My favorite time of year, my favorite flower!
Most people associates tulips with Holland, but very few are aware that tulips originate from Turkey. In Turkish the word for tulip is "lale", and the word tulip (or tulipan) comes from the Turkish word for turban (dulband).
The tulip is native to Turkey and its neighboring countries, but Turkey might have been the first country to cultivate the flower. An Austrian visiting Istanbul in 1554 brought the tulip back home, and slowly it made its way to Holland where it became very popular and the big tulip industry started.
If you want to read more about the history of the tulip, I can recommend this web site: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197703/turbans.and.tulips.htm
Every year in April there are tulips blooming all over Istanbul. This year the city celebrated it's 6th annual Tulip Festival, and the best place to indulge in the diversity of this beautiful flower, I was told was Emirgan Park. It was fabulous! I have tried to find out how many varieties and how many bulbs the city has planted, but even if Turks love statistics I have not been able to find any numbers. There must have been millions of tulips, and more kinds then I could count.
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