About
About the Reader
An independent guide to the culture, places and craft of Turkey, written for an English-speaking reader who wants to know how things are put together.
The Anatolia Reader is a cultural guide. It covers archaeology, cities and their great buildings, landscape, craft and the table — the things that stay put. It does not cover politics, current affairs or the news, and it has no institutional voice: nobody here speaks on behalf of a country.
Not affiliated with anything
Despite the domain, this is not a university, a faculty, a student union or an NGO. It is an independent cultural guide to Turkey, not affiliated with any university, institution or organisation.
How it is organised
Three devices run through the whole site. The motif key names the six shapes that recur across tile, textile and stone. The layer ruler places every guide in a sequence — Neolithic, Hittite, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman — as sequence only, not to scale. And the map pins every guide at its true coordinates, so a place can be found by where it is as easily as by when it is.
What we do not do
- No prices, opening times, tours or operator names.
- No dates on the pages: a guide to a Neolithic hill does not go stale.
- No invented figures. Where the evidence is unsettled, the guide says so and describes instead of asserting.
Photography and maps
Photographs are real images of the places described. Map geometry comes from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain; the coastline and the pins are drawn at true coordinates and nothing geographic is sketched by hand.
Corrections are welcome — they are the only kind of post we are glad to be sent.