Alparslan Nas

This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in September 2023. It develops the reflections I shared after my own family holidays in Greece. The text has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving its personal observations and original sociological argument.

In recent years, Greece has become an increasingly popular summer destination for travelers from Türkiye. The eastern Aegean islands are a short ferry ride from the Turkish coast, while cities and beaches in northern Greece can be reached by car from İstanbul and Thrace. Chios, Lesbos, Samos, Alexandroupoli, Kavala, Thessaloniki, and Halkidiki have entered everyday conversations about where to spend the summer.

The tendency has become visible enough to inspire social-media jokes about the Turkish middle classes “escaping” to Greece. Economic factors matter: at the time of my own visits, accommodation and food in Greece could be less expensive than comparable options in Türkiye’s most famous coastal resorts. Yet price and proximity do not fully explain the trend.

A holiday is also a social practice. Where we go, how we travel, and how we speak about the experience can communicate taste, status, and belonging. Saying “I spent the summer in Greece” may carry meanings beyond the journey itself.

Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology helps illuminate these meanings. From a Bourdieusian perspective, choosing Greece—and narrating that choice—can become a practice of distinction. My purpose is not to accuse travelers of insincerity. I am one of those travelers, and I genuinely enjoyed the experience. The more interesting task is to examine how pleasure becomes connected to class, cultural capital, and the symbolic meaning of crossing a nearby border into Europe.

Holidays as Practices of Distinction

Bourdieu argued that social position depends on more than income. Economic capital consists of material resources. Cultural capital includes knowledge, education, cultivated tastes, and familiarity with socially valued settings. Social capital develops through relationships and networks. These resources can acquire symbolic capital when they are recognized as prestige or legitimacy by others.

Tourism allows these forms of capital to interact. Money pays for transport, accommodation, and food, but travel may also produce cultural and symbolic value. Travelers acquire experiences, images, stories, and familiarity with another country. When narrated to colleagues, friends, or social-media followers, these experiences can signify cosmopolitanism and cultivated taste.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is equally important. Habitus refers to durable dispositions shaped by family, education, class background, and social environment. We do not consult a class rulebook before choosing a beach or hotel. Yet our ideas about what counts as tasteful, authentic, crowded, vulgar, comfortable, or sophisticated have social histories.

Holidays make these histories visible. Destinations, hotels, meals, leisure activities, and even the language used to describe them help communicate who we are—or who we want to be.

A Hierarchy of Holiday Destinations

Consider the Turkish expression memlekete gitmek, meaning “going back home.” Here, memleket generally refers to the town, district, or village from which one’s family originates. Many urban families spend part of the summer visiting relatives in these places. Such holidays may provide close relationships with nature, memory, and family.

Yet a village holiday does not always receive the same social recognition as time spent in a fashionable coastal resort. In the metropolitan and secular milieu around me in Kadıköy, İstanbul, people are more likely to mention Bodrum, Datça, Ayvalık, or the İzmir coast. These destinations have become signs of an Aegean-oriented, urban, educated, and Western-facing lifestyle.

There are also distinctions within the same destination. A five-star resort, boutique hotel, modest pension, rented house, and campsite can carry different meanings even when all are located in Bodrum. Wealth may be expressed through luxury, but rejecting luxury can also become distinctive when simplicity is presented as more authentic and refined.

The hierarchy is therefore not determined only by price. A remote pension may demonstrate insider knowledge, while a famous resort may demonstrate economic capital. The meaning of each practice depends on who chooses it, how it is described, and which alternatives it implicitly rejects.

When one person’s village holiday is dismissed as backward while another’s resort holiday is celebrated as sophisticated, a classed hierarchy of taste appears natural. Bourdieu describes this process as a form of symbolic power: socially produced judgements come to look like objective differences in value.

Why Greece Became Distinctive

Over two consecutive summers, my family and I visited Chios and Halkidiki as well as Alexandroupoli, Kavala, and Thessaloniki. We enjoyed these trips immensely. At one point, I even found myself saying that I no longer wanted to holiday in Türkiye. That sentence encouraged me to turn the sociological gaze back on myself.

Part of my response was economic. At the time, Greek accommodation could be less expensive than comparable places on the Turkish coast. Viewed through Bourdieu, however, this advantage had an additional effect: it allowed travelers to acquire greater symbolic value with less economic capital.

Saying “I went to Greece” could attract a kind of admiration that “I went to Bodrum” no longer necessarily produced within my social environment. Bodrum, Datça, and Ayvalık had become familiar. Greece remained nearby and sometimes affordable, yet it still counted as abroad. It could signify mobility, curiosity, cosmopolitanism, and the competence required to cross a national border.

Greece occupies a distinctive symbolic position for Turkish travelers because it is both familiar and foreign. The landscapes, foods, and rhythms of the Aegean can feel recognizable, while the border gives that familiarity the prestige of Europe and elsewhere. It offers difference without complete unfamiliarity.

Distinction is never permanent. Once a destination becomes common within a social group, its symbolic value changes. What initially appears novel eventually becomes routine, and new destinations or styles of travel acquire prestige.

“Escaping the Crowd”

Another familiar statement among Turkish visitors is: “Türkiye has become too crowded, so I escaped to Greece.” This may describe a genuine preference. Some Greek beaches and towns can feel quieter than Türkiye’s most commercialized resorts. Yet the meaning of crowded deserves closer attention.

Crowds are not perceived only numerically. They are also social. Complaints about crowded resorts may express discomfort with encountering people from different regions, classes, or cultural backgrounds. Popular domestic destinations bring heterogeneous groups together. Unless travelers retreat into an exclusive resort, leisure may require contact with people unlike themselves.

“Escaping the crowd” can therefore become a coded practice of distinction. Quietness, authenticity, and simplicity are associated with cultivated taste, while mass tourism is associated with disorder, excess, or vulgarity.

This does not make the desire for peace unreal. Bourdieu simply encourages a second question: why do certain preferences carry more prestige, and which groups have the authority to define what counts as tasteful?

Social media strengthens this mechanism. An image of an empty cove, a small taverna, or a modest village house may appear to reject conspicuous luxury. Yet it can still communicate mobility, access, and insider knowledge. Distinction does not disappear when wealth is displayed discreetly; it adopts another visual language.

Borders as Class Filters

During my visits, Turkish travelers sometimes expressed satisfaction with one another: people came to Greece for peace, and no one created trouble. A sociological explanation is that international borders function as filters.

For most Turkish citizens, traveling to Greece required a Schengen visa when I recorded the original episode. The application process, financial cost, transportation, planning, foreign-language confidence, and ability to take time away from work limited who could travel. Even where the holiday itself was affordable, access was unequal.

The Turkish visitors meeting one another on a Greek island were therefore not a random sample of society. Many occupied broadly similar socioeconomic positions and possessed comparable forms of mobility and cultural competence. Their comfort with one another may have resulted partly from encountering people socially similar to themselves.

This creates a paradox. Travelers may describe Greece as an escape from social tension, but the sense of tranquility can depend on a border that has already filtered people according to resources and privilege.

At the same time, Greece’s proximity makes the journey accessible to parts of the Turkish middle class who could not afford a distant European holiday. Its symbolic power comes from this combination: it is selective but not impossibly remote, foreign but familiar, and potentially affordable while still carrying prestige.

Public Beaches and Commercialized Coasts

Not every positive experience should be reduced to status competition. One of the things I valued most in Greece was the relative ease of accessing many beaches. At the places I visited, we could bring our own chairs and umbrellas and spend time by the sea without purchasing entry to a heavily branded environment.

On many popular Turkish coasts, beach clubs, entrance fees, minimum-spending requirements, branded furniture, and carefully controlled aesthetics increasingly mediate access to the sea. These establishments do more than sell comfort. They sort visitors and transform the coastline into a stage for class performance.

The Greek beaches I encountered often allowed a less commercial relationship with nature. This difference was real and contributed to my enjoyment. Yet it produces another paradox: the international border may filter who reaches the beach, while the beach itself may feel more open once one arrives.

Turning the Sociological Gaze on Oneself

I am not outside the class practices described here. I enjoyed Greece, benefited from the mobility that allowed me to travel, and participated in the language of distinction I am analyzing. This is why reflexivity matters. Sociology should help us examine not only other people’s tastes but also the social conditions of our own choices.

Recognizing these conditions does not invalidate pleasure. A holiday in Greece can offer rest, hospitality, natural beauty, and cultural encounter. A holiday in an ancestral village can offer equally meaningful experiences of memory, belonging, and freedom. Neither has a fixed social value.

The growing appeal of Greece brings together proximity, economic pressure, the unequal mobility created by borders, dissatisfaction with the commercialization of Turkish resorts, the desire for quieter spaces, and the symbolic attraction of Europe.

The question is not whether Turkish travelers truly enjoy Greece. We often do. The question is what else we communicate when we tell others that we spent the summer there.