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Despite appearances, Turkish is surprisingly easy to learn.

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Despite appearances, Turkish is surprisingly easy to learn.

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The tongue-twisting, 70-letter Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, or “as if you are from those we may not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful ones,” is thought to be the longest word in Turkish, an agglutinative tongue whose dialects are spoken across a swath of Asia all the way to western China. Yet Turkish is pretty easy to pick up, following a language reform in the 1920s that simplified the vocabulary and moved from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet.

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A new type of plant is discovered every 10 days.

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A new type of plant is discovered every 10 days.

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And Turkey’s 10,000 plant and 80,000 animal species help rank the country among the world’s 35 biodiversity hotspots. Twitchers can visit more than a half-dozen bird sanctuaries for sightings of some of the country’s 475 aves, or 5% of the global variety. It’s a great place for flower lovers, too — see highlights like the native Fritillaria imperialis, above.

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When director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, it crowned a decade-long revival in Turkish cinema that’s seen productions rise five-fold to about 100 films per year. Turkey is one of the few countries where domestic films rake in more at the box office than Hollywood’s offerings, and its movies and television series are a major soft-power export in the Middle East.

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People were building temples here back in the hunter-gatherer era.

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People were building temples here back in the hunter-gatherer era.

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Prior to the mid-1990s, it was assumed that large-scale human constructions weren’t undertaken until early peoples mastered agriculture and established permanent settlements. But then the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe was discovered in southern Turkey, with evidence of monumental construction taking place at least 2,000 years before the accepted timeframe of the agricultural revolution. Building at Göbekli Tepe also predated the inventions of pottery, written language, and the wheel.

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Istanbul has one of Europe’s most exciting art scenes.

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Istanbul has one of Europe’s most exciting art scenes.

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The edgy Istanbul Biennial, now in its 14th edition, is a must-see for the international art crowd, and with more than 300,000 visitors in 2013, it ranks among the top contemporary art shows in the world. In 2015 the show will occupy 30 venues on both sides of the Bosphorus.