I have been working in Sultanahmet for the better part of twenty-five years, and The Other Tour has been around for fifteen of those. In that time you meet every kind of guide this city produces — the loud ones, the lazy ones, the polished ones, the truly great ones, and the rare few who only reveal what they are after the second or third coffee.
Table of Contents
A Quiet First Impression
When you sit down with Faruk for the first time, he doesn’t lead with credentials. He doesn’t tell you about himself unless you ask. He talks about the city. He listens more than he speaks.
He pauses before he answers things — the way teachers do, after twenty years of being asked questions by teenagers. What you eventually realise, as the conversation goes on, is that he has been preparing for this work for a very long time.
He is a licensed professional tour guide in Istanbul, qualified through Nişantaşı University’s tourist guide program.
A Boy From Ankara Who Decided On Istanbul
Faruk grew up near Ankara and went through the foreign language stream at Hasanoğlan Anatolian High School in the early 1990s — the kind of serious old-republic school that takes language seriously.
When he sat the national university entrance exam in 1994, he placed in the top tier of foreign language students in the entire country. The natural reward was a place at Middle East Technical University in Ankara — the institution most Turkish families would tell you was the right answer.
A year in, he gave it up. He sat the exam system again, transferred to Istanbul University, and finished his English Teaching degree there on a full scholarship between 1996 and 2000.
I have asked Faruk why, on different occasions, and the answer is always essentially the same.
Istanbul has always been my dream city. I wanted to live and work here.
He was 19 when he made that decision and he has not changed his mind since. I have noticed something about guides who reshuffle their entire lives for this city: their love for it isn’t performance. It’s already paid for. Faruk paid early.
A Translator's Habit of Mind
For almost three decades — alongside everything else — Faruk has worked as a professional translator in Beşiktaş, at a handful of different agencies, in the kind of technical and legal translation that uses serious computer-assisted tools and demands a near-obsessive attention to nuance.
Translators don’t simply speak two languages. They live between them. They spend their lives asking the question every great guide asks all day long:
how do I carry this meaning from one world into another, intact, without losing what made it true?
That is what Faruk does at his desk for technical work. It is also what he does at the Blue Mosque when he tries to explain the architecture of belief to someone who has never set foot in a mosque, or at Topkapı Palace when he opens up the protocol of the Ottoman court to a family from Texas.
The translator’s habit shapes everything he does on tour. You feel it after about ten minutes.
Three Languages, Properly
Faruk works in English and Spanish, all at advanced level. His English has been forged across thirty years of teaching it, translating in it, and now guiding in it.
His Spanish is at the level where he can comfortably handle a full day of guiding for a family from Madrid or Buenos Aires — and that, in Istanbul, is genuinely rare.
A lot of guides in this city say they speak Spanish. Faruk actually does.
A Style That Lines Up Almost Exactly With Ours
When Faruk describes his own approach to a tour day, it sounds suspiciously like our own philosophy:
“Friendly, interactive, storytelling-focused. I give priority to the expectations and needs of the guests and try to make them comfortable.”
He has also told me, more than once, that he avoids over-exposing guests to memorised information.
He aims for a balance between historical depth, cultural perspective, and personal experience — the same balance we have been chasing on these streets for fifteen years.
I didn’t have to coach him into that. He showed up with it.
The Kind of Day He Loves to Guide
Ask Faruk to sketch his ideal day in Istanbul and you get a near-perfect classical walk through the old town:
Hagia Sophia → the Hippodrome → the Blue Mosque → Topkapı Palace → the Basilica Cistern → the Grand Bazaar, with local food tasting stops along the way.
Not rushed. Not skipped. Not turned into a checklist. The kind of day that leaves visitors saying, “I feel like I actually understand this city now.”
A natural match for our daily city tours, our private tours, and — particularly given the depth he brings — our Istanbul layover tours for cruise and airport stopover travellers who only have one shot at the city.
Who Should Book Faruk
If you are coming to Istanbul and you want a guide who is patient, multilingual, deeply read, ethically trained, and quietly passionate about this city — and especially if you want a tour in Spanish that doesn’t feel like a compromise — Faruk is who I would put you with.
He is best matched with travellers who want to understand the city rather than just photograph it: historical tours, cultural tours, private city tours, layover tours, Sultanahmet deep dives.
I have only worked with him for a short while. But I have worked in this district for twenty-five years and run this small agency for fifteen, and I can tell when a guide has arrived already formed. Faruk has.
Book Faruk Now
Fill in the form below to book Faruk Arslan for a private guided tour in Istanbul any day of the year — in English or Spanish.
