“City children can get hold of books one way or another,” says Devran Sinanoğlu as he neatly shelves books in a brand new high school library, built at the foot of a mountain in Ovabağ, rural Diyarbakır province. “But the children in the village don’t have that opportunity. So, we try to enrich their worlds with books.” This is not the first library that Sinanoğlu has built. The 36-year-old author and biology teacher has contributed 120 libraries to Diyarbakır in …

Selda Çelik, a 35-year-old who lives alone in Turkey’s western coastal province of İzmir, says that she feels most vulnerable at night. She assiduously follows steps she hopes will keep her safe; always double-locking the door of her ground floor flat, closing the shutters on the windows and checking her surroundings to be sure no one follows her home. Çelik even tries not to park her car too close to the house, to make it harder for strangers to know …

Black figs, which happened to be a favourite delicacy of the UK’s Queen Elizabeth II, are a traditional agricultural product of Turkey’s north-east. In recent years, women farmers have been making inroads in a historically male-dominated industry – but several tell Inside Turkey that obstacles remain. Agricultural engineer Sıla Özkan comes from a rice farming family. She started her own business upon completing her graduate degree and has exported black figs to Moldova for the last year. Özkan successfully applied …

Two years after devastating earthquakes struck Turkey’s Hatay province, many of the region’s churches remain in ruins, leaving the local Christian community without vital spaces for worship and community life. For Father Nikola Papasoğlu, the grief is still unbearable. “I try not to go there,” he says, talking about the St. Nicholas Church in the city centre of İskenderun, a coastal district of Hatay province in southern Turkey. “Seeing our church in ruins gives me a sorrow that I still …

“When I went to the hospital, my friend, who is a doctor, welcomed me. Because of this, I personally did not encounter the bad treatment that we often hear about from others. The real damage I suffered was from my boyfriend, both physically and psychologically.” With these words, 29-year-old Aysel* described the violence she endured and the aftermath. Aysel, who lives in Turkey’s capital Ankara, struggles to express her emotions due to her trauma. However, she says that being welcomed …

Despite jubilation over the fall of the Assad regime, many refugees fear the uncertainty of return to a war-ravaged country. On the first day of Eid last year – when it is traditional to visit the graves of loved ones – relatives were searching for their loved ones’ resting places at a cemetery for victims of the 2023 earthquake in Hatay, southern Turkey. Rainfall had caused some of the graves to move, and the visitors were wading through puddles of …

The split between secular and conservative religious values may be one of Turkey’s great political divides, but it’s also proving to be the source of must-watch television. In recent years, popular drama series like “Cranberry Sorbet” and “Red Roses” have attracted viewers by placing this divide at the centre of their plot lines. “Cranberry Sorbet” focuses on the relationship between Fatih, a conservative man, and Doğa, a secular woman, and their efforts to establish a family. The show handles the …

Vaccines against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes genital warts and can lead to cancer, are offered to girls free of charge in 125 countries worldwide. Yet despite government promises, Turkey has yet to add the vaccine to its national immunisation programme. In November 2022, the then-health minister Fahrettin Koca promised that the HPV vaccine would be offered free of charge in Turkey. Experts believe that the vaccine, rolled out globally, could save the lives of 340,000 women a year …

A group of women sit and chat in front of their stone-walled homes, wearing brightly-coloured floral dresses and traditional white headscarves. When the setting sun hits them, it lights up the lines inked onto their hands and faces – as well as images of the sun itself, tattooed onto their foreheads. A common practice in the Mesopotamia region that straddles Turkey, Iraq and Syria, especially among Kurds, “deq” is the Kurdish word for tattoo. Prevalent in Turkey’s south-eastern provinces of …

“After I got married, I looked at my ID card to see that there was nothing left of mine except my first name,” says Oya Ersoy. Ersoy, now 54, is a human rights lawyer. In the 1990s she became a figurehead for women who want to keep their maiden names after marriage, taking her case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Oya Ersoy (Her personal archive) Decades later, that struggle continues. Today, when women in Turkey …