When the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director prize at the Cannes film festival last month for his film Three Monkeys, he dedicated the award "to my lonely and beautiful country".
Turkey is certainly beautiful. Anyone who has seen the night sky over Anatolia, been spooked by the mountains of the east in the dark, traipsed across its ruins, lazed on its beaches, or gazed at the interior of Ayasofia in Istanbul - described recently by the historian Eamon Duffy in the New York Review of Books as "the world's greatest religious building" - could not conclude otherwise.
