Elif Kaya: travel writing, editorial photography and seven years of overland routes by train and ferry.
Travel writer · slow travel by train and ferry
Istanbul-based travel writer with seven years of commissioned features, a paid weekly newsletter and a rule about planes. I travel overland and by sea, keep a numbered notebook for every route and photograph my own stories.
Luna, the journal · Istanbul and the route
Commissioned features, a weekly newsletter with 3,800 paying readers and sponsored overland routes for rail and ferry operators. Twenty-four notebooks, fourteen countries, no short-haul flights since 2021.
Meridian Travel Magazine · Remote
Eight long-form features a year on overland routes across the Balkans, Italy and Iberia, each filed with my own photography.
Kadıköy Gazette · Istanbul
Reported the ferry timetables, the fish market and everything in between. Learned to file from a moving vehicle.
Bosphorus Press · Istanbul
Fact-checking, captions and the travel pages of a small guidebook imprint. First byline: a walk along the Golden Horn.
Boğaziçi University · Istanbul
Thesis on the railway in the Turkish novel, which explains a lot.
Istanbul Photography Workshops · Istanbul
Six months of evenings learning to shoot from the window of a moving train.
Features on the Belgrade to Bar line, Puglia by rail and the Sporades by ferry
Columnist, "The Timetable"
A quarterly column on one overlooked route and why it deserves a night.
Photo essay, "Ferries of the Sporades"
Contributor, Balkans chapter
One stop, one photograph, one timetable, every Thursday. 3,800 paying readers.
A hand-drawn map of every overnight line I have taken, updated each season.
A talk on keeping a travel notebook you will actually reread, given at three festivals and one bookshop.