Experience Turkey's hospitality, craftsmanship, and culture

A couple of years ago, Emily Morrison, a former New Orleans commodities trader, visited Turkey for the first time, sun-tanning in Bodrum and hot-air-ballooning over Cappadocia like a latter-day Jules Verne. At the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, that tortuous labyrinth from the 15th century, she had a career epiphany while sorting through textiles, so she left her job and started a lifestyle brand, Elysian by Emily Morrison, back home, collaborating with Turkish artisans on decorative wares, footwear, and clothing.

“What I experienced was the people of Turkey,” she says. “The hospitality, the craftsmanship, the culture.” Now she returns several times a year. It turns out Morrison’s not alone: American travel to Turkey in the first half of 2022 skyrocketed 77 per cent over the same period in 2019, according to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Post-pandemic, the number is poised to climb in 2023, as the country marks its 100th anniversary
as a republic. “It took many years, but things have definitely changed,” says Karen Fedorko Sefer, founder of Sea Song Tours, who arrived in Turkey in 1998, and organised Morrison’s original visit. “The key was developing infrastructure to accommodate demanding luxury travelers.”

Turkish Airlines invested in US hubs (three daily flights out of JFK, two from LAX), and elite lodgings boomed: A Four Seasons and a Mandarin Oriental opened on the Bosporus, followed by the newly restored Four Seasons in historic Sultanahmet. The Peninsula Istanbul and Japan’s Okura Spa & Resort Cappadocia are expected in 2023.

And it’s not just cities that are thriving: Thanks to Turkish Airlines’ vast network of domestic flights, jetsetters are discovering the cradle of civilisation in Asia Minor. Though why go by air to the ruins of Kaunos or the shipwrecks of Monastir Bay, when a gulet is an option. A very posh option. Turkish sailing yachts are, Sefer says, “second to none.”

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar US