Çeşme – made for summer and spas

  February is the wrong time of the year to visit Çeşme, a small Turkish coastal town nestled on the Mediterranean Sea. And it’s not just because the temperature hovers near freezing (yes, my husband really brought me to a resort on the Med in the middle of winter.) The oddest part about visiting Çeşme (pronounced Chezmay) in February is that it’s a ghost town. Most shops are closed as many of the city’s residents are in-town only during the warmer months of April – October. During this season the town bustles to life with tourists sprawling the sandy beaches, sailing the aqua blue waters. And enjoying ... [Read More]

Religion in Turkey

A couple of years ago Joan Firstenberg wrote an intriguing article suggesting that “Americans are fickle consumers of religion”, noting that about half of Americans change their religion at some point in their life. It might rightly be said that the entire nation of Turkey is a fickle consumer of religion, having changed the state-approved deity more than a few times in its turbulent history 1700 years ago the city we now know as Istanbul was called Byzantium. At the time the locals worshiped a handful of pagan gods, but Christianity was growing in popularity, so one day during a battle General Constantine (Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus ... [Read More]