I recently met a lady who told me she had visited Istanbul in the 1950's to help start the Turkish ballet company. It was a really exciting thing to visit Turkey in those days.
Ataturk had the Grand National Assembly pass a law to encourage dance and opera in 1934.
A girl called Edris Stannus who was born in Co. Wicklow in Ireland became a dancer and changed her name to Ninette de Valois and helped form the Sadlers Wells company and other ballet companies in England. In 1947 the Turkish government invited her to Istanbul to form a company there and she toured the schools and orphanages to find some suitable children to train. She chose about 30 children and they graduated in 1959/60. Ninette de Valois was strict but the children called her mother.She lived to be 102 and died in 2001.
The journey across to Istanbul was a lot different at that time and took a couple of days.
