welcome to Afyon in Turkey and today we're going to see some of the city's
incredible sights and amazing food
it's 2pm right now and I’m in Afyonkarahisar which is the capital of the province of Afyon.
The karahisar part of Afyonkarahisar means black castle and that's because you can't go anywhere in
the city without seeing that huge castle on top of this mountain. You can actually climb all the
way to the top but I’m gonna save doing that for the very end of the video and this castle has in
a sense shaped the history of the whole city The top of that mountain has been fortified for more
than 3 000 years at first by the Hittites 3300 years ago then it was conquered by several
civilizations until Alexander the Great came and conquered the fortress too. After that it
was conquered by the Romans and the Byzantines and the Seljuks until it was finally taken over
by the ottomans by Sultan Beyazit the first in 1392. So once the city was under the ottomans
this city became the biggest center production of opium in the Ottoman empire which is where it gets
the first word of its name Afyon. Afyon literally means opium. So people to this day make actually
a lot of food from the poppy plants or the opium seeds but we're gonna talk about that more later
first we're gonna check out some of the more normal food that this city is also famous for and
today I’m on the hunt for a very special kind of meat that's uh very special to this place called
Sucuk
Where's Sucuk?
I was looking for it in the main market but couldn't find anything there
apparently there's some right ahead
can I eat like Sucuk in bread? okay? eat. eat yes
oh not here?
that's an interesting concept. I found a place that does sell Sucuk but just the
meat itself and then the place next to it just sells the bread and nothing else so
I’m gonna go ahead and try to find another place that actually will serve me a sandwich
finally found a place
Finall got my hands on some sucuk
and this is a specialty of this region it's a popular kind of meat that's eaten in the Middle
East, the Balkans and even in parts of western Asia. They use ground meat and dry it with
a bunch of spices that you can sort of see on here and then they usually make sausages out of it and
they usually put it in a sandwich. You can eat in other ways too but the most popular way of eating
it is putting it in a sandwich. When it's eaten in western Asia, Sucuk is often prepared from
even horse meat as well because that's something popular to eat over there. Let's try this out
this bread here is a little bit tougher than I’m used to. It's pretty good very delicious
Ayran, the Turkish milky yogurt the ayran itself costs like
two liras which is 25 cents, is super cheap, way cheaper than a coca-cola
so very close to the city center is this mosque called ulu cami which is literal translation of
grand mosque so you're probably going to see a lot of other ulu cami's in different cities of Turkey
as well. This mosque is pretty special because it's almost 800 years old. It was built in the 1270s
by a Seljuk emperor that ruled over this land and it's a really cool
mosque and a wooden mosque the coolest feature about this mosque is
on the inside you see these old-fashioned 800 year old wooden pillars that go throughout the mosque
quite a difference from the brick mosques that I’m used to seeing growing up at least
I was filming outside the mosque and for a second I thought some locals were getting mad at me
it turns out they were just really curious from where I’m from and wanted to be in the video
so one really cool thing that I wasn't really expecting is that the houses near the mosque have
incredible architecture and there's a lot of really pretty pastel colored
houses all over the street with every possible color you can think of. This looks a lot like
Copenhagen or Reykjavik except it's old Ottoman architecture with wooden houses
before I move on with this video I want to give a big thank you to surfsharkvn for sponsoring
this video and supporting my travels. Now if you've followed my channel for any amount of
time you probably know I’m all about going into new adventures without taking all the necessary
precautions all the time.
but when it comes to internet security I take it very seriously and you should too
so if you're going around traveling or just living your normal life you probably spend
a lot of time connecting to public wi-fi in airports in cafes or even hotels like this
one. Now what I didn't know till not too long ago is that whenever you do that, your information is
very vulnerable to hackers. This is not something you think about but the last thing you want is
checking your bank balance in the airport or how much you spend on your credit card and
have your credit card information compromised A VPN is a virtual private network which encrypts
all your information that you send out online and protects you from security threats like
that. Surfsharkvpn also allows you to change your location to numerous countries and cities around
the world. When you're traveling as fast as I am and changing so many countries, often when
you're trying to access your bank account from a different country, it can get your bank account
frozen and that's also something you don't want to deal with. So using a vpn to change
your location to your home country also takes care of that. Another big reason for travelers to
use a vpn service like surfshark: if you're using streaming services to watch your favorite shows
content can be often limited based on which region you're in and this can be easily overcome with
just one click of a button on surfshark Surfshark is a highly rated vpn service and it allows you
to connect to unlimited devices which means you can connect it to your laptop your phone
your tablet or whatever else you want to bring along Just the regular price of surfshark is well
worth the benefits that you get in return but if you follow the link in the video description below
and use the promo code nadir that's n-a-d-i-r you get 83 percent off and an additional three months
for free which makes it a real no-brainer at this point. Now let's take a minute to talk about
opium. So historically this place has been a huge producer of poppy and famous for its poppy fields
and about until 100 years ago it was very free to cultivate around this land but then around
50 years ago the production of opium here was heavily regulated. Today Afyon is still the largest
producer of pharmaceutical opium in the whole world but it is very regulated. You can't even go
into the factory to see what's happening unless you actually work in the factory but one thing
that has still remained is that people use the poppy seeds to make all kinds of food in the city and
now we're about to check out some of those foods made from poppy seeds
Merhaba (hello). Is this made from hashas?
hashas and chocolate
this is like the.. hashas seeds? Okay
I’ll get one of that. This is Turkish delights?
yes. Okay
this is a Turkish delight so this is made from poppy seeds used to make opium
pretty good. Thank you. Have a good day. So I just got this thing called Hashasella which is basically
a kind of nutella that's made from chocolate and hashas so I guess this is going to replace my
peanut butter for the next few days and now for the last big adventure in the city I’m going to
climb all the way to the top of the mountain and get to the black castle of Afyonkarahisar
so apparently I was trying to go the wrong way. Thankfully someone showed me
and told me to go the right way which is by the mosque
finally going the right way
there's some cute ass puppies here
you definitely need good shoes for this last part
I’ve made it to the top of Afyonkarahisar
This is such a sick view. I think it was well worth the hike for this view
That is going to be it from Afyonkarahisar. I’m just going to hike down.. down this hill and uh
call it a day and head out of Afyon tomorrow if you like this video don't forget to hit
that like button. If you want to see more from my channel from Turkey and all over the world
feel free to subscribe to my channel I’ll be posting a lot more videos really soon and
if you want to follow me in real time and get real-time updates, feel free to follow
me on Instagram. That's where I do post my stories on a day to day basis. That's
it for this one. I’ll catch you guys from the next one from somewhere else in Turkey
also on a final final note I want to thank Travelcomic for the inspiration and she's
the reason I found out about Afyon. Check out her video if you want a different look at the place