Turkey has one of the world’s oldest and biggest malls.
The signature Ottoman treat is tavuk göğsü, or chicken breast pudding. It’s a strange blend of boiled chicken, milk, and sugar, dusted with cinnamon. And it’s delicious. Look for it on menus across the country.
In fact, there are 13 spots in Turkey inscribed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, and a whopping 62 on the tentative list. They range from a Mesolithic temple (Göbekli Tepe) to a Biblical city (Ephesus) to a World War One battlefield (Gallipoli), and help make Turkey the sixth most-visited tourist destination in the world.
Santa Claus is from Turkey. Saint Nicholas was born far from the North Pole, in Patara. And he’s not the only saint with connections to Turkey — the Virgin Mary’s resting place could be near Ephesus, while Saint Paul was from Tarsus in the south. Other Biblical figures include the Prophet Abraham, born in Şanlıurfa. And after the deluge, Noah may have run his ark aground at Mount Ararat.
Oil wrestling is the national sport. The spectacle of two bulky men stripped to the waist, doused with olive oil, and grappling under the hot Thracian sun is a 654-year-old sporting tradition and sight to behold. Camel wrestling tournaments, held throughout the Aegean region in the winter, and bull wrestling near the Black Sea, are also popular.
Turkey’s 10,000 plant and 80,000 animal species help rank the country among the world’s 35 biodiversity hotspots. Twitchers can visit more than a half-dozen bird sanctuaries for sightings of some of the country’s 475 aves, or 5% of the global variety. It’s a great place for flower lovers, too — see highlights like the native Fritillaria imperialis, above.
Turkey really is the center of the world.
The tongue-twisting, 70-letter Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, or “as if you are from those we may not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful ones,” is thought to be the longest word in Turkish, an agglutinative tongue whose dialects are spoken across a swath of Asia all the way to western China. Yet Turkish is pretty easy to pick up, following a language reform in the 1920s that simplified the vocabulary and moved from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet. Come and give it a shot.
There are no native camels in Turkey, but there’s an annual camel wrestling festival. Every year, the Selçuk Efes Camel Wrestling Festival, established by the Turkic tribes more than 2,000 years ago, takes place in Turkey’s southern Aegean coast. The fighting camels, adorned with decorative rugs, bells, and saddles, often come from Iran and Afghanistan.
