explainer

If you have ever stood inside a great Ottoman mosque and felt the walls glow around you, you already know the power of this tradition.

The Ottoman Empire was a land power that became a sea power, and its navy carried its flag across three seas for more than four centuries.

Between the end of the eleventh century and the end of the thirteenth, Europe sent wave after wave of armies toward the Holy Land, and nearly every one of them crossed the land that is now Turkey.

In 334 BCE, a twenty-two-year-old king led an army across the narrow strait between Europe and Asia and began one of the most extraordinary military adventures in history.

The Trojan War is the most famous conflict that never quite happened, at least not the way the poets tell it.

In 1453, an Ottoman army did something that had not been done for a thousand years: it captured Constantinople, the greatest city in the Christian world.

Few chapters of Ottoman history are as charming, and as confusing, as the Tulip Era. It lasted barely a dozen years, it produced no great conquests, and its name sounds like a gardening manual.

You may not know the Lydian Kingdom by name, but you use its invention every day.

If you know the legend of King Midas and the riddle of the Gordian knot, you already know something of the Phrygians.

High in the mountains of eastern Turkey, above the blue expanse of Lake Van, stand the walls of a kingdom that most travelers have never heard of.

If you travel eastern Turkey, you will see churches, monasteries, and carved stones that seem to belong to another world.

Mention the Silk Road and images come to mind: camel trains, desert oases, and merchants bargaining over silk and spices. But the real Silk Road was more remarkable than the legend.