My husband and I have just returned from Turkey, where we found a fascinating country, with a long history, wonderful food and a resurgence of religion in public life, familiar to us from developments at home.

I knew that Turkish was written with the Latin alphabet but I did not know that Ataturk, the father of the modern secular state, changed the language from Arabic script in 1928, to promote greater literacy. Anyone can look at a map and see that Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia, which surround the Black Sea, have access to the Mediterranean only through the Bosphorus, the strait that divides Istanbul. Imagine, a capital that straddles Europe and Asia! Yet somehow I had never thought about what a crossroads Turkey is, by land and by sea. When we visited Antalya, a modern resort city on the southern Mediterranean coast, we learned that St. Paul and Alexander the Great had also passed that way, visiting the ancient city of Perge.

In eleven days, most of what I learned was how little I knew about this part of the world. Through Duolingo Turkish, Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul, the Netflix series “The Gift” and “The Club” , cooking Kabak Tatlısı, a pumpkin dessert, I have prolonged my glimpse of the Turkish culture. It was great to travel with a group of Americans who approached our trip with the same curiosity and respect we felt, despite political differences.

Toni Martin Writes