Well spotted Gordon .... thought the cars might be the clue .... they're Dolmus .... a sort of scheduled route communal taxi/bus kind of thing .... nowadays they're all modern minibuses but back when the pic was taken they were big yank cars.
Turkey had a car shortage for decades and prices were at a premium ..... American servicemen stationed in Germany would road-trip down through Italy and Greece to Istanbul ... enjoy a stay ... then sell their car for enough to travel home on the Orient Express and buy another car (which they could at a majorly disounted rate through the base PX)
This was such a drain on the Turkish economy it was eventually outlawed .... to the point that when I drove there in the '70s in my mighty Austin A40 they stamped my passport on entry with a big red car-shaped stamp filled in with the vehicle details .... no leaving the country without the car (even if you crashed it you had to physicaly truck the wreckage to the border and present it for checking before you could leave) .... was made some outrageous offers of hundreds of times its UK value to sell it while I was there even then.
All those big old Yank Tanks with their lazy unbustable and simple V8s became family businesses running Dolmus routes and were still being used at least up to my last overland motorcycle trip there in the '80s.
K
