Ask our guests which site on the Treasures of Western Turkey tour they are most looking forward to, and the answer, more often than not, is Troy. It is the one name on the itinerary that everybody already half knows, learned in some school lesson or half remembered from a film, long before they ever…
Travellers who stand at Anzac Cove, or walk the long rows of the war cemeteries scattered across the Gallipoli peninsula, often ask some version of the same question: how did this narrow strip of Turkish coastline come to matter so much, to so many different nations, all at once? The answer is a story of…
Travellers walk into the theatre at Ephesus, or climb the steep, cliffside theatre at Pergamon, and ask some version of the same question: why does this look so Greek? This is Turkey, not Greece. The answer is a story that unfolds region by region and century by century, across the coastline that once linked Pergamon,…
Part One: The Varieties of Italy In Italy, few winter vegetables command as much respect, or as much passion, as the carciofo. Known in Sicilian dialect as cacòcciula, a term that appears in documents as early as 1416, the artichoke is not merely an ingredient here; it is a way of life. It can be…
What is this Zeus’s Law? If you have recently seen Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, you will have picked up on the frequent references to Zeus’s Law. Having never heard it called as such, I was curious to find out what it was. It turns out it is Nolan’s own invented name for what the…
Annabelle Thorpe writes her travelogue of our April 2026 Lycian Coast tour: Day six of my first ever Esplora Travel tour along the beautiful, history-rich coast of Lycian Türkiye, and I didn’t think there was anything that could impress me more than what I had already seen. I’d stood at the top of the spectacular…
In search of Ferhad and Şirin – Turkey’s most well-known love story Written after a visit to Amasya by Damian Croft in 1999. First published in: ANATOLIAN ARCHAEOLOGY Research Reports of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara Volume 6 (2000). Published again on www.florencestudios.com and reproduced here by the original author, Damian Croft “You…
The north east of Turkey was once part of the Georgian Kingdom of Iberia and there are still some interesting Georgian churches to be found in the area. In the 9th and 10th centuries the Çoruh river valley was part of the Tao-Klarjeti region ruled by the Bagrationi dynasty – the founder of which had…
One of the great differences between the Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations is that whilst the former were predominantly seafarers (the exception of course, was Alexander the Great), the Romans preferred to travel by land. The Ancient Greek civilisation was therefore largely confined to the Mediterranean, whilst Roman civilisation extended throughout Europe, Asia Minor, into…
Two episodes in my life had spurred my interest to go to Mardin – the first was reading William Dalrymple’s splendid “From the Holy Mountain” in which he describes his visits to a handful of Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the South East of Turkey. The second has been a long-standing fascination and admiration for all…
