It may be flavour of the month among European travellers, but Turkey remains terra incognita to most of us, less a destination than a famous battleground. The Site includes a time line history of Anatolia from the Neolithic to the present day as well as a close-up of the major cities, including Phrygia, Ephesus, Side and the improbable cave villages of Cappadocia. In many cases, what remains amounts to little more than tumbled stones and solitary columns, yet to antiquarians, this vast and meticulous Website vividly conveys the vigour of the civilisations that have donated to the Turkish melting pot. And, since semi-nudity plus steam is a great leveller, the bathhouse also serves as a forum for the democratic exchange of views among the social strata. To find your real bathhouse, look for a building with steam pouring from a metal spout.
Foreigners always welcome.
Raising it head and shoulders above the common herd of happy snaps broadcast on the Internet is the exceptional quality of the photographs and the captions. Ottoman palaces and mosques, the treasures of Byzantium, Turkish street life and the Turkish Sufi sect, the Whirling Dervishes, are spotlighted in short but scintillating portfolios. This vast compendium of Turkish sounds encompasses traditional music, classical, military, Arab and even an Australian-Turkish rock band. On the downside, few of the songs are available in a streamed format, which means long download times in most cases. In the best traditions of the genre, it is the photographs that dominate.