Beysehir, a town in Konya province in Anatolia, central Turkey, has a beautiful 13th-century wooden mosque, Esrefoglu. The mosque has an impressive tile entrance. Near the entrance, tiny, fierce women wearing scarves and “Aladdin pants” (the name I gave to the wide-seated, narrow-legged trousers many women in Anatolia wear) practically insisted that female visitors purchase printed cotton scarves with crocheted
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Horses and donkeys still do hard work in Syria and Turkey: plowing rocky fields, pulling carts, and carrying oversized burdens, as they have done all over the world for thousands of years. The horses in the first three pictures below, from Syria, were riding horses, as, I think, were those photographed in Cappadocia. The plow horses and the cart horses were
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Cappadocia, in central Turkey, is on a high plateau rimmed with snow-covered mountains. It was the ancient kingdom of the Hittites, and a refuge for early Christians, who flocked there to escape persecution and made homes, churches, and entire underground cities in its caves. Now tourists flock there to enjoy its dry, sunny, high desert climate, and its bizarrely eroded
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