About Murat Atalay

I grew up in Büyükçekmece, a lakeside district on the western edge of Istanbul — close enough to the city to smell the sea, far enough to feel the quiet of provincial life. As a child, the lake was my whole world. I watched ferries cross it at dusk, listened to fishermen argue over backgammon at the tea houses along the quay, and ate grilled corn on the promenade while the sun melted into the Marmara horizon.

Istanbul has always been easy to love — and easy to get lost in. But growing up in its orbit meant I understood from a young age that the city was both a beginning and a boundary. Beyond the outer ring roads, beyond the Bosphorus and the grand mosques and the tourist maps, there was an entirely different Turkey that most visitors — and many Turks — never properly encountered.

My first real journey beyond Istanbul came when I was nineteen. A university friend from Gaziantep invited me to visit his family for the Eid holiday. I took an overnight bus, arrived at dawn, and ate katmer — a flaky pastry filled with clotted cream and pistachio — at a bakery that had been open since before my parents were born. It was one of those meals that rearranges something quietly inside you. I came home three days later, and Istanbul felt both exactly the same and completely different. I had been handed a new lens.

Over the next several years I made it a habit to say yes to every invitation east, west, south. I spent a summer helping a relative with his olive groves outside Ayvalık. I hitchhiked across the Taurus Mountains on a whim, ending up in a village where the mukhtar cooked tarhana soup over an open fire and refused to hear of me sleeping anywhere but the guest room. I camped alone beside the salt lake of Tuz Gölü, completely disoriented by the flatness and the silence and the particular shade of pink the salt turns at midday.

None of this was planned as a career or a content strategy. I was simply someone who found travel in Turkey deeply satisfying in a way that was hard to explain at dinner parties. Friends started asking me: where should I go that isn't Cappadocia, isn't Ephesus, isn't the same package holiday everyone takes? How do I get from Konya to Şanlıurfa without losing three days? Where do the locals actually eat in Trabzon?

I started keeping notes. At first just for myself — practical things, prices, bus schedules that turn out to be suggestions rather than facts, the name of the tea garden in Safranbolu where the owner makes his own rose jam. Then I started sharing those notes online, carefully, because I was aware of the gap between what travel writing often promises and what travel in Turkey actually delivers.

That gap bothered me. I had read too many articles that described Turkey as a series of photogenic ruins and glamorous rooftop bars, stripped of the friction and the charm and the occasional absurdity that make the country worth visiting honestly. I had also read too many warnings that overstated difficulty and understated the extraordinary warmth of ordinary Turkish hospitality. Neither extreme felt useful to a real traveller trying to plan a real trip.

murat-atalay exists because I believe the most valuable travel knowledge is specific, grounded, and unglamourised. It is the knowledge of which dolmuş to take from the otogar in Muğla. It is understanding that the "closed on Mondays" rule for museums is enforced with great inconsistency. It is knowing that the best way to see the Ishak Pasha Palace outside Doğubayazıt is to go at four in the afternoon when the light turns the stone the colour of old honey and the tour groups have already left.

I am not a professional travel writer. I am a person from Büyükçekmece who has spent a significant portion of his adult life on overnight buses, in modest pensions, at roadside kebab restaurants, and in the company of people generous enough to share what they know. This blog is my way of passing that generosity forward — to every curious traveller willing to look a little further than the first page of search results.