Common Concerns

Occasionally people email us here at HiTiT with questions about Turkey. I'll draw on some of those here.

Dress code seems to be a recurrent theme, understandably so, and it's nice to be able to reassure people that things really aren't that different. While you will see women covered head to toe just about everywhere in Turkey they'll be walking down the same street as women indistinguishable from western europeans.

In any tourist area just about anything goes and while wearing something skimpy is going to get you attention it's unlikely to cause offence. This isn't the case in more traditional or religious areas. The attitude to dress varies from place to place and it would be ill mannered to attempt to enter a mosque with out covering up. Incidentally, it's interesting to note that this attitude to bare flesh and places of worship is by no means restricted to Islam as visitors to Orthodox monasteries in Greece will find out.

In general, if you're visiting anything of religious significance, or anywhere where there isn't a McDonalds yet, then you should pack some light trousers and something that covers shoulders, as much for your own comfort as anything else. You're more likely to get tired of being stared at than you are to get into a shouting match.

Travel is another old chestnut. Any guidebook will tell you that you can't sit next to a man you're not travelling with on a bus. This seems to be the case on all of the lines although whether by law or custom I'm not sure. The upshot of this is that if an odd number of people are travelling together and an even number of them are women then one of the guys will have to sit next to someone he doesn't know. Not such a big deal really.

Any lone traveller, male or female, is probably going to feel at their most vulnerable getting off a night bus at 6:00 in the morning and being approached by accommodation touts. In an ideal world you've already phoned ahead and made a reservation but it is easy to get railroaded into staying somewhere you don't like. The few cases of lone women being harrassed that I know of have occured in pansiyons and cheap hotels so perhaps this is something you do need to be careful about.

Hitch hiking is probably not such a bad idea. If you're comfortable hitch hiking in Europe then I wouldn't hesitate to do so here. If you're not comfortable anywhere else then you're not going to do it here anyway. Common sense applies but there are not really any special circumstances to watch out for. On the whole, Turkey is a safe country, the rules are a little different but most people will be nice.