25 Years Across Turkey — From the World's Oldest Temple to the Bosphorus
There is a version of Turkey that most visitors never find. It is not hidden, exactly. It is simply off the path that package tours and busy itineraries tend to follow. It is the Turkey of pre-dawn arrivals at archaeological sites before the buses come, of conversations with local experts who rarely speak to tourists, of valleys and hilltops and ruins that haven't yet made it onto the itinerary of anyone you know.
I have been finding that Turkey for twenty-five years. I'd like to show it to you.
The Training Behind the Guide
I grew up in Turkey with a deep fascination for archaeology, mythology, and the ancient civilisations layered beneath the country's surface. In 1995, I completed an Associate Degree in Travel Management at Bilkent University in Ankara, with a specialist focus in archaeology and mythology — the academic foundation that has shaped every tour I have ever designed.
That same year, I moved to Australia, where I pursued further education at the University of Western Sydney and the University of Sydney, completing a Bachelor of Business and Economics in 2000. Those years in Sydney did something equally important: they taught me how to think from the perspective of the English-speaking traveller — what background knowledge to assume, what context to provide, what questions to anticipate before they are asked.
In 2001, I returned to Turkey and sat the professional examination administered by the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Tour guiding in Turkey is not an informal profession. It is a formally regulated career with rigorous state-administered training and assessment — one that many Turkish universities now offer as a dedicated undergraduate degree programme. Passing the Ministry examination and receiving my professional licence marked the beginning of what has become a twenty-five-year career guiding English-speaking travellers across the full breadth of this country.
Twenty-Five Years on the Ground
Turkey is one of the most extraordinary countries on earth for a guide to work in — and one of the most demanding. The sheer breadth of what it contains is unlike anywhere else: Neolithic temples older than any other monumental architecture on earth, Hittite imperial capitals, classical Greek cities, Roman provinces, Byzantine churches, Ottoman mosques, Armenian ruins, and a coastline that stretches from the Aegean to the edge of the Middle East.
To guide well here requires something more than a script. It requires knowing the difference between a site that looks impressive and a site that genuinely changes how you see history. It requires knowing when to speak and when to be quiet. It requires the kind of accumulated judgment that only comes from walking the same ground, season after season, year after year, watching both the archaeology and your understanding of it deepen together.
I have been doing this since 2001. I have guided archaeologists, professors, documentary filmmakers, retired diplomats, families, honeymooners, and solo travellers who simply wanted to understand what they were standing on. Every tour has taught me something. After twenty-five years, I find I can give this experience better than ever.
But Turkey Is More Than Its Oldest Stones
Twenty-five years of guiding across this country has taken me through places that genuinely changed how I understand what it means to be human.
In 2005, I drove a group of American travellers down a dirt track through Kurdish villages to a hilltop in southeastern Turkey that almost no one in the travel world had heard of. There was no road, no visitor centre, no signage — just ancient stone and a handful of archaeologists quietly brushing soil off T-shaped pillars that had been buried for 12,000 years. That site was Göbekli Tepe. I was among the first guides to bring tour groups there, years before it became known to the wider world. I have returned every year since, watching the excavations deepen and the understanding of what was built here — and by whom — become more extraordinary with each season.
When Karahan Tepe began to emerge as part of the wider Taş Tepeler archaeological project, I brought visitors there too — before the gates officially opened, when the excavation ropes were still up and the archaeologists themselves were your guides. A site that may ultimately prove even more significant than Göbekli Tepe, and one that remains largely unknown to travellers outside the specialist world. This is what I do: I find the places that matter before the world catches up.
But my work has taken me far beyond the ancient sites of the southeast — extraordinary as they are. I have guided travellers through the underground cities of Cappadocia, where early Christians carved entire civilisations into volcanic rock. I have walked the marble streets of Ephesus at first light, before the crowds make quiet contemplation impossible. I have watched the sun set from Istanbul's rooftops and felt that particular vertigo of standing at the junction of two continents and three thousand years of empire.
Turkey is not one story. It is dozens of stories, layered on top of each other across thousands of years. My job is to help you find the one — or ones — that speak to you.
Why Travel With Me
I split my life between Turkey and Sydney, Australia. This matters more than it might seem. It means I understand exactly what English-speaking travellers — from the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK — need in order to make sense of what they're experiencing. I know how to bridge the distance between worlds.
My clients are well educated and well travelled. They have done their research. They have watched the documentaries, read the books, and they come to Turkey because they want more than a surface encounter. They want to understand what they're standing on — the history, the archaeology, the human story beneath the ruins.
I give them that. And after twenty-five years, I find I can give it better than ever.
Every tour I design is built around a simple question: what would make this experience genuinely unforgettable?
If that is what you are looking for, I would be honoured to plan a journey for you.
— Fazli, Serendipity Tours Turkey
