I have spent years walking through cities, listening to strangers, taking notes on trains, and trying to understand what it truly means to feel at home while constantly moving. All of those moments, the quiet ones, the honest ones, the fleeting ones, eventually found their place on these pages.
Today, I am happy to share with you my book, Slow Travel: Reflections of a Laid-Back Soul. A book for those who wander with intention, who search for meaning in small details, and who carry a gentle restlessness in their pockets.
Here is a glimpse of what waits inside:
This is a book for those who wander slowly, not to escape but to belong elsewhere for a while.
For travelers who move through cities with open eyes and an unhurried heart. For those who couldn’t find themselves a Paris, yet never stopped searching.
In Slow Travel: Reflections of a Laid-Back Soul, Gökhan Kutluer traces the quiet beauty of movement, from sunlit towns in southern Italy to fleeting encounters with strangers who become memories. Through essays, travel notes, and meditative reflections, he explores what it means to feel at home in transit, to listen, to walk, and to see.
Blending the eye of a flâneur with the heart of a storyteller, Kutluer invites the reader to rediscover the world through slowness, through scent, light, conversation, and chance. Each page becomes a window into how travel transforms not only our perception of places but also our sense of self.
Slow Travel is an invitation to look longer and to trust that home may not be a destination, but a rhythm that follows wherever you go.
Translator’s Note
Between the solitude of the individual and the dual solitude and collectivity of travel, Gökhan Kutluer captures in Slow Travel: Reflections of a Laid-Back Soul not only journeys or adventures, but cultural awakenings as well.
One of the epochal aspects of this book is its timing. It begins around the moment the world was struck by an unfathomable crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. Dedicated simply to good writing and not seeking perfection, Slow Travel offers the reader a more luminous world, an element of serenity, and a delicate sense of place.
In Slow Travel: Reflections of a Laid-Back Soul, there is a Gökhan who finds his days more meaningful, who is at peace with the places where he pauses or moves, and who stands in a calm balance. You can almost hear his footsteps; they have a sound—unflinching yet naïve. The reader will be amazed by the wanderer’s gaze and by how he sees in “Encounters” and “Well-Trained Eyes.” In “La Via degli Dei,” we are carried to altars, pillars, castles, and ancient paths of gods, goddesses, and all those who came before us. With a thirst for curiosity, we travel with Gökhan through evergreen landscapes, unrelenting hills, the azure sea and its waves, and the people he meets on his unhurried sojourns.
There could be no finer example of his sensibility than the chapter titled For Those Who Couldn’t Find Themselves a Paris. A kaleidoscopic look at the Lost Generation—reframed for our current times and for posterity—and the echoes of Hemingway’s early life, interwoven with Gökhan’s own metaphors, add a resonant layer of narrative depth to the book.
The effects of Gökhan’s passion for writing and travel will linger with the reader, just as his commitment to both craft and movement will continue to endure.
İrem Bilkin
