Istanbul, the throne of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II is encased by mosaics. The cherubic face of a child stares intently down. I’m in a Turkish minibus owned by Fatma Celik Karakol, who has tenderly decoupaged a photograph of her granddaughter to the entire span of the skylight. Karakol was the first female ambulance driver in Denizli province. Now working in tourism, she navigates the steep and spindly tangle of Istanbul’s blaring backstreets with as much ease as she does the hairpin twists of a mountain ascent. Like women everywhere, she must be twice as good to do what’s considered a man’s job.
Clip-on koala bears dangle from the rearview mirror as mementos of happy travels past. In tunnels, Karakol will flick on the LED disco lights to make her passengers laugh and “oontz oontz”. The grandmother, and divorcee, didn’t stop driving when she took over the transport company. “Driving is how she finds freedom, how she feels free,” says our guide, Aysenur Genc. Genc often calls Karakol askim (my love). It’s one of many Turkish terms of endearment and it foretells the camaraderie that is to spread fast among this trip’s passengers: 12 women from five countries, here for Intrepid Travel’s first women’s expedition in Turkey.
Six years ago, the Australian group tour company noticed that 65 per cent of its customers were women, rising to 80 per cent on trips to the Middle East and North Africa. Meanwhile, says Zina Bencheikh, managing director of Intrepid Europe, Middle East and Africa, women make about 80 per cent of travel decisions across the board. “It shows the power women have to actually shift and create change in travel,” says Bencheikh.
In 2017–18, that woman was her. Bencheikh was running the Morocco office when Intrepid set a goal to double its number of female guides. But she had a problem. “We had zero,” she says. “Sometimes we would have 12 female guests going with one male guide.” Bencheikh lobbied the Minister of Tourism and went to the flinty High Atlas mountains to speak with conservative male community leaders about employing their wives and sisters as guides and muletiers (mule drivers). “I’m not going to cover my head, obviously, but I’m not there to challenge or shock them,” she says. “I’m there to work with them.” Eventually, a muletier conceded. There was money on the table so he said, “I’ll give you my cousin”, recalls Bencheikh of how her quest led to Intrepid training up the first ever female muletier in Morocco, a woman named Zahra. “Then that became two and I don’t know how many there are now, but the trip is only women from A to Z.”
We’re sitting together on the bus. Tall and optimistic, Bencheikh will one moment be telling me about recruiting the help of the then-Australian ambassador to Morocco, Berenice Owen-Jones, and the next be exclaiming of the Turkish countryside streaking by: “Oh! This looks a lot like Morocco!” Her words tumble out in a thick Moroccan-French accent and she can always lasso-in a statistic to back them up. Beware telling her to “be realistic”. Bencheikh’s response to that is more punk-rock middle-finger than corporate changemaker. “So change the reality then, do the work,” she says.
Something else happened in 2018. Intrepid’s senior product manager, Jenny Gray, from Melbourne, visited a Tehran beauty salon. “The hijabs came off and women had purple hair and bright red lipstick; there were midriffs, cleavage and beautifully manicured nails, the music was blaring,” she recalls. This insight into Iranian life was only possible with no men present, of course, and the seed for Intrepid’s Women’s Expeditions was sown. Designed to benefit both curious travellers and their female hosts, the trips in Morocco, Jordan and Iran rapidly became some of Intrepid’s most successful products and the company followed up with expeditions in India, Pakistan and Nepal.
By 2023, the numbers were talking industry-wide, with solo women travellers for the first time becoming the biggest single customer type of Australian travel agency Flight Centre. Turkey was the most recent addition to Intrepid’s Women’s Expeditions. “After the earthquake, knowing women are disproportionately affected by any natural disaster, it was the right time for this trip,” says Bencheikh. More than 55,000 people died in last year’s Turkey-Syria earthquake, and around 130,000 were injured. Millions were displaced.
Genc’s warm connections all over the country suit her to the job. From cosmopolitan Istanbul and the raki-swilling Aegean coast to Anatolian ghost towns overrun by goats and aching, still, with memories of the forced population exchange between Greek and Turkish peoples a century ago — Genc brings bright shards of insight to all of it. It’s OK, we learn, to refer to “the European side” and “the Asian side” in Istanbul but when the poppies, wheatfields and olive trees press in, call it Anatolia. “Anatolia is the motherland,” Genc says. “We don’t say Europe or Central Asia or the Middle East. We like to say Anatolia, Kurdish and Arabic — it is the perfect combination of these three.”
