I am going to Turkey to hunt in December.
For those of you who have hunted Turkey, tell me what non-hunting sites you suggest my wife and I see while there.
Thanks

Haiga Sofia
Blue Mosque
Grand Bazaar

Ross,

I have lived near Adana in the East. There are tons of sights if you can slip away for a few days.

As you have lived in Egypt, I'd recommend talking to the outfitter about options. Terrorism has changed Turkey and things change everyday. Probably what you were used to in Cairo.

We visited a Greek ampitheater built during Alexander the Great's time, that had been built on a mountain they were hunting ibex in.

Biggest problem with Turkey was the food, they can carry a pretty huge internal parasite load that would kill us. Anytime I strayed from the safer resteraunts I'd have bathroom problems for a week until the corpsmen got it locked down.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...-20150306-story.html



Dogcat,

As CoyoteHunter listed, those are must sees. We were there for a few days on our way to Tajikistan in 2008 and really loved Istanbul, a beautiful city with fantastic history.

Have a great trip.


BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU BUY.



Chicago trader spends eight harrowing days in prison after buying sword on church-sponsored trip to Turkey.

Chicago businessman Martin O'Connor was at the tail end of a church-sponsored trip to Turkey with his wife in November when he bought a sword engraved with Arabic script at Istanbul's teeming Grand Bazaar.

Inside a cramped kiosk stuffed with military memorabilia, O'Connor haggled the price down to $500.

Two days later, as he and wife Maureen were about to fly home, the couple were stopped at an airport checkpoint by Turkish police who suspected the sword was a valuable antiquity. Assured that the matter would be cleared up quickly, O'Connor persuaded his wife to board the jet and told her he'd follow on the next flight.

Instead, the financial trader spent the next eight harrowing days locked up in a filthy prison, charged with attempting to smuggle an artifact, an offense that can bring up to 12 years behind bars.

O'Connor is now safely back in the U.S., but three months after his return, the case is still playing out in Turkey, where the nation's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has appealed a court decision in January that cleared O'Connor of any wrongdoing.

"It's been hell," O'Connor, 50, told the Tribune. "I spent a fortune. I went through a nightmare, and my wife went through a nightmare not knowing what was happening with me in prison. ... And I do not expect anyone to ever say they are sorry."



The couple know they were fortunate to have had financial resources and family connections to fall back on. O'Connor's father, Edmund, was a driving force behind the creation of the Chicago Board Options Exchange in the 1970s. Maureen, an attorney who volunteers with Catholic Charities, is the sister of an Illinois state senator who was able to bring significant political pressure to bear.

After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and travel expenses, the O'Connors want their ordeal to serve as a warning to anyone vacationing in the region — particularly college-age kids with no cash or clout — that even a seemingly innocuous souvenir could land them in trouble.

"If I did not have the money, if I did not have the connections and if I didn't have a loving, hardworking, caring wife that managed it all and took care of it, I would still be in prison," O'Connor said on a recent afternoon in his town home in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood. "I needed all three things."

Black market smuggling

O'Connor's travails in Turkey are not unheard of for a country that for centuries was looted by various powers only to be hit with the added insult of seeing its priceless artifacts put on display in museums around the world. The illegal sale of historical treasures has also been linked recently to the funding of terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, putting pressure on governments across the Middle East to clamp down.

In an effort to combat black market smuggling, Turkey has enacted laws that have broad definitions of what constitutes an artifact, and the government regularly prosecutes anyone believed to be removing antiquities from its borders.

In 2013, a U.S. Department of Defense civilian contractor vacationing with his wife in Turkey was detained on suspicion of smuggling antiquities after he was found with some stones and debris he'd collected from the beach in front of his hotel. Like O'Connor, Jason Dement was whisked away from his wife at the airport and booked into custody. He wound up cutting a plea deal that allowed him to leave after he was detained just one night.

A few months earlier, Swiss police Chief Christian Varone was convicted of smuggling artifacts for taking a stone from near a historical site as a souvenir, but his sentence of a little more than a year in prison was suspended as long as he stayed out of trouble.

For those buying antiquities in Turkey, the U.S. State Department warns on its website, "use only authorized dealers and obtain museum certificate for each item they are authorized to sell. At departure, you may be asked to present a receipt and the certificate. Failure to have them can result in your arrest and jail time."

