Anatolian Days & Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey: Land of Dervishes, Goddesses, and Saints

When Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner meet on the balcony of a guesthouse in a small resort town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, they think they have only a mutual friend and a summer dream in common. Soon, they discover a shared love of travel, history, culture, cuisine, and literature; and they begin a ten-year odyssey through Turkey.

Inspired by the poetry of thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, Brenner and Stocke journey to central Turkey for the Whirling Dervishes Festival. A visit to a Turkish bath becomes a lesson in sensuality and patience. Their interest in the cults of the mother goddess takes them to Ephesus, the Black Sea, and east into Mesopotamia. Through intuition, experience, and a bit of serendipity, Brenner and Stocke find excitement, friendship, and love, and learn how and why Turkey--a country that holds the keys to Western Civilization--continues to grow in world importance.

Travel writing with literary value, Anatolian Days and Nights will appeal to armchair travelers as well as those about to hit the road.

Angie Brenner began her love affair with Turkey when she embarked on a quest to see Whirling Dervishes in Konya, where Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi taught. An avid traveler and illustrator, Brenner would spend the next twenty-five years searching the remote corners of Turkey for historical and cultural links between Turkey's past and present. A former travel-bookstore owner and freelance writer, Brenner is the West Coast Editor for the online magazine Wild River Review. She lives in the rural mountain community of Julian, California.

Joy E. Stocke has been traveling to and writing about Turkey and the eastern Aegean since 1982. Her quest to discover the roots of Western religion has brought her to all of Turkey's borders. She is the author of a novel, Ugly Cookies, and a collection of bilingual poems (English/Greek), The Cave of the Bear, based on her travels in Crete. Founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Wild River Review, Stocke is a Lindisfarne Association fellow and serves on the board of the Princeton Middle East Society. She lives in Stockton, New Jersey.