She issues stern warnings before we meet women who lost family in the earthquake. “Please do not ask about it,” she says. That request is most pressing in the western Aegean village of Camlik at Sultankoy. Determined to keep the Neolithic-era tradition of carpet weaving alive, Sultankoy supports its female artisans to craft silk carpets that may feature “ancient designs from cave drawings”, says second-generation carpet expert Emre Eren. Sitting serenely on a verandah, weaver Gul Cennet Baba double-knots silk threads on a loom. Women have stronger eyes, smaller fingers and “more patience than men”, says Eren. Sultankoy lost about half of its 3,875 weavers in the earthquake — some died, others lost their homes or tools. “Some lost their motivation because of spiritual problems, personal problems,” says Eren. We stand in the dry heat, silenced by the enormity of it. The enterprise was already struggling to interest the next generation. “I cannot say this is a dying art, it’s going to live, but the numbers will decrease dramatically over time,” Eren says. The upside? “A real handmade Turkish rug will be very valuable.”
Plenty of such rugs once softened the imperial residence for 400 years of the Ottoman Empire, Topkapi Palace, located atop one of Istanbul’s legendary seven hills. Its neighbour Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque was built in the 6th century, with its minarets added 1,000 or so years later. “Minarets are the easiest way to show off,” says Genc. “The easiest way to say to the world, ‘I did it, I conquered.’ ” She doesn’t mean to mock the peacocking of the powerful men who ordered them built, but that’s sure how I hear it. Jabbed and jostled by every other tourist in town, we tour the harem. The Sultan’s wives, concubines, sisters and sultanas (daughters) were confined here. And they were the lucky ones, says Genc. “Parents gave toddlers because in the harem they have everything they need and no one can kill them, rape them or attack them.” The women were controlled by eunuchs and encased by walls teeming with vine-like cini (mosaic tiles). Only two people could wander at will: the Sultan and Valide Sultan (his mother).
Figurative shapes are discouraged in Islamic art and in their place bloomed voluptuous motifs of roses, tulips, carnations and cypress trees. Their curves are corralled by sacred geometries of pentagons and many-pointed stars and sobered, always, by the sweeping calligraphy of passages from the Quran. Opulent? Quite. Oppressive? Potentially. Could do with a few more windows? Absolutely. Doors twice the height of any human are inlaid with mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell, while the Sultan’s hammam, and only his, is illuminated by hexagonal skylights. Then there is his sumptuous throne, a dormitory called Apartment of Favourites and the harem’s entrance, Gate of Girls.
The text on the information plaques is perplexingly dry, given the audacity of the Sultan’s racket here. It must be why the Ottoman historical fiction “Magnificent Century” broke Turkish television records when it premiered in 2011. The show reignited Turkey’s collective swoon for Hurrem Sultan, or Roxelana, who was Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent’s enslaved concubine. They married, she bore him five sons and amassed significant political power for herself, manoeuvres that were viewed as calamitous because Sultans didn’t marry their concubines (marriage was banned due to potential meddling in-laws) and his child bearers were allowed only one son. The couple’s letters are steamy, however, and it seems that love, true love, explains it. Roxelana’s influence inspired a new era of the Ottoman Empire called the Sultanate of Women, during which women were emboldened to more cannily use their political power. The modern feminist mantra “you can only be what you see” goes a long way back here.
Topkapi Palace is spoiled by over-tourism, though, which is never nice to admit when you yourself are the walking, talking, gawking problem. But more insights unfurl later, when Genc stresses that the harem was an elevation of mothers. “Mothers are very important,” she says. “This is a problem for my generation — without being a mum, you are half. If you don’t want children, you are sick, how you dare? Mothers struggle too but everyone will help look after your kid and give you what you need, so it is still the safe option.” Harem mentality persists, then, in a country where one’s babaanne (father’s mother) reigns supreme. “Babaanne is just sitting on the sofa, like in a palace, giving the orders,” Genc says, miming a haughty head toss. Your teyze (mother’s sister) “can be your bestie” but your hala (father’s sister) “is concerned with improving opinions about you”.
