Hiking amidst history in the Southeast

“Here, taste this,” our guide Hüseyin said, plucking a handful of green stems from the ground and offering them to us. The scent and flavor were sharp and unmistakable – garlic, growing wild in the rugged hills behind the town of Hasankeyf in Southeast Turkey.


We had set out on a hike as the sun rose, climbing past old cave dwellings and into the canyons. Delicate flowers shook off the morning dew and opened to the sky, leaving the green slopes studded with red blossoms in our wake. Birds circled overhead, spiraling down to round holes in the limestone cliffs where they’d built their mud-dark nests alongside vertiginous staircases and primitive drainpipes carved into the stone....

Read the rest of my article about exploring Hasankeyf in the October 2011 issue of Time Out Istanbul: jpg | pdf.

To learn more about this amazing and threatened place, visit the website of the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive and the blog Hasankeyf Values. For more photos, see my Flickr site.