Destination: Turkey

LONELY PLANET'S OFFICIAL GUIDEBOOK INFORMATION

Travel Literature

Since time immemorial travellers have written about their rambles across Turkey. Herodotus (5th century BC), Xenophon (5th century BC) and Strabo (1st century BC) have all left us accounts of Anatolia in antiquity. The famous march to Persia by the Greek army, immortalised in Xenophon’s Anabasis, has been retraced some 2400 years later by Shane Brennan in his fabulous tale, In the Tracks of the Ten Thousand: a journey on foot through Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters details the author’s travels to Istanbul with her husband, the British ambassador to Turkey, in 1716. It’s a surprisingly nonjudgemental account of life at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.

Edmondo De Amicis’ Constantinople, first published in 1877, has been recently translated into English. While its main focus is ?stanbul, this classic beautifully details the exoticism of the city and the cosmopolitan nature of 19th-century Turkey. Alexander’s Path, by the indomitable Freya Stark, will appeal to those who wish they too could have visited the classical sites of the coast in the early 20th century.

In From the Holy Mountain, William Dalrymple retraces the journey of 6th-century monk John Moschos who wandered the reaches of eastern Byzantium from Mt Athos, Greece, through ?stanbul, Anatolia, and the Middle East to Egypt. This is a gripping meditation on the declining Christian communities, and amusing ta boot. ?stanbul-based poet John Ash provides a must-read for anyone interested in the Byzantine monuments scattered around ?stanbul, Cappadocia and the rest of Turkey in A Byzantine Journey. Balthasar’s Odyssey, by Amin Maalouf, is a gripping tale of a Levantine merchant who travels through 17th-century Constantinople in search of the ‘hundredth name’ of God.

The lives of the disappearing Yörük, once one of Anatolia’s largest nomadic tribes, have long captured the imagination of writers. Irfan Orga’s superbly evocative The Caravan Moves On: Three Weeks Among Turkish Nomads, first published in 1958, details the author’s journey and insights into the lives and lores of the nomads in the 1950s. An excellent follow-up read is Bolkar, Travels with a Donkey in the Taurus Mountains, by Dux Schneider, a bitter-sweet insight into the lives of the Yörük and Tatars today.

The 8.55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, by Andrew Eames, retraces the crime queen’s travels on the Orient Express with a chapter dedicated to the author’s Turkey adventures.

Travelling to Turkey?
Lonely Planet recommends World Nomads Travel insurance