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Tel Aviv going cheap

Guardian Unlimited Travel / News 12:00pm

Revellers in Rabin Square, in Israel's 24-hour party city, Tel Aviv. Photograph: Havakuk Levison/Corbis

Uzi Gafni, the head of the Israeli tourist board, proclaims himself "delighted" with the news. The budget airline Thomsonfly has introduced the first low-fare flights from the UK to Israel's "24-hour party city", Tel Aviv.

Ancient ruins plus clubs galore, beaches and a museum of the Jewish diaspora could now be yours in a single city break for a lead-in fare of £139.98 return. Passengers begin making the four-hour flights, from Luton and Manchester, today.

Actually, "news" is not quite right as far as the Israeli government is concerned because, as is often the way with these things, the tourist board itself has helped to bring the budget flights into being, by covering a percentage of Thomson's marketing budget.

Inside Istanbul

Story by Reyhan Harmanci / Photos by Cristóbal Palma

The old saw that Istanbul is the bridge between Europe and Asia is technically true—the Bosporus Strait parts Istanbul into a European side and an Asian side—but doesn’t go far into explaining its uniquely Turkish nature. Ever since people began building in the area around 5,500 BC, it has been a place of constant tumult. With each new empire—it was the capital for the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans—palaces and churches were razed and rebuilt to honor the latest despot. Civilizations came and went. It was named and renamed.

So it makes sense that what exactly constitutes the Turkish nature is very much up for grabs. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who saw that in order for Turkey to avoid being divided up by and parceled out to various European forces after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I, it had to become a modern nation. He abolished the caliphate, changed the script from Arabic to Latin, gave women greater rights, and helped write a democratic constitution. He moved the capital from old Stamboul, formerly Constantinople, to the central city of Ankara.

But modernization—or to put it slightly more pejoratively, Westernization—couldn’t be done by government mandate alone. The price for abandoning tradition was a loss of certain freedoms; to distance the new state from Islamic rule, Atatürk made it illegal for men to wear the fez and women to don head scarves. Those laws have since been relaxed, but the current political situation is an uneasy mix of military rule and democratic process.

Culturally, though, Istanbul benefits from the tension between tradition and modernity; it’s a lovely mess... read more at dwell.com