Turkey Traveller

Kaleiçi is the old historic centre of Antalya built around a picturesque old Roman harbour, lined with restaurants & cafes. From the harbour a maze of narrow streets filled with restored Ottoman houses stretch upwards towards the walls of the once fortified old city. Exploring Kaleiçi you find a fantastic selection of boutiques, restaurants, pensions, medreses, hamams, ancient mosques, antiquated churches, Turkish rugs and some beautifully restored Ottoman style boutique hotels.The courtyards and streets are lined with palm fronds and fine fruit trees under which you will often find a man shading from the sun who will polish your shoes for a small price.The winding streets and hidden courtyards of Kaleiçi will quickly have those of a curious nature peeking and peering into private gardens, windows and speculating on the price of doing your own restoration. Kaleiçi is a protected area and was awarded the Golden Apple of Tourism in 1984,you will still see the odd dilapidated Ottoma...

The ruins of Troy (referred to by one writer as the ruins of ruins) are not going to be the most impressive archaeological site you will have the opportunity to see in your time in Turkey. However they will be one of the oldest, and their immortalisation by Homer accounts for a lot of interest. The site is actually much more than just the ruins of Troy (Truia, Truva) in the location are the archaeological remains of 9 cities all layered one on top of the other, this in itself makes it all but impossible to get a proper feeling about how any of these cities would have looked because all the ruins are intermingled with each other. The first excavation of Troy in 1870 was carried out by a German called H. Schlieman, sadly his obsession with discovering the Troy of Homer’s Iliad and the treasures of King Priam were to prove destructive and much of the archaeological evidence on the upper layers was destroyed, lost and looted. However up until this point the Homeric Troy was largely consid...