Blue Guide Turkey

by Bernard McDonagh

Book Overview

This book has detailed information about cities and towns, the archaeological sites and historical monuments in Turkey, including the Hittite sites of central Anatolia, the Classical sites of the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, the Crusader castles of the south-east and the Selcuk mosques and medreses of Konya, Kayseri and Sivas. It has town plans, site plans, route maps, hotel recommendations, advice on traveling in Turkey, information about Turkish...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393311953
• ISBN13: 9780393311952
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 703 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 4.7" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Very Specialized

The "Blue Guide" is not a guidebook in the "Eat at Dogan's, sleep at Mustafa's" sense, although a bit of that (dated) information is featured. Rather, it is an exhaustive compilation of data regarding the historical sites of Turkey, usually with accompanying maps. On our last trip, we carried it and the Lonely Planet guide, and found that the LP guide was, as you'd expect, more useful for travel logistics, but was surprisingly also about as good for site information. This is because the Blue Guide's descriptions are often taken verbatim from official tourist information that's generally provided free at the sites. As a result of our experience, I'd go with just the LP another time. If you're going to Istanbul, however, be aware that the Blue Guide to Istanbul is outstanding. It has excellent walking tours that make every step through the Old Town meaningful, and excellent maps as well. The Blue Guide to Turkey makes a good read at home to plan before you go, and is a good reference when you return, but I wouldn't pack it along again if I had access to the Lonely Planet Guide.

A good guide book

After spending a month of traveling through Turkey visiting archaeological sites, ruins and museums, I found this book to be helpful since there was little I knew of the specifics of the history of the sites to which I was visiting. And yet, some of the more specialist historians and classicists with whom I was traveling found many, many errors in the book. Basically, if you are looking for a wealth of information on the archaeological and historical aspects of Turkey this is the book for you. However, be careful as you read and do a little extra work if you are using it for research. It is a guide book after all and excels at that purpose. Recommended for the typical visitor to Turkey.

Not for every traveler to Turkey....but

We returned in Feb 2003 after 3 months of independent travel in Turkey. We were there mostly to visit archeological sites and ruins, and we traveled with several other books. Nothing, however approached the exhaustive, invaluable and often overwhelming information that the Blue Guide provided us with. There are many guidebooks that provide basic information on accomodations/restaurants/etc in TK for the casual tourist who will primarily be visiting Ephesus and the other major sites on the Aegean Coast of Turkey. There any book will do, and if you are traveling with a TK licensed guide this is one of the books that they will have had to master in the grueling University program that allows them to become licensed tour guides.But if your interest in Asia Minor takes you even slightly off the well-trodden path, the Blue Guide is indispensible. I can't imagine understanding places like Boðazkale,Seleucia, Letoön, Xanthos,Iassos,Miletus, Stranoniceia without either this book or a licensed guide. There is often little in the way of informational signage at the important yet lesser visited sites, and compared to other countries ,there is little published information available in book form at the sites other than glossy tourist-photo books.I can not recommend the Blue Guide too highly to the specialist visitor to Turkeys rich archeological past.

Travel Guides Don't Get Any Better Than This

The first thing to understand about Blue Guides is: they're not for everyone. In particular, they aren't for people who only want to have to take along a single guidebook when they travel. Although in recent years the series has begun to include some fairly sketchy data about hotels and restaurants, information about where to stay, eat or shop has never been the raison d'etre of this series. Rather, the purpose of the Blue Guides has always been to provide accurate and astonishingly comprehensive information about the history, architecture, art history, and literary associations of the countries or regions each guide covers. For those purposes, the Blue Guide has no peer. (The series has also always been distinguished by the abundance and excellence of its maps, city plans, and museum floor plans.) If you want to travel, miss nothing of any interest or significance, and come back with your mind much enriched and primed for further reading and exploration, then you're one of the people Blue Guides are written for. Traditionally, Blue Guides were known for being authoritative and reliable, but the writing was typically understated and restrained. That began to change a few years ago, and now -- just as with the New York Times -- Blue Guide authors no longer shy away from writing marked by local color, word pictures, and individuality. At the same time, the series retains its old virtues of exhaustive research, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Bernard McDonagh, the author of the Blue Guide: Turkey, is the Michelangelo of the new model Blue Guides. He began by authoring a volume for the series on Turkey's Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, which was widely acclaimed, and then expanded it to cover (almost) the entire country a few years later. I say "almost" because this volume covers Istanbul only in summary fashion, since there is another Blue Guide volume (by the estimable John Freely) that covers that great metropolis in microscopic detail. The Blue Guide: Turkey's comprehensiveness immediately distinguishes it from the competition. The coverage of the best-known sites like Troy, Ephesus, or Aphrodisias, of course, is superb: Ephesus merits 22 pages, along with one full-page and another two-page plan of the site and its environs, and Aphrodisias gets 10 pages. But lesser-known sites like Assos, Priene, and many others that might receive a paragraph in most guidebooks are also covered in detail, usually with an excellent plan. Indeed, the book includes no less than 45 site plans of archaeological sites, including such relatively obscure ones as Nysa, Labraynda, Limyra, Sillyum, Sura, and Uzuncaburc. For years, the secret behind the Blue Guide's comprehensiveness was its authors' willingness to mine obscure archaeological excavation reports and 18th and 19th century traveler's accounts for nuggets of information that would have escaped the less diligent. McDonagh lifts the veil on this technique, often quoting at length from the im