A sip of tea from tulip shape glass
A visit to Turkey, to Istanbul (for personal Istanbul tours) suggests together with going sightseeing, to get familiar with the local cuisine, local traditions…
Surely, every one of you has, at least once, heard or even tasted Fish and bread, Turkish coffee and Turkish tea. If not, then it is time to do so. Today, wherever you go in Turkey (in every park, village, town square … in any place which offers a good view), you will find many small teahouses or tea gardens. These are not simply places where you can have tea while enjoying the Bosphorus, for example, but they are social clubs where men mainly gather, especially in the evening. There they feel fine to play backgammon.
Some of the typical tea gardens in Istanbul are Camlica, on the Asian side, the Pierre Loti cafe in the neighbourhood of Eyup, the tea garden in Uskudar.
Turkish tea is one of the things that symbolizes Turkey and always there to make personal Istanbul tours lovelier and friendlier, still it is relatively young. Some sources mention that Turks traded and consumed tea as soon as 400 B.C., but certain is that tea only became common in Turkey from the 1900s onwards. The first record of using tea as a beverage comes from China dating back to the 10th century BC. But only since 1589, Europeans learnt about tea when a Venetian author credits the lengthy lives of Asians to their tea drinking.
