Turkey's European Union Minister Egemen Bagıs has said Turkey's biggest city and financial center is as attractive as Marilyn Monroe, after visiting an exhibition displaying photos of İstanbul in Luxembourg. During his visit to Luxembourg this week, Bagıs visited the exhibition “City of Lights and Shadows” in the Place Guillaume II Square. The exhibition, composed of photos by Timurtas Onan, will remain open until June 6. Bagıs said he is pleased to walk through an exhibition featuring İstanbul in Luxembourg's most important square.

Dozens of passengers were evacuated from a tourist ferry off the coast of Istanbul on Tuesday after a fire started on the vessel, but there were no immediate reports of serious injuries. Turkish television showed smoke pouring from the back of the vessel, several hundred metres (yards) from the shore, as two other ferries drew up to rescue the stranded passengers. The cause of the fire was unknown. State-run news channel TRT said all passengers were safely evacuated from the ferry, which was travelling between Istanbul and the popular Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara.

Nearly a million people preferred Turkey’s financial and cultural capital Istanbul as their touristic venue this quarter, a record number in the past ten years. Istanbul Cultural and Tourism Directorate said on Tuesday that at least 838,201 tourists visited Istanbul in the first three months of this year, a 23,8 percent increase compared to the same period last year. The directorate hailed progress made by Istanbul in the sector of tourism at a time of economic recession across Europe. The data also showed that every two of three tourists came to Turkey between Oct.

Istanbul University is set to open a new exhibit featuring animal bones discovered during excavation work for the Marmaray project, which will connect Istanbul's Asian and European sides via an undersea commuter train line, at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine building in Istanbul's Avcilar district at the end of May. The excavation of the 58,000 square-meter Marmaray site has unearthed the bones of many animal species that are not native to Turkey. Today's Zaman got the chance of taking a tour in the museum and talking to Professor Vedat Onar before the exhibition's opening.