An Irish man who swallowed an expensive diamond ring at a jewellery store in Turkey recently told prosecutors that he wasn’t himself when he did it, because he “fell into a trance” the moment he saw the beautiful diamond.

Ian Campbell, who was vacationing in the Turkish seaside resort of Marmaris, was arrested on October 4, 2018, after swallowing a $40,000 diamond ring at a local jewellery store. Eyewitnesses later told police that Campbell swallowed the jewel in desperation, after realizing that he was going to be caught trying to steal it. Prosecutors instructed police to take the would-be-thief to the local hospital, where he was administered laxatives to help him “return” the 2.5-carat diamond ring by natural means. Turkish media tracked the “journey” of the jewel through Campbell’s stomach almost in real time, but sadly it got stuck and had to be surgically removed.

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A 55-year-old Turkish man is facing up to five years in jail for “preventing public officials from performing their duty”. His crime – phoning the police 45,210 times in just one year.

Şeref Can, a divorced man from Istanbul’s Bayrampaşa district, allegedly called the police line well over 100 times per day between May 15, 2017 and May 15, 2018, but never once made any sort of complaint or asked police assistance. Instead, he only tried to make conversation with whoever picked up the phone. At one point, police staff became so irritated by Can’s unusual habit that they filed a complaint about him with Istanbul Police’s communications and electronics department. After confirming that Can had called the 115 emergency number a total of 45,210 times in a year, investigators charged him with “obstructing service of public institutions”.

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Gulspor, a small football club from one of Turkey’s lowest divisions, recently sold 18 of its players in order to buy 10 goats and generate extra income from milk and meat sales.

The club’s president, Kenan Büyükleblebi, told Turkish media that the unusual decision was dictated by lack of funds, as there are virtually no sponsorships or government investments for teams performing in lower leagues. Gulspor sold 18 of its youth players for around 15,000 Turkish lira ($2,600), which was enough to buy 10 goats. It may not seem like a great business decision, but Büyükleblebi claims the club is estimated to generate a yearly profit of 4,000-5,000 lira from the sale of milk and meat. In fact, it plans to build a herd of 140 goats in the next few years.

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A cafe in Istanbul, Turkey, has been accused of animal cruelty after a video of a young lion nervously pacing back and forth in a narrow glass box inside the venue went viral online.

The owner of Mevzoo, an animal cafe in Istanbul’s Beykoz district has been accused of animal cruelty and abuse after videos of Khaleesi, a one-year-old lion, pacing through a glass box built in the center of the cafe and chasing after a small girl were shared on social media. People were outraged that an endangered wild animal was confined to a space less than a meter wide, which was barely enough for it to turn around, and used as entertainment. And feedback kept getting worse after it was revealed that Mevzoo also uses parrots and other rare birds, caged crocodiles and horses to attract customers.

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A die-hard fan of Turkish soccer club Denizlispor recently made international headlines after renting a crane so he could watch his team play in a league game, after being banned from the stadium for one year.

37-year-old Ali Demirkaya, a.k.a. ‘Amigo Ali’ is well-known as one of Denizlispor most fanatic suporters, and this weekend he proved his love for the club once again, literally going above and beyond just to see the team play Gaziantepspor. Following his involvement in an incident that occurred during one of Denizlispor’s games in 2015, Demirkaya was banned from entering his team’s stadium for one year, in 2017. However, he always contested the decision and vowed to not let it stop him from being close to the action and cheering his boys on. This past weekend, he fulfilled his promise.

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An incredible new library has opened in the Çankaya district of Ankara, Turkey featuring a collection of salvaged books once destined for landfill.

Local sanitation workers, who spent months collecting abandoned and discarded books from the streets, established the library to be used by themselves and their families. As the collection grew, however, word spread throughout the community, and locals began to donate books that they would have otherwise discarded. In September of last year, the Sanitation Department decided to open the library up to public use.

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On Jan. 6th, Turkish academic Dr. Yavuz Örnek, a lecturer at the