The Holy Month of Ramadan has started here in Turkey and over this thirty day period devout Muslims fast during daylight hours. This means not eating, drinking, smoking or even chewing gum, from early in the morning until the evening. Once it’s no longer possible to distinguish a piece of white string held up to…
A Turkish friend recently invited me to attend a mevlit, one of the important Turkish death rituals, to be held for her mother. Her mum had been failing for months, going from being a chirpy chatty woman to a small silent figure swaddled in a now too large bed, who no longer spoke but always…
“A few months ago, Lisa Morrow, an experienced travel writer living in Istanbul, contacted me. She had just released a book, Exploring Turkish Landscapes, about Turkish culture and asked if she could send a copy, for a published review. I said yes and a week later, received a 162-page book via cargo. Since I am…
One of the first things people rave about when they come to Turkey is the food, so it’s not surprising that ‘Afiyet olsun’ is one of the first Turkish phrases they learn. It’s the Turkish for ‘bon appetite’ and I find it highly amusing that I have learnt the Turkish for something I say in…
“If you want to know how to improve your Turkish, I have one word for you. Bureaucracy. Forget expensive courses and fancy textbooks. Just spend one day (or maybe a lifetime) trying to get anything of a bureaucratic nature completed, and you’ll be as fluent as any native born Turk. By the time you’ve asked…
For my first Turkish Ramazan I was living in Istanbul. It was November 2000 and I was living in Erenköy, a leafy suburb on the Asian side of the city. At that time there were no natural gas connections so the air was thick with coal smoke from apartment heating systems, darkness fell around 5pm…