Abstract:

Practicing one of the oldest professions in history, tour guides have accompanied countless travelers for centuries and had a major influence on a country’s image. This study, which was inspired by the author’s curiosity regarding the state of guides in this period, aims to examine the travelogues written by foreigners who visited Anatolia and determine in what light authors wrote about their guides. It was assumed that travelers who visited numerous places would be interested in translator guides and they would mention these guides in their logs, accordingly the travel books of people who visited Anatolia between 1662-1913 were examined. In this qualitative research, 57 travelogues written in German, English, and French were scanned for words such as translator, guide, host, interpreter, accompanying, tipstaff, etc. The content analysis of the data was made with the qualitative data research program Maxqda and five main categories were determined. These are the attitude and behavior of guides, the working conditions of guides, the services provided by guides, the competence of guides, and the demographic characteristics of the guides. As a result of this research, it was found that the most commonly used expressions are regarding how intelligent, helpful, well-informed they are and how successful they were as leaders in expeditions, and they accompanied travelers, as well as statements about where to find travel guides, how much they were paid, and their nationalities and ethnicities. The evaluation of data collected from travelogues where travelers recorded their own experiences also showed the necessity for further regulation in this profession. Thus, this research provides a source for the history of tourism and the historical development of tour guiding as a profession.

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