By Nazlan Ertan
Here at the tail end of the tourist season, the word of the week writes itself: konukseverlik, hospitality, or, in its Ottoman-tinted oldspeak, misafirperverlik. Every guidebook swears Turks are preternaturally welcoming; the national branding machine isn’t shy about it either. Yet while “hospitality” is the country’s trusty calling card, the numbers are more than brochure copy. Turkey received 23.6 million foreign visitors in the first half of 2025, marking an increase of 15.9% year-on-year, as tourism revenues hit a record $24.6 billion. By July, official arrivals had topped 31.2 million, the second-highest January–July tally on record.
Do people in Turkey take pride in their hospitality? Studies—from tourism-sector reports to children’s literature curricula—place hospitality high among the traits Turks claim as their own. What is measurable is how the country prefers to be seen: in nation-brand indices, Turkey leans on “People” and “Heritage” to signal warmth and cultural richness—exactly the categories guidebooks flatter.
Turks like to say that Anatolian hospitality is known throughout history and indeed, it was part of the Ottoman Empire's soft power: Caravanserais on trade routes, public soup kitchens and guesthouses. But hospitality also sat beneath a hierarchy in which a guest—a foreign ambassador or a local notable—could turn overnight from being “Makbul” (the Favored) to “Maktul” (the Executed).
Just as often, we point to our literature: the Book of Dede Korkut, a 14th–15th century epic of the Oghuz Turkic tribes, inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage, for its elaborate scenes of welcoming guests. But modern classics take a different view: In Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s Yaban (the word means both “stranger” and “uncivilized”), available in English as Stepmother Earth, the guest is an Istanbul intellectual who retreats to a Central Anatolian village and meets not bottomless tea but wary stares and, eventually, hostility.
UNWELCOMED
On the ground, konukseverlik remains a theater of abundance and control. Tea is insistence distilled: to accept is to enter a compact of time, talk, and minor obligations; to refuse can feel like a snub. In the tourist zones, the theater can curdle into farce. This summer in Marmaris, officials shut down multiple venues after viral footage of staff dragging women into bars, staging torch-lit, semi-nude performances by male dancers who seem to think that European females would throw money on a lap dance, and otherwise collapsing “welcome” into harassment. Once, national Kılıç-Kalkan troupes clashed swords and shields to greet visitors in an unnerving but authentic spectacle. Who would have thought the modern version would be worse?
HARD-WON SMILE
The economics behind the hospitable smile are thornier still. CHP’s shadow Tourism and Culture Minister Gülşah Deniz Atalar’s recent report cautions that glossy aggregate figures hide thin margins, precarious workers, and a sector skewed toward short, low-value stays. In T24, she went further: for most Turks, it is unlikely they will ever be on the receiving end of the country’s famed hospitality. More than half of citizens can no longer afford even a one-week summer holiday. Atalar underlined the irony of a nation ringed by seas and rich in cultural treasures that remain out of reach for its own people due to the economic crisis caused by bad economic governance. She calls it a denial of rights: “Holiday is not a luxury, it is a social right.”
The author of this column, as you might have guessed, spends her summer in the coastal town of Çeşme, in a modest summer house that belongs to her parents (a euphemism to say that it is well beyond her reach in the current economy). Yet, even without rent, the resort town becomes far too expensive in the summer, where a bottle of water costs about five times more than it would elsewhere. Turkish people, who want to be at the receiving end of hospitality at affordable prices, take the ferry to the Greek islands, an act deemed unpatriotic by nationalists and profiteers. Stay on the Turkish coasts and be robbed by your country!
I PAY BUT YOU DON’T EARN
What seems to make it worse is that the high rates in tourism hardly trickle down to the people who work in the field: They are poorly paid and forced to slave around the clock. A law passed in July weakened the guaranteed weekly rest day for tourism workers, effectively sanctioning weeks of uninterrupted shifts. “Exhausted staff cannot sustain quality tourism,” Atalay warned, pointing to both the injustice faced by employees and the inevitable decline of the very hospitality that Turks pride themselves on.
Which helps explain the edge you can feel in service work. In a sharp essay in Vesaire, academic Sinem Yıldız asks whether workers owe tourists a permanent grin. Her answer—no—lands with force because it details the emotional labor extracted in the name of national image. The most outrageous example came during the pandemic, when the Ministry of Tourism’s “Safe Tourism” campaign released a video mainly showing maskless tourists served by employees wearing masks that read: Siz eğlenin, ben aşı oldum (“You have fun; I’m vaccinated”). The backlash was swift. Turks under lockdown bristled at a message that reduced workers to props for foreign comfort, while opposition politicians called for the minister’s resignation. The video was taken down, but not before the slogan became shorthand for hospitality slipping into humiliation.
BEYOND KITSCH
But let us not forget another stage. The same culture that can overfeed a guest to the point of surrender also flips, in crisis, into civic grace: earthquake kitchens feeding strangers; neighbors housing neighbors; a pot of soup on a doorstep with no selfie to prove it. That version of konukseverlik—uncommodified, unscripted—resists both kitsch and coercion.
So yes, Turkey’s hospitality is real. It is also political, choreographed, occasionally predatory, and often back-breaking for the people paid to wear it. The task for a country courting “60 million visitor” headlines (a target the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has set for 2028) is to ask, as Yıldız and Atalar do in different registers: hospitality for whom, performed by whom, at what cost, and who gets to rest when the guests go home?