Old World charm

The O'Connors didn't know of the recent arrests when they signed up to go to Turkey last fall with a group from Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago — their first "empty nester" trip after their youngest child went off to college.

For a week and a half they lived it up, soaking up the Old World charm of Turkey while touring ancient ruins and sites like the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia cathedral.

"It's a beautiful country, and we were having a blast," Maureen O'Connor said.

On their second-to-last day, the O'Connors went with a guide to the Grand Bazaar, a sprawling covered market with thousands of merchants that's sometimes referred to as the top tourist destination in the world.

Most of the couple's purchases that day were typical souvenirs — backgammon sets, Turkish towels, scarves and spices. Then Martin wandered into a kiosk and set his sights on the sword and its sleek curved handle and 2-foot blade without an edge, signifying it was ceremonial and never intended for battle.

O'Connor, a history buff, and the shop owner surmised it was from the early 1900s — relatively new for a country where civilizations can be traced back to the Stone Age.

"I wouldn't have bought anything that was really old," O'Connor said. "I wanted something I could buy as a memento."

Two days later, on Nov. 20, the couple arrived at Ataturk Airport for their flight home and went through the metal detectors set up near the entrance. Maureen O'Connor froze when two security guards pulled the sword out of a red suitcase containing all their souvenirs.

"I was like, 'They think we're going to bring that on the plane!'" she recalled. "I said, 'No, no, no, we are checking that.'"

That wasn't the problem, though it took some time for the O'Connors to figure that out because of the language barrier. Eventually a woman who spoke a bit of English explained that Martin O'Connor had to go with police while they sent the sword across town to the Topkapi Palace Museum to determine whether the weapon could be exported.

O'Connor, convinced by the guards that it was all just a routine procedure, told his wife he'd follow her home to Chicago as soon as he was cleared. As he was escorted to the airport police station, there didn't seem to be any cause for alarm.

"They bring me in unhandcuffed, offer me tea. One says in broken English, 'If museum say not old, you go. If old, sword stay, you go,'" O'Connor said. "They took me to the ticket counter and had me switch my flight to the next day. No big deal."

About an hour after Maureen O'Connor boarded her flight alone and in tears, word came back from the museum that the archaeologist who examined the weapon had determined it was a protected historical property. "This work must not be exported," an email read in Turkish. O'Connor's real troubles had just begun.

"The cop comes up to me and goes, 'Sword very old. Problem.'" O'Connor said.

'The most disgusting place'

O'Connor was booked and told he would see a judge in the morning. He can still picture the door slamming behind him at the airport police station lockup, where he spent a long night in a cell that was filling up by the hour with arrestees of all stripes.

In the morning he was handcuffed, put in a van and driven to a hospital where he was stripped and examined for bruises or other signs of mistreatment, a tedious process that was repeated several times over the next few days as he was taken back and forth to the Bakirkoy courthouse.

When his case was finally called in the afternoon, O'Connor was told by his court-appointed lawyer to make a statement to the judge explaining that he didn't know he wasn't allowed to take the sword out of the country. The merchant who sold him the sword was also in court, represented by an attorney, and submitted a written statement saying he believed the weapon was ordinary.

But the judge, armed with the report from the museum, found there was enough evidence for the case to continue to trial and ordered that O'Connor remain in custody. O'Connor was told he would be in prison until he had a full hearing. How long that could take was unclear — at first he'd heard a month, but later he was told it could be six months or longer.

"Every time they would tell me something, the story changed," O'Connor said. "It went from no problem to a small problem to a very big problem."

That night he was processed into the Maltepe Prison, an expansive complex on the outskirts of Istanbul that houses convicted terrorists and drug smugglers as well as arrestees awaiting trial. O'Connor was given a thin mattress, a scratchy blanket and a pillowcase — but no pillow. He was escorted to a pod for new inmates that had seven four-man cells that opened into a common room with a lone shower stall and porcelain hole for a toilet. The garbage can was overflowing with weeksold food, and flies and gnats swarmed around stale bread on the floor.

"This is the most disgusting place in the universe," O'Connor said. "No toilet paper, hasn't been cleaned in years. The smell was just as bad or worse than any outhouse."

He spent four days in the "orientation" cell, battling fatigue and boredom, trying to keep active by pacing around the cell pod several times a day. He never showered or brushed his teeth and stayed hydrated only by drinking tap water from the filthy sink. Food was brought in through a chuckhole in the steel door — usually bread and an unfamiliar stew. But there were no utensils, and he hardly ate a bite.

Strike Force One

By the time O'Connor ended up at Maltepe, his wife was back in Chicago, busy marshaling resources despite the shock of what had happened. Through connections at the Chicago law firm of Baker & McKenzie, she was able to hire an affiliated lawyer in Turkey, who visited O'Connor on his first overnight stay in prison and later filed a series of appeals to the high courts in Istanbul to try to spring him from custody.

Meanwhile, Maureen's twin brother, state Sen. Michael Connelly, was in the middle of a legislative session in Springfield when he learned that O'Connor had been detained in Turkey and no one knew his whereabouts.

"The first thing that goes through your mind when you get a call like that is, is this a joke or something?" Connelly said. "We all remember the movie 'Midnight Express.' ... It's just a feeling of pure terror."

Connelly contacted the offices of U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk to intervene with the State Department. Once they found out where O'Connor was being held, Maureen's other brother, Tim, a Cook County probation officer, teamed up with a close family friend and flew to Istanbul to meet with the Turkish lawyer and visit O'Connor in prison.

"We called them Strike Force One," Connelly said.

That Monday, Maureen O'Connor went with brother Michael, U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam and a Kirk aide to meet with officials in the Turkish Consulate in downtown Chicago. The next day, Durbin sent a letter on his official letterhead to the president of Turkey asking if anything could be done about the "unfortunate misunderstanding" that had landed O'Connor in prison.

"By then it was out of my hands," Maureen O'Connor said. "It had gotten really high up."

Still, no one knew if the efforts would pay off. On Tuesday, his sixth day in custody, O'Connor was transferred into the prison's regular population. He was housed in a cellblock with mostly English-speaking prisoners who were doing longer stretches of time, most for drug smuggling.

His new surroundings were comparatively immaculate, thanks in part to a British cellmate who was paid in cigarettes to be the "maid." The Brit, who called O'Connor "Professor" because of his fresh beard and a sport jacket he'd been wearing for warmth, said he'd been at the prison for nine months and had yet to see his first court hearing. O'Connor said he was resigned to the fact that he might not be going anywhere for a while.

"If I keep telling myself I'm going to get out, it would drive me insane," he said.

But by Wednesday, the tables had turned. Istanbul's highest available court ordered O'Connor released as long as he stayed in Turkey pending a hearing in December. O'Connor finally walked out of prison in the early morning hours of Nov. 27. It was Thanksgiving Day back home.

Standard-issue sword

With O'Connor staying at an Istanbul hotel awaiting his hearing, his wife flew back to Turkey to be with him. On Dec. 11 the travel ban was lifted, and O'Connor was allowed to come back to Chicago. A final decision, however, was not made — partly because the key evidence, the sword, was not brought into court that day.

It wasn't until more than a month later that the court heard from a weapons expert with the national museum who confirmed that the first inspector had been wrong: The weapon was a standard-issue "bombardier's sword" from the 20th century, not an antiquity, court records show.

"It is not a cultural property that should be protected," the expert's report said. "These kinds of properties (carpet, rug, and wooden properties) can be taken out of the country with the relevant museum's permission."

The O'Connors thought that would be the end of it. But the Turkish legal process continued to play out as prosecutors and other government entities mulled whether to appeal. Prosecutors eventually declined to pursue the matter further, but last week came word that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism had challenged the dismissal of the case to the supreme court in Ankara, claiming the lower court's ruling was "against law and the procedure."

Their Turkish lawyer told the O'Connors it may take up to two years for the court to hear the case. But he reassured them that such appeals are routine — a characterization the O'Connors have heard at just about every step.

"It's just procedure, no problem," Maureen O'Connor said. "But then it comes back to bite us."

As for the sword, Martin O'Connor said he's looking forward to its return, as called for by the lower court's ruling. To his wife's chagrin, he already has a prominent spot picked out for it on a living room wall, a perfect conversation starter for when guests visit. He can already picture how his story will begin.

"So back when I was in a Turkish prison ..." O'Connor said.

As of this morning I would try and get my deposit back.

quote:

Originally posted by Big Wonderful Wyoming:
As of this morning I would try and get my deposit back.

Ain't that the truth!
Zeke