In Istanbul’s Beyoglu, the ancient-sounding call to prayer yanks Istiklal Caddesi — a 1.4-kilometre pedestrian strip of placeless consumerism — back to an older time. I’m grateful to escape Istiklal’s chain stores by slipping down one of its hundreds of sloped cobblestoned side streets where there are coffee houses, meyhanes (alcohol houses), antique shops and street vendors serving midye dolma (mussels stuffed with lemony spiced rice). Cats stalk out of homewares stores like displeased customers.
Down one of these characterful streets is No11 Hotel & Apartments and oh, my kingdom for a stealthy backpack! My four-wheeled suitcase does not glide, you see, but boorishly bumps and grinds. The hotel owner, Ayse Zeynep Sezerel, must hear my thunderous approach and greets me warmly. You won’t find single-use plastics, extra towels or water-wasting showerheads in her hotel. You will find in-room recycling and a rooftop permaculture garden, all part of No11’s Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) certification. Sezerel employs about 80 per cent women and sells ethically sourced goodies like hand of Fatima bracelets, rich creams and pumice stone scrubs. She’s bright-eyed and chatty and joins us at Sofyali 9 restaurant, one of the first female-run meyhanes in Istanbul, where she confides that she was over-quoted on a recent water tank repair. When she asked for a cheaper price, the reply was: “Where’s your husband?” She laughs, and so do I. More raki is poured from a shared jug.
Helping to prepare hotel breakfasts is Tugba Gulyesil, a scholar and performer of Turkish divine music. One evening, Sezerel arranges a private concert in the hotel’s street-facing foyer. Gulyesil wears a green ankle-length dress. Her fingers seem to barely tap the drum’s skin but its swallow and gulp fills the room and her voice is as pure as the water in a rocky mountain stream. A stringed instrument called a rebab emerges next, a replica of the one owned by Mevlana Rumi, the poet and founder of the Mevlevi Sufi spiritual order. Mevlana likened the rebab to “the sound of the door opening for heaven”, Gulyesil says. A street cat ribbons around my shins and the man from the shop opposite comes out to lean on the doorframe to smoke. Gulyesil’s playing oozes me into oneness with the setting in the way only music can. Sufi rituals, and music, are traditionally patriarchal and Gulyesil says she’s felt discouraged in the past. “I’ve had comments like, ‘You are a woman and your voice is making men very excited’,” she says. “They are really heavy comments for me.
“Sufism helps me to understand this kind of negativity,” Gulyesil continues. “People see what they have inside, on you. You are the mirror.”
Of course, #NotAllMen. In southern Turkey an institution called Dervish in Progress, founded by the acclaimed dancer and choreographer Ziya Azazi, invites all genders to spin in the manner of the Sufi whirling dervishes. Studying ballet in Europe, Azazi had one day been defeated by a complex sequence and sat down, legs crossed. Something clicked, he told the BBC. “Me, the oriental boy sitting in an oriental posture,” he recalled, “trying to follow Western terminology in dance which is not me, actually. There, I decided to search for my own movement.” He developed a unique style of whirling. The doors at Dervish in Progress “are open for everyone”, he tells me. “Trance, spirituality, transcendental behaviour, whatever you’d like to call it, this state can be felt by anyone, it does not have to do with gender.” The majority of his participants are women.
Co-founded by Sengul Akcar in 1986, the well-trodden headquarters of the Foundation for the Support of Women’s Work (KEDV) is helping with the urgent needs of low-income women affected by the recent earthquake. Akcar has seen a lot in her time, but her eyes light up when she talks about women learning about grassroots organising as part of a co-operative. “You may not call them feminist but they are, because they’re trying to change their neighbourhoods,” she says. Come election time, government interest spikes. “The political parties come to us and ask, ‘What do the women want?’ ” Akcar notes that during the 1980s, after the coup d’état of September 12, 1980, all political groups were forbidden, “but we kept going because I was leftist and usually leftist people have that courage”.
That maxim proves true in the Greek-built town of Ayvalık, where American expat Tara Hopkins founded Cop(m)adam 16 years ago. This is olive territory and the main way for women to earn money, if there’s no family business, is picking olives. At Cop(m)adam, however, women use their handicraft skills to make items from throw-away materials: dresses from flour sacks, clutches from flattened bottle caps, and textiles embroidered with evil eyes, grapes and cats. None of the 500-plus women who’ve come through had worked for a salary before but “almost all have gone on to work somewhere else”, says Hopkins. “Money is a factor, but they get to feel good and to see themselves in a way they’d never thought of before.” She pauses her spiel and looks around at the group. “Any of us who are here right now, we lucked out,” she says. “There were opportunities for us that nobody’s mother or grandmother or great-grandmother had here.” And there it is: luck. People want to believe their good fortune is hard work or God’s will or street-smart savvy. But luck — who talks about that? What is there even to say?
I’m the antithesis of handy or crafty but get emotional seeing the plumped pillows for sale and the tea towels draped just so. Three employees, Sidika Zincir, Muzeyyen Ondul and Aysun Kara, are here. They don’t speak English — or, I should say, I don’t speak Turkish — but it’s exceptional work and their pride is clear. I think of the hats my late grandma Irene crocheted for me and my sister, Rachel. Grandma’s life had been hard and she was feisty and stern, but after Mum told her I liked the hats, they kept arriving in the mail from Cairns, the colour and design more extravagant each time. None of Grandma’s toughness was evident in those hats, but all of her tenderness was. In feminism’s quest to expose the hypocrisies of unpaid domestic labour, it is guilty, perhaps, of overlooking the unspoken love inherent in these historically female acts: homemaking, cooking, sewing and cleaning.
A heartwarming few days of home, hearth and food follow. In 1992, when Hatice Mercan’s husband’s business failed, she borrowed money for flour and ground meat and sold gozleme in a park in Selcuk. Thirty-two years on, Mercan’s Bizim Ev Hanimeli Restaurant has such an extensive buffet of saucy, village-style food that there are six kinds of eggplant dishes alone. Patrons of three decades say the tastes never change. They return for an all-you-can-eat feast for about $18, eaten in a garden where evil eye amulets spin on strings hung from trees. Mercan has a mama-to-everyone benevolence and comes out with arms laden with her 2022 cookbook, “My Mother’s Kitchen”, which she autographs for us like a bona fide celebrity. Before we leave, bellies full and beaming, her son stages a video shoot for Instagram with Mercan looking on watchfully. Warm and canny: a very Turkish-lady combo.
In a rustic kitchen in the fairytale-pretty village of Sirince, Mujde Tonbekici teaches us how to make cold mezze (carrot with yoghurt and garlic) and what she calls “mommy-style stew”. We chop vegetables contentedly, cuddle the two little girls present and tell one another how nice we look, transformed into traditional Turkish village girls with floral headscarves over our hair. Sirince owes its heritage listing in part to the university-educated Tonbekici, yet it’s her assistant, Gulay Ozkoca’s first paid job. “It’s so important for me to work with women like her,” says Tonbekici. “She’s so proud about this.”
“I really feel the sisterhood!” Bencheikh says after the cooking class. She tells me that she’s tenacious in securing female guides because so many Intrepid executives began as one. It’s true of other companies too. “The more we get women working as guides, the more we can actually reduce inequalities at the top,” she says. With tourism employing one in 10 people globally, the results could have a big impact in every society. “There’s so many problems in the world but if we just focus on one, tour leaders, we can actually empower more women to high-level positions,” she says. “Positive discrimination is the way to do it as we are in a world that’s been ruled by men for so, so long.”
It chimes with comments from Akcar, at KEDV, who had pointed out that women hold 30 per cent of the jobs in Turkey’s robust tourism sector but “not the decent jobs”, she’d said. “It’s part-time or cleaning and housekeeping, so it’s seasonal.” And yet. When KEDV began a leadership training program in southern Turkey’s Hatay province just five or so years later, women were running guesthouses.
On the last night, Genc reads our fortunes in our coffee grounds and the high-spirited laughter probably keeps Sirince’s young and old awake. The group WhatsApp thread has been pinging for days with flattering photos — among ruins and in palaces, naturally — and helpful follow-ups on places we’ve been. There are invitations to meet at dawn for swims, hikes or photoshoots. I’m hit hard with a migraine one day and my luggage is mercifully, silently wheeled around for me and the comfiest seat on the bus is mine. Beneath our driver’s sweet domestic Sistine Chapel, we deep-talk about our families and careers. It would be simplistic to say this bonding happens because we’re women, but it’s probably true, too.
When times change for the better and history creeps forward, it’s convenient to think progress is inevitable. But it never is. Scratch the surface and you’ll find women, such as those we’ve met in Turkey, both on and off the bus, were there all along. In every era, in every country, in every culture. Changing the reality, doing the work.
