About This Project

I was born and raised in Ankara — a city that many Turks consider a functional capital rather than a romantic one. Growing up between the concrete ministries of Kızılay and the narrow backstreets of Ulus, I developed an early restlessness, a persistent sense that Turkey's real stories were being told somewhere else entirely: on a shepherd's path in the Kaçkar Mountains, in a tea-house corner in Mardin, along the slow ferry crossing of Lake Van at dusk.

My first solo journey was modest by any measure. In 2011, aged twenty-six, I took a minibus from Ankara to Kastamonu with nothing but a notebook and a rough sketch of a road I had found in a 1970s atlas at my father's bookshelf. That single trip changed everything. Kastamonu's Ottoman timber mansions, the smell of pine resin on the Ilgaz plateau, a family in a village near Araç who invited me to stay for three nights — none of it appeared in any guidebook I had ever read. That absence felt like a problem worth dedicating years to solving.

The regions I have returned to most frequently are the ones that resist easy categorisation. Eastern Anatolia — Erzurum, Kars, Ağrı, Van — holds a severity and grandeur that resets your sense of scale entirely. The Kaçkars and Artvin offer an almost Georgian lushness that surprises even veteran travellers. Southeastern Turkey — Şanlıurfa, Gaziantep, Mardin, Batman — carries millennia of civilisation in its stones and its cuisine alike. The Central Anatolian highlands of Sivas, Tokat and Amasya remain among the least visited and most historically dense regions I know.

I should be honest about what this project is not. osmanferitaydogan is not sponsored. No tourism board has commissioned these routes. No hotel chain underwrites my travels. No affiliate programme shapes which accommodation I mention or which road I recommend. Every journey was funded by my own savings — from years working in urban planning research in Ankara — and every opinion expressed here is my own, unconditioned by hospitality or commercial arrangement.

This matters because the moment a route guide becomes commercially entangled, it begins to drift. Certain villages get recommended because they have accommodation that pays referral fees. Certain roads get avoided because the attractions along them are not "bookable." I have watched this happen to platforms I once admired, and I made a deliberate decision early on that osmanferitaydogan would not go in that direction — even if it meant growing more slowly and remaining permanently non-commercial.

My approach to documentation is editorial in the truest sense: I write what I find, not what I'm told to find. A route is only published here after I have driven, walked or cycled it myself, usually more than once. Notes on road conditions, seasonal access, local hospitality customs, and infrastructure realities are updated regularly. I try to write for the independent traveller who is comfortable with uncertainty, not for the one who needs everything pre-confirmed.

If there is a philosophy underlying all of this, it is simply that Turkey rewards slowness. The country is too vast, too layered, and too contradictory to be consumed quickly. Its pleasures — a simit seller at sunrise in Safranbolu, the way light falls on Urfa's limestone at midday, the silence of the Nemrut plateau before tourist buses arrive — are available to anyone willing to be patient and present. This website exists to point people toward that kind of travel. Nothing more, nothing less.