We, Darren Blanchard & Esen Kıvılcım Blanchard, are passionate about Türkiye, the astonishing city of Istanbul and our other home in Çeşme on the Aegean. We developed likecesme.com and liketurkiye.com to share our practical knowledge of Türkiye’s culture, history, and diverse experiential activities.
About the LikeCesme & LikeTurkiye Projects
In 2019, Darren, a hotelier by trade, conceived likecesme.com as a personal, not-for-profit project to highlight, especially for international visitors, the broad spectrum of activities and experiences available in Çeşme. Today, the website covers over 100 subjects and activities available in and around Çeşme and across Western Anatolia. The website’s principle is to provide practical tips and information, without the clutter of internet pop-ups, that brings together and simplifies logistical and cultural information often found only on Turkish-language sites, which are usually poorly structured and difficult to access.
With the rapidly growing popularity of visitors to likecesme.com, in 2024 we decided to apply the same principles to a broader website, liketurkiye.com, with an initial focus on the city of Istanbul, where we have our project management and real estate business and spend most of the year when we are not in Çeşme in the Summer.
About Our Istanbul Focus
We created the website to offer a personalised, more lived-in view of Istanbul beyond the familiar headline attractions. While most guides and online information focus on major sites such as Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace, which have also become increasingly expensive and crowded, we aim to highlight a broader range of cultural experiences across the city. Many of these alternatives are free or low-cost, easy to access, and deeply connected to everyday Istanbul life: neighbourhood walks, independent art spaces, overlooked viewpoints, and cultural stops that reward curiosity rather than ticket queues.
We spend much of our free time exploring Istanbul ourselves, and we’ve learned that once you understand how the city works, it becomes surprisingly easy and a joy to navigate. Public transport, especially the ferry network, offers one of the best value experiences in the city: for just a few euros, you can cross continents, see Istanbul from the water, and travel through layers of history. Throughout liketurkiye.com, we share practical tips on getting around, where to go, and how to discover places such as free-to-enter galleries and cultural foundations that many visitors miss.
Contact Us
The site is not-for-profit, with a small number of affiliate links included to help cover running costs, and we hope it enables you to experience Istanbul with confidence, insight, and discovery. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or are interested in partnering with us, please feel free to send them here: