Bettany Hughes on Turkey’s epic rail journey and off-season wonders

The Doğu Express cuts through the snowy steppe of Eastern Turkey, loosely following the path merchants took along the ancient Silk Road. Bettany Hughes sits beside the window of a half-full carriage gazing out at the terrain. Soon, giant pots of Turkish honey (someone had heard she enjoys it) are delivered to her seat table, before she dances with a group of women in the café carriage. The scenes invite more than a twinge of travel envy. “It’s an epic adventure,” Hughes tells The i Paper of her journey across ancient Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) – the 800-mile overnight rail route, between the city of Kars in northeastern Turkey and the capital of Ankara in the Central Anatolia region, is just one leg. “The train was genuinely magical. We were seeing wolves and eagles hunting as we went through that landscape”. She has returned to Turkey every year since her first backpacking visit in 1986. This trip was for her latest Channel 4 series, Bettany Hughes’s Lost Worlds: Dawn of Civilisation, in which she explores places from antiquity and the neolithic period with plenty of travel inspiration along the way. There’s a moment where she’s brought to tears as she’s shown a freshly unearthed statue of a boy from the prehistoric site of Karahan Tepe in the Şanlıurfa Province, southeastern Turkey. The site predates The Great Pyramids of Giza by around 7,000 years. Almost 12,000 years old, the statue was discovered just two weeks before Hughes’s visit, opposite another, seven-foot tall stone statue thought to represent life and death. “It’s just remarkable how [the site] is still rewriting history, and the stunning sophistication of the carvings and lifestyle there,” she tells The i Paper. Shorts “[The discoveries] make you feel very close to [ancient people]. It’s almost like the boy was sleeping. It was very tender in a way.” Visiting the life-sized statue was one example of the programme’s small, on-location team “tearing up the script”. “We had no idea that we could go and get access to it, so we had to kind of completely change what we were doing,” says Hughes. The crew chose to film in winter, despite the harsh conditions. “It’s so important that people travel off peak and we knew we could get tickets for the train in winter. ” Less comfortable than the Doğu Express was Hughes’s sleigh ride across the frozen surface of Lake Çıldır. “It was -22°C, and I was sitting on that sledge for about six hours. My bum was completely numb.” Bettany Hughes chose to film in winter, despite the harsh conditions (Photo: SandStone Global Productions) It’s an experience that could only be enjoyed in winter, Turkey’s quietest time for tourism. Around two million foreign visitors arrive in the country in January, compared to nearly seven million in August. Winter also brings fewer tourists to well-known sites such as Ephesus and Cappadocia, which feature on Hughes’s itinerary. In Cappadocia, she walks among the “fairy chimney” rock formations, stepping inside hollowed-out examples that were used by monks as hermitages and chapels. Although, inside one rock-cut building, which was thought to be a monastery, Hughes points out secular paintings of Aesop’s Fables. Those tales originated in ancient Greece, which tends to get more attention among British tourists than Turkey’s antiquity. But the ancient city of Gordion, another stop for Hughes, was founded by someone we haven’t forgotten – King Midas, his reputation may be grounded in Greek mythology, but his kingdom is within modern-day Turkey. The ancient city of Gordion is not the easiest site to reach – around an hour and 40 minutes’ drive south-west of Ankara airport (from which there are direct flights to the UK). Hughes offers further enticement: “The food is heaven, and the hospitality is extraordinary”. The second episode sees Hughes admiring findings from recent excavations (Photo: SandStone Global Productions) There are several moments in the two episodes that might spark a craving for less familiar flavours. Hughes drinks salep (a hot, creamy drink made using flour created from the tubers of orchids) on the banks of the Bosphorus and on the roof of a Land Rover. She also loves Turkish cheese and vegetarian pancakes. No doubt she’ll return next year. “When I visited aged 19, it made me understand the world, and that cultures are all about learning from each other.” Bettany Hughes’s Lost Worlds: Dawn of Civilisations airs at 8pm, Saturday 15 August on Channel 4, then catch up on Channel4.com