[Dottore]

Ian:

I'll pull together some thoughts on this for you—since you have some time. Turkey is a large, endlessly complex and fascinating land.

The absolutely single most invaluable book if you are trying to understand a bit of the context of modern Turkey is "The Ottoman Empire" by Lord Kinross. It will be hard to find, but look for it on amazon or call around to a few of the used bookshops in your part of the world. Barring that, anything Kinross wrote on Turkey is brilliant. For my money, no one every understood the place better than this British Lord.

And you will find Turkey very hard to comprehend without some background reading.

Depending on what you enjoy, you will need to focus your trip very much, because the country is very big, and you won't cover large distances quickly. I would be able to give some tips on this. But please give me some idea what you are looking for first.

Cheers, Mark