Turkey: The Bridge

Made by BP films, this short documentary feature takes quite an interesting look at just how the modern nation of Turkey emerged from it’s Greek, Roman and Ottoman influences into a modern day, multi-cultural, country bridging the continents of Asia and Europe. Luckily there is a wide selection of remarkably well preserved architectural remains from antiquity to illustrate the history of ancient lands like Lydia and Ionia and thence through to the creation of a Muslim empire that dispossessed what was left of the Roman Empire of Constantinople, renamed it Istanbul and saw it evolve into a bustling and thriving city straddling the Bosporus. There is a narration but it doesn’t really add much to this pictorial travelogue, neither does the frequently intrusive score but it’s the sort of film you might have watched at school and sixty years later offers us quite a visually striking contrast to what we might see there today.