The Penn Stater Magazine

Faces of Turkey

May 13, 2011 at 11:01 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

We’ve all enjoyed taking photos of the sights on this trip to Turkey: photos of mosques, markets, ancient ruins, turquoise seas. But we’ve really enjoyed photographing the people.

The Turkish people are generally warm, friendly, and welcoming of tourists. Many of them are happy for us to take their picture. Others got their picture taken without them realizing it—and obviously there are different schools of thought as to whether that’s appropriate.

Here are a few shots from just the last couple of days. The image above is of two businessmen outside a shop in the Old Town section of Antalya. Roger Werner ’67 Eng caught the image below of one of the vendors outside the ruins of Perge:

At that same market, a toddler—presumably the child of one of the vendors—was playing with some U.S. money, and I managed to get a photo before the parents discovered what she was doing and took it away from her:

One of our passengers, Marlynn Wilson-Donaldson ’60, has no hesitation about walking up to someone and asking to take their picture, and most of them readily agree. Here’s a photo she took of a woman and (presumably) her mother outside the Mevlana Museum in Konya:

Outside that same museum, we ran into some enthusiastic young girls who were excited to see us, and eventually through hand gestures we discovered that they wanted to take our picture. So we happily posed for them, and then I took a photo of them in return:

The interaction left us all feeling good.

I’m posting collections of Turkey photos regularly to the Alumni Association’s Facebook page, so be sure to “like” that page if you haven’t already.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Alumni Association, Penn State alumni. Tags: Antalya, Konya, Legendary Turkey, Mevlana Museum, photography.