person a year — and almost all of it, around 99%, is grown domestically. Çay isn’t treated as a beverage choice so much as a social default: offered to guests, customers, and strangers alike, served constantly from […]
BY Koray Kuzu Turkey remains one of the best-value destinations reachable from Europe, and the range between a shoestring trip and a luxury one is wide: realistic daily costs in 2026 run from roughly $45-65 for a budget traveler up to $250-300+ for a luxury one, with a comfortable mid-range trip landing around $100-160 per day. Prices vary […]
BY Koray Kuzu Istanbul is the only city in the world split across two continents, and that single fact shapes daily life for millions of its residents in a very literal way: many Istanbullus cross between Europe and Asia as part of an ordinary commute, by ferry, not as a novelty but as routine transportation. Strip away the […]
BY Koray Kuzu Pide, lahmacun, and pizza all start from the same basic idea — flattened dough, baked hot, topped with something savory — and that resemblance causes constant confusion for first-time visitors to Turkey. But the three are genuinely different dishes with different doughs, different toppings, and different histories. Knowing which is which turns a Turkish menu […]
BY Koray Kuzu Amasya sits in a narrow valley in north-central Turkey where the Yeşilırmak — the “Green River” — cuts between steep limestone cliffs, and the result is one of the most complete historical landscapes in Anatolia: Ottoman timber houses lining the riverbank on one side, and monumental rock-cut royal tombs carved into the cliff face on […]
