‘A Byzantine Journey’

These days you don’t need to just visit key sites of a country: You can go on a specialist tour with a particular theme. The most famous example of this is the safari: tour the African bush in search of great animals and the big five in particular -- elephants, lions, rhinos, buffalos and leopards. In this ecologically minded age many similar wildlife and nature-focused tours have sprung up around the world. You can go dolphin-watching in North America, or tour the rain-forests of South America, or take a Swiss and Austrian theme tour discovering alpine flowers.

Britain has always known how to exploit its history, particularly when American tourists are involved. You can join a myriad of tours exploring Henry VIII’s England (sites range from Hampton Court Palace and Hever Castle to Richmond Park), Shakespeare’s England (not just centered on Stratford-upon-Avon), Roman England (from the spas at Bath to Hadrian’s Wall), to name just a few. Where there is no particular famous personality linked with them, towns manage to jump on the theme tour bandwagon with a ghostly tour of local graveyards and sites of hideous crimes -- of course, these tours depart at sunset to add to the atmosphere!

Hollywood has made places famous, and Oscar-success almost guarantees a clientele for a theme tour based on a film. New Zealand has made a cottage industry out of Lord of the Rings tours -- you can visit the locations where your favorite parts were filmed, and even meet a hobbit, an orc and Gandalf.

Art tours have always been popular. Italy is a wonderful destination for these: Not only is it full of the masterpieces of previous centuries for visitors to admire, but the landscape will inspire artists to create their own. Often art tours include a teacher to assist you in your technique so you can paint your own holiday memento.

Researching theme tours, I discovered that even China has joined the rank of tourist destinations promoting itself in this way. Here you have not just one choice, but you can focus on Chinese cookery, or Kung Fu, or ceramics or archeology. How about the Guizhou Ethnic Tour, or the Sichuan Panda Tour?

This is an area of tourism development that Turkey has not really cashed in on yet. There are some specialist companies who offer a Footsteps of St Paul tour, but often these are based abroad and they include Turkey as just part of a wider Mediterranean trip including Greece and Malta. The Mavi Yolculuk -- Blue Tour -- a long extravaganza on a beautiful gullet boat around the coast of Fethiye and Marmaris and Bodrum is well-known in the country but less well advertised abroad.

In the last few years, Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) tours have grown increasingly popular, with Gaziantep, Nemrut Dağı, Hasankeyf, Mardin, Urfa and Diyarbakır coming on to the tourist map.

However, a wealth of tours could be designed that, instead of focusing on places, focused on a common linking theme. How about a Turkish Cuisine tour, where a group of tourists is taken from place to place sampling the highlights of local cuisine, and learning how to cook a dish each day themselves? A mosaic art tour would have so many potential destinations it would be hard to decide which ones to leave out. In the Footsteps of the Odyssey, or Jason and the Argonauts (although I guess, this one couldn’t be called “in the footsteps” but would have to be “in the wake of”!) could celebrate ancient mythology. A musical tour could range from seeing bagpipes in Trabzon to reed pipes in Central Anatolia.

Exploring Sufism would take you around some mystic sites, and of course the highlight of the tour would be Konya. Riding with Osman could take you on a sweep of Turkish history starting in central Turkey and slowly advancing on Istanbul, taking in Iznik, Bursa and Edirne. An Ataturk-themed tour might start at the Turkish Consulate in Thessalonica and then move on to Gallipoli, Samsun, some of the battle sites of the War of Independence (Dumlupınar? Afyon? İnönü?) and then Ankara.

Such tours have the advantage that they attract the wealthier grade of tourist, and so they would be a welcome alternative to the package tour of the all-inclusive hotel, where beach-lovers do not stray out of their hotel and spend no money in the town.

John Ash created his own tour, based on the many Byzantine remains in Turkey. Of course, this means he had to visit the obvious sites of the Hagia Sophia and the rock churches in Cappadocia. These are the main Byzantine remains that all tourists see. But John manages to uncover a wealth of places worth adding to his itinerary, spanning the country from north to south, as well as from west to eastern-central Turkey. İstanbul, İznik, Bursa, Eskişehir, Afyon, Eğirdir, Beyşehir, Konya, Karaman, Cappadocia.

Byzantium has, he notes, often been synonymous with decadence and decline -- in short, it has a bad reputation! The capital Byzantium was described both as the New Jerusalem and the New Babylon, a paradox, at once the most Christian of cities and also the mother of all iniquities. Starting here, he visits sites off the tourist path such as the Palace of Blachernae and the Rose Mosque. The art of Byzantium was stunning, and an encounter with it brings history alive. In one building, climbing up scaffolding in restoration Ash came “face to face with the angels, saints, monarchs and courtiers of Byzantium.”

“A Byzantine Journey” is a travel memoir linking history with the art and remains of Byzantium. It is a tour guide, interspersed with retelling the stories of the chief characters of Byzantine history. Ash skillfully swings into the tale of a courageous king, a wronged princess, a scheming wife or a wicked courtier after leading us on an exploration of the ruined building where they once lived. As we enter the Church of Çavuşin in Cappadocia he tells us all about the lovely but ruthless Theophano, the heroic but hideous Nicephorus and the gallant but murderous John.

His descriptive powers bring the ruins to life -- we almost do not need the few photographs that are contained in the center pages of the book. For example, Şehitgazi near Eskişehir is a “cluster of domes, turrets and minarets floating on the horizon looking exactly like an Edmund Dulac illustration for the Arabian Nights.”

In this landscape, with amazing brick and stone buildings that bear witness to history, Ash considers the stories and ballads of Byzantium, too -- how they often had the conflicting threads of heroes fighting the Turkish enemy, while love transcended the boundaries of race. Byzantine heroines and Turkish heroes would declare love for each other like Romeo and Juliet: a love that was not necessarily doomed.

Ash recommends such a tour not just because it is an interesting way to see this magnificent country, but because, as he says when exploring the Binbir Kilise region near Karaman, “As you walk from church to church, the life of the 10th century seems very close.”

Visiting these historical sites, you begin to understand an ancient people. “The plain to the northeast of Ereğli is the kind of place where one might expect to see signs, omens and visions.” Let John Ash inspire you to take a tour of your own. Who knows what you might see?