How the Ottoman Tile and Ceramic Tradition Shaped Turkish Identity
You cannot travel far in Turkey without noticing that tiles keep appearing. They cover the walls of imperial mosques, decorate tea houses, and fill museum galleries.

You cannot travel far in Turkey without noticing that tiles keep appearing. They cover the walls of imperial mosques, decorate tea houses, and fill museum galleries.

When you step into the great mosques of Istanbul, the walls glow with color.

Turkey looks out on four seas, and the story of how it learned to command them is one of the foundations of its national identity.

Turkey is a country of seas. It is surrounded by water on three sides, and the history of the nation is inseparable from the ships that sailed those waters.

The Crusader era left Turkey a complicated inheritance. For two centuries, European armies crossed Anatolia on their way to the Holy Land, and the peninsula became a front line of one of history’s great clashes.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, waves of European armies marched through Anatolia on their way to the Holy Land, and their passing left deep marks on the land that is now Turkey.

Alexander the Great passed through the land that is now Turkey for only a few years, yet his shadow has never lifted.

More than two thousand years ago, a young king from Macedonia crossed into Anatolia with an army and changed the course of history.

The most famous war in world literature was fought on Turkish soil. For three thousand years, the story of Troy has been told and retold, and for most of that time the city itself was a myth, a name in a poem.

The story of the Trojan War is one of the oldest and greatest tales of Western literature, and its setting lies in modern Turkey.

There are dates that define a nation, and for Turkey, May 29, 1453 is one of them.

Few events in world history carry the weight of May 29, 1453, when the armies of Sultan Mehmed II broke through the walls of Constantinople and brought the Byzantine Empire to an end.
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