The Passenger: Turkey

The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world. Its aim, to break down barriers and introduce the essence of the place. Packed with essays and investigative journalism; original photography and illustrations; charts, and unusual facts and observations, each volume offers a unique insight into a different culture, and how history has shaped the place into what it is today.

Brimming with intricate research and enduring wonder, The Passenger is a love-letter to global travel.

IN THIS VOLUME, Elif Batuman, Burhan Sönmez, Elif Shafak among other Turkish writers, many of them in self-imposed exile, explore a fascinating yet maddening country.

The birth of the “New Turkey,” as the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called his own creation, is an exemplary story of the rise of “illiberal democracies” through the erosion of civil liberties, press freedom, and the independence of the judicial system. Turkey was a complex country long before the rise of its new sultan: born out of the ashes of a vast multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, Turkey has grappled through its relatively short history with the definition of its own identity.

Poised between competing ideologies, secularism and piousness, a militaristic nationalism and exceptional openness to foreigners, Turkey defies easy labels and categories. Through the voices of some of its best writers and journalists, The Passenger analyses how it got to where it is today and finds the bright spots of hope that allow its always resourceful, often frustrated population to continue living, and thriving.