I recently visited the well-known tulip heaven we have in İstanbul, and it definitely was worth seeing!

Tulips remind me of Holland all the time, and seeing so many tulips together made me feel like I've been in Holland for a while, once more.

If you ever consider visiting the historically rich Turkish city İstanbul, I offer you to come before the summer, I mean in the middle of the spring, so that you may go and see those tulips with their extremely well-organised pattern.

Pinky red tulips from the garden - photo taken by me

There is a very famous plantation area in İstanbul, which is called 'Emirgan Korusu*' and the tulips I mention here are located in this area, distributed everywhere in a greatly wonderful order! Colours are dancing with each other and the sizes of the tulips are just surprisingly at the same height. No mistake can ever be done in this huge garden, they are absolutely perfect!

According to the historical information we have got, the first tulips were owned by the Ottoman Empire, and after the Ottomans gave some of these tulips out as a present to Holland, Holland started planting them. Now they are famous with their undeniably beautiful tulips and tulip gardens, while we have a few tulip gardens and no fame with tulips.



Those tulips in Emirgan Plantage (Emirgan Korusu) are planted in cold autumn months, like September, and the tulip bulbs show their colourful flowers and leaves in the very beginning of the spring. With the summers first days, tulips' flowers and leaves die, and only the bulbs remain alive. Plantage staff collect those bulbs and keep them safe, so that they can be planted for the next years' spring season.

I have taken countless photos of the gardens that I want to share with you, but very unfortunately I have no enough space to put them all, so I could only share a few here.

For those who have a chance to visit the plantage, please type the name 'Emirgan Korusu' on google, and you'll come up with loads of related websites. Unfortunately I have not found an official website that belongs to the plantage, so you may get benefit from only the other websites that relate to it.

Location is on a pattern that is very close to Bosphorus, the big channel separating both sides of İstanbul, and the area name is as in the name of the garden : Emirgan. You may go to Emirgan buy bus, but yet you'll have to climb over to reach the garden by foot.




*'Koru' means 'plantation area' in Turkish.