The Doğu Express cuts through the snowy steppe of Eastern Turkey, loosely following the path merchants took along the ancient Silk Road. Bettany Hughes sits beside the window of a half-full carriage gazing out at the terrain. Soon, giant pots of Turkish honey (someone had heard she enjoys it) are delivered to her seat table, before she dances with a group of women in the café carriage. The scenes invite more than a twinge of travel envy.
“It’s an epic adventure,” Hughes tells The i Paper of her journey across ancient Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) – the 800-mile overnight rail route, between the city of Kars in northeastern Turkey and the capital of Ankara in the Central Anatolia region, is just one leg. “The train was genuinely magical. We were seeing wolves and eagles hunting as we went through that landscape”.
She has returned to Turkey every year since her first backpacking visit in 1986. This trip was for her latest Channel 4 series, Bettany Hughes’s Lost Worlds: Dawn of Civilisation, in which she explores places from antiquity and the neolithic period with plenty of travel inspiration along the way.
There’s a moment where she’s brought to tears as she’s shown a freshly unearthed statue of a boy from the prehistoric site of Karahan Tepe in the Şanlıurfa Province, southeastern Turkey. The site predates The Great Pyramids of Giza by around 7,000 years.
