Bilge Arıcan

Biography

After graduating from the Tourism Guiding department of Selçuk University in 2005, I began my professional career as a national guide.

Step by step, across all seven regions, I began both to get to know and to make known the country I had never had the chance to explore. Marvelling once again at its every stone and every field, I have had the pride of introducing the historical and natural beauty of Anatolia — cradle of many civilisations — to travellers of every age, culture and standing, both local and foreign.

I grew still more attached to a profession that has given me the chance to meet people of every faith, every language, every colour, every country and every background. They say a person’s horizon opens through other people, and that shallow seas become open oceans once you make room for other ways of thinking; my profession turned my small world into a vast sea.

There were times when a question asked during a tour sent us into new research and we lost ourselves in books. And there were revolutions in which the knowledge gained at the end of that losing began new illuminations in our world of thought, closing one age within us and opening another, arming us with a wholly different strength.

With the inspiration that comes above all from telling of Rumi, I feel that great poet, thinker, scholar and leader adding to my strength; I know the peace of being able to inspire a heart here, and the happiness of standing through their prayers and practising my profession with the love of the first day.

Practising a profession in which that great thinker’s words — “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder” — find their meaning, we continue to widen our capacity for perception and understanding.

Approaching people in his manner, giving worth not to outward appearance but to the heart, seeing whoever comes — whatever their religion or belief — as a traveller God has placed before me, and, as far as my words and my strength allow, honouring their wishes with this duty God and life have laid upon me, I am honoured to host, like an innkeeper, every kindred spirit who comes to our door.

I would like to close with this view of the world from Rumi: So explain your word in such a way that both the learned and the ordinary may benefit from it… With greetings and love to all friends who do not forget why they came into this world, who are able to be human above all else, and who remain so…

Stay with love, my friends…