I was lucky enough today to enjoy the spring-like weather in Belek, a golf-and-sun tourism resort area less than an hour’s drive from Antalya. Belek is known for its world-class golf courses, five-star resort hotels, and golden sandy Mediterranean beaches. Every year thousands upon thousands of tourists and seasoned travelers visit there, not only from other areas of Turkey, but also from all across Europe and even as far afield as Japan and Australia.
Encountering this mixture of cultures and nations always makes me wax philosophical, and the reason I’m bringing up Belek this evening has nothing at all to do with golf or beaches or tourists— rather I want to talk about a little village adjacent to Belek, a place called Kadriye. One has to drive through Kadriye in order to get to Belek, and though the tiny hamlet doesn’t have a tremendous amount to recommend it to visitors, one Kadriye landmark in particular stands out and draws my attention every time: the Garden of Religions. Here one can find a church, a synagogue, and a mosque all on the same site, each situated adjacent to the others so as to form a triangle of sanctuaries, all facing one another within the peaceful serenity of a green garden. There is only one other site in the world where such a mixture of religious worship can be found, and although you might think this would make Kadriye famous, one almost never sees the Garden of Religions mentioned in travel reviews or vacation catalogs. There are endless write-ups about Belek’s golf courses, but it seems that people who come for golfing holidays don’t take the time to do much else but traipse around golf courses. It’s a shame, because even if you have no particular interest in religion, the rareness of seeing these buildings sharing the same garden is quite a lovely thing to behold. Perhaps I wouldn’t go as far as to say it inspires hope, but… well, it’s a nice gesture, anyway. And the buildings themselves are pretty to look at. If you ever get a chance to see this part of the world, I urge you to pay the Garden of Religions a visit.
Many thanks to Habibi04’s Flickr collection for the photos.