Jennifer Young

I grew up in Edinburgh, the kind of city that teaches you to love layers — layers of history, of weather, of meaning hiding behind every stone facade. That same curiosity is what pulled me, at thirty-one, onto a creaking overnight bus from İstanbul's Otogar toward a village I could barely pronounce. I had a dog-eared guidebook, a phrase sheet printed from the internet, and absolutely no plan beyond "see what's there."

What I found was Safranbolu — a UNESCO-listed Ottoman town of honey-coloured timber mansions tucked into a valley the tourist buses had, at the time, largely forgotten. I ate slow-cooked lamb in a courtyard with a family who insisted I stay for tea, then stayed for dinner, then stayed for three days. That trip changed the entire shape of how I understand travel.

Over the next decade I returned to Turkey every year, sometimes twice. I stopped flying into the big airports and started taking trains, shared minibuses called dolmuş, ferries across the Aegean, even a horse-drawn cart through the Kaçkar highlands. I spent a week walking the Lycian Way when it was still largely unwalked by foreigners. I stayed in pansiyon guesthouses run by widows who cooked breakfast from their own gardens. I sat with carpet weavers in Uşak who taught me that every pattern has a regional dialect, just like spoken language.

"Turkey is not one country. It is twenty countries pressed together, each with its own food, dialect, landscape and rhythm. Most visitors see only the tidiest corner of it."

My favourite regions reveal that truth most sharply. The Black Sea coast — from Sinop down to Trabzon — feels nothing like the Mediterranean. It is green and dramatic, almost Welsh in its mist, with wooden hamlets perched on slopes above the water and a cuisine built on anchovies, butter and maize. Then there is Central Anatolia: the high plateau around Konya and Kayseri, where the light is different, the silence is enormous, and Seljuk stone carving rivals anything in Europe for ambition and craft.

And of course the Aegean interior — Aphrodisias, Şirince, the Bozburun Peninsula — places with ancient stones underfoot and fig trees overhead, almost entirely free of the resort-hotel circuit.

I created jenniferyoung because I kept being asked by friends, colleagues and strangers on trains: "Where exactly did you go? How do you find these places?" I was writing long emails anyway. At some point it made more sense to write them here.

This guide is entirely non-commercial. There are no sponsored posts, no affiliate links, no hotel partnerships or tourism board arrangements. No itinerary here was produced in exchange for anything. Every route, guesthouse mention and local tip comes purely from personal experience — often from getting it wrong first, taking the wrong turning, missing the last bus, and discovering something better as a result.

My only aim is to help curious people find the Turkey that exists beyond the postcard — not to sell them anything, and not to pretend it is always easy. It isn't always easy. That is, largely, the point.