Before dawn breaks on a chilly morning in Sakal, rural Van province, a barn door creaks open. The soil is frozen and breath mists in the air. Recep Yolak waits next to a newborn lamb. The delivery is complete, but the work is just beginning in a region where keeping a young animal alive is almost as hard as bringing it into the world. Yolak is a livestock farmer in eastern Turkey’s Van, once one of the country’s capitals of …

A house in rural Van province, south-eastern Turkey, is built around a small courtyard. Three generations live under its roof: grandad and grandma Mustafa and Emine Harun, their son Ali and their daughter-in-law Şennur, and finally, the grandchildren. This way of life has gone unquestioned in the home for years. The elders would decide and the younger family members would abide. The crowded home was not a burden but a safety net. Today, a new question is whispered around the …

Vahide Çakır starts the day early in her apartment in Ankara, where she lives alone. She’s showered the night before and has her morning prep done: make-up is the only thing she has left to do before work. She takes a final look in the mirror before leaving the apartment and moves over to her “active” wheelchair, which she uses outdoors. She gets into the driver’s seat of her car and the security guards in her apartment complex fold the …

Women’s willingness to alter their hair in solidarity with those suffering violence is “an alternative method of writing history”. In early 2026, as Syrian government troops retook territory held by Kurdish-led forces in the north of the country, a chilling video circulated online. A Syrian government soldier was seen holding plaited hair in his hand, claiming he cut it from a female member of the SDF, the Kurdish-led army, who had been killed. “This is what’s left of her,” he …

Eating and drinking together, locals are healing after the devastating disaster that decimated 90 percent of the city. Local legend has it that Kurtuluş street, the spine of Antakya’s old city—what was the ancient city of Antioch—is the world’s first illuminated street, once lit by Roman torches at night. But on a winter evening, it is dark, with the only light coming from small fires lit by construction workers camping out beside the road. Once trodden by traders and warriors …

Turkey’s government has made no secret of its desire to boost birth rates and strengthen the traditional nuclear family. But its ambitions clash with the relatively meagre maternity leave working mothers receive – just 16 weeks paid leave as standard – and a lack of publicly-funded daycare centres. Its proposed solution, unveiled last year as part of a wider initiative that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dubbed the Year of the Family, is the “neighbourhood mum” project. This pilot for community-based …

“These places are graves for living humans,” says Serkan Onur Yılmaz, a former inmate of one of Turkey’s new high-security prisons. Introduced in 2021, they have been labelled “well-type prisons” by inmates and human rights advocates – who compare incarceration in such structures to being stuck at the bottom of a well. “[My cell] didn’t get any sun,” says Ali Hasan Akgül, another former inmate. “You got maybe a single ray if you were lucky. It’s not possible to look …

The heavy gates of a seemingly ordinary wedding hall close on a busy street in Istanbul. The city’s bustle is shut out, replaced by the bass indoors. With her chic headscarf and sequin dress, Tuğba Dağlar stands at the DJ booth. To kick off the evening, she reads out a manifesto to the hundreds of women standing in the hall. “Leave your identity, your motherhood, your career, your marital issues beyond those doors. Here we are just women – and …

“Life after the earthquake has been really hard, but coming to a game even for just an hour gives me a breather – it’s empowering” says Sakine Özelci. Like thousands of others, Özelci has been living in a container home – with her family of four – since the earthquakes that struck southern Turkey in February 2023. Football is one of the things that has kept her going. Özelci’s team is called the Gökyüzü Şutlayıcıları (“Sky Shooters”). It was established …

In a courtyard in Hatay, southern Turkey, a group of women are dressed in their best clothes as they get ready for their first concert, after months of practice. They look over the lyrics one last time, the seating chart is finalised and the instruments are tuned. Then, the music starts. “When we were young,” the conductor Abir Naeseh Bilgin starts singing, as the choir joins in, “how we used to stroll hand in hand on the streets…” Abir Naaseh …