Who you will be travelling with

He still guides. He came to guiding in 2012 from agricultural investment banking, brought there by hiking and biking in the Turkish mountains, and works across Turkey and Greece. He married into the company as well as into the family: Göze is his wife.

He plays several instruments, the Turkish ney among them, and has been known to play in an ancient theatre when the acoustics ask for it. He also photographs, and writes the software this site runs on.

Göze is the second generation here, daughter of Yasemin and Cemil, the couple who started Runner. She spent a few years working in Istanbul before coming back to join the family business in 2009. These days she is also Mert’s wife, mother to ten-year-old Aras, and caretaker to seven cats from the neighbourhood who have decided she is theirs.

She guides too, bird-watching journeys especially, and she runs operations, the part of a journey nobody notices when it is done well. She holds a degree in social media management.

Runner is now a partnership of two brothers: Yiğit joined Mert with an entirely different career behind him, over a decade of international hospitality, most of it in luxury hotels and airport service in Switzerland. He trained as a Hospitality Management graduate with a culinary background before moving into guest experience, operations and revenue management.

He looks after the business side of Runner rather than guiding: the same close attention to detail that used to go into a five-star check-in now goes into how a journey is planned before a guest ever arrives.

Mehmet trained as a lawyer, took a master’s in environmental law, practised for a while, and then stopped. What he kept from it is the habit of looking at a landscape and seeing what has been done to it.

Mehmet works mostly with families and small groups who came for the ruins and end up asking about the birds. A swimmer, and still a reader of Tintin.

Hülya taught English at two universities and then at a school in Istanbul, right up until 2023, and she has been guiding since 1997. That is explaining things for a living, twice over.

Degrees in English literature and in history, which is a useful pair here. Eco-tourism training from the Black Sea to Cappadocia. Hülya plays the violin.

Fırat grew up in Şırnak, in Türkiye’s Kurdish southeast, and moved to Istanbul at sixteen. Kurdish, Turkish and English all came from home rather than a classroom, and a tourism degree at Ege University added archaeology, mythology and the history of religion on top.

Ten years of guiding since, mostly travellers from North America, Europe, Oceania and Southeast Asia. Between seasons he travels alone, seventeen countries so far, with a small bag and his guitar.

Süleyman has been guiding for fifteen years, and the thing guests remember is the connections he draws: a Roman ruin and the trade route story behind it, a market spice and the poem written about it centuries ago, a mountain view and the folk song that names it.

A cyclist and a father, at home on a coastal footpath as much as in a village kitchen. Guests often say his cooking is as memorable as anything he tells them.

Betül trained as an archaeologist before she became a guide: a degree in Classical Archaeology from Ege University, a master’s in Art History from Istanbul Technical University, fieldwork at ancient Antandros, two excavation seasons at the Harşena Castle digs in Amasya, and six months cataloguing finds beneath Istanbul for a major natural history museum.

Her master’s thesis, on the Ottoman Empire at the 1910 Munich exhibition, was later published, and she contributed to a documentary on Anatolia’s civilisations. Licensed and in the field since 2011.