Seljuk Turks in Anatolia: History of the Seljuk Empire

The Seljuk Turks in Anatolia The Seljuk Turks were nomadic peoples who originated in the Central Asian steppes and entered into Anatolia in the 11th century. From here, until around 1300, they would rule an…

Pergamon and the Asclepion: Healing and Power in Ancient Turkey

Pergamon and the Asclepion: Healing and Power in Ancient Turkey The terraced acropolis of Pergamon, overlooking the Bakırçay plain in western Anatolia. Two thousand years before spa retreats and wellness clinics became a travel industry of their own, the sick and the anxious climbed a hillside above the Bakırçay plain in western Anatolia hoping a […]

Şirince Village: Wine, Peaches and Traditional Turkish Life

Şirince Village: Wine, Peaches and Traditional Turkish Life High in the hills above Kuşadası, in western Turkey, the whitewashed and terracotta-roofed houses of Şirince spill down a mountainside surrounded by peach orchards and vineyards planted on terraces cut into the slope. Once a Greek Orthodox village known as Kirkinche, its stone houses and hillside church […]

Troy, Turkey: Separating Homer’s Myth from the Archaeological Reality

Troy, Turkey: Separating Homer’s Myth from the Archaeological Reality Homer never saw Troy. By the time the Iliad took shape as oral poetry in the eighth century BCE, the Bronze Age settlement it describes had already been built, burned, and rebuilt several times over. What survives today at Hisarlik, on Turkey’s northwestern coast near the […]

ANZAC Cove, Turkey: Gallipoli’s Landscape and 1915 Campaign

ANZAC Cove: Gallipoli’s Landscape and 1915 Campaign ANZAC Cove is a small crescent of beach on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, barely wide enough to land a rowboat, hemmed in on three sides by ridgelines that climb almost straight up from the water. What happened here in April 1915 cannot be separated from this terrain: the troops […]

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: A Journey Through First World War History

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: Turkey’s First World War Legacy Morning light over ANZAC Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The Dardanelles is a strait barely two kilometres wide at its narrowest point, yet for three thousand years it has shaped the fate of empires. In April 1915, this stretch of water and the ridges above it […]

Perge Ancient City: Exploring the Ruins of Asia Minor, Turkey

Perge Ancient City: Exploring the Ruins of Asia Minor, Turkey The colonnaded street at Perge, its paving still grooved from the central water channel. Long before Ephesus or Aphrodisias drew crowds of Roman travellers, Perge was already a working city in the plain behind Turkey’s southern coast, its acropolis settled since the Bronze Age. Few […]

Sultanhani Caravanserai: Trading on the Seljuk Silk Road

Sultanhani Caravanserai: Trading on the Seljuk Silk Road The old Seljuk trade route crossing the Anatolian plateau near Sultanhani. Halfway along the old highway between Aksaray and Konya, a fortress-like stone building rises out of the flat Anatolian plain with no city around it, because it was never meant to serve one. The Sultanhani Caravanserai […]

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey Most Roman theatres survive as suggestions of themselves — a curved wall here, a few tiers of seating there, the rest carried off for building stone centuries ago. Aspendos theatre is the exception. Rising intact from the plain of ancient Pamphylia on Turkey’s southern coast, it is widely […]

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love The reconstructed Tetrapylon gateway, marking the ceremonial approach to the Temple of Aphrodite. Long before marble became a byword for European sculpture, the workshops of Aphrodisias were shipping finished statues across the Roman world. The city sat on a seam of fine-grained white and […]

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi Long before Konya became a stop on the modern traveller’s map, it was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the adopted home of a Persian scholar named Jalal ad-Din Rumi. It was here, in the 13th century, that Rumi wrote the poetry that […]

Çatalhöyük, Turkey: One of the World’s Earliest Cities

Çatalhöyük, Turkey: One of the World’s Earliest Cities On the flat, wind-scoured plain south of Konya, a low mound rises just a few metres above the surrounding wheat fields. There is little to suggest, from a distance, that this unassuming rise conceals one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Çatalhöyük — sometimes […]

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey The open-air rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, set in the Anatolian landscape near Hattusa. A short walk from the fortified capital of Hattusa in central Turkey, a natural cleft in the limestone opens onto one of the most unusual religious sites to survive from the Bronze Age […]

Cappadocia’s Underground Cities: Ancient Refuges in Turkey

Cappadocia’s Underground Cities: Ancient Refuges in Turkey Beneath the fairy chimneys and honey-coloured valleys of central Turkey lies a second Cappadocia, one carved downward rather than up. Entire settlements — stables, kitchens, wine presses, chapels — were hollowed from soft volcanic rock centuries before anyone thought to build a house of stone above ground. At […]

The Hittite Empire: Exploring Ancient Hattusa in Central Turkey

The Hittite Empire: Exploring Ancient Hattusa in Central Turkey The Hittite Empire: Exploring Ancient Hattusa in Central Turkey The fortified walls of Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire, on the Anatolian plateau. Long before Rome had a name, a fortified city on a windswept Anatolian plateau ruled an empire that faced down Egypt’s pharaohs as […]

The Viking Rus’ and the Slave Trade: Trade Routes from Scandinavia to the Silk Road

The Rus’ and Viking Trade Networks In the early Middle Ages, the Viking Rus’ emerged as a formidable power, controlling vast trade routes stretching from Scandinavia as far as the Caspian Sea – a journey of nearly 3,000 miles. Several commodities were shipped south, but the most profitable trade goods were slaves, captured and transported […]

Istanbul, Imperial City: The Definitive Guide

Istanbul, Imperial City | Small Group History Tours Turkey For more than a thousand years, Constantinople stood as the capital of the Byzantine Empire, surviving numerous attacks and internal rebellions, until the cannons of the Ottoman Empire breached its walls. Constantinople, the bastion of Christianity, was renamed Istanbul, “the city of Islam”. It became the starting […]

Derinkuyu Underground City, Turkey

The Ancient Underground City of Derinkuyu The Derinkuyu underground city is a massive subterranean network of caves and underground dwellings located in the Derinkuyu district of Nevşehir Province in Cappadocia Turkey. The caves may have first been excavated by the Anatolian Hittites in ancient times as far back as the 15th century BCE, but the […]

Troy, Turkey: The Ancient City Behind Homer’s Iliad

Troy, Turkey: The Ancient City Behind Homer’s Iliad Troy is one of the most famous cities in the ancient world — not for its size or wealth, but because it was the stage for Homer’s Iliad, one of the foundational works of Western literature. The real archaeological site sits at Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey, and […]

Empires in World History

A History of Empires Throughout the World The history of human civilisation has been for the most part a history of empire. The term empire refers to the rule by a particular group in a…

From Anatolia to the Ottoman Empire: A History of Turkey

From Anatolia to the Ottoman Empire: A History of Turkey For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire ruled from the gates of Vienna to the deserts of Arabia, absorbing the older civilisations of Anatolia — the Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines and Seljuks — into one of history’s most enduring superpowers. Its palaces, mosques and battlefields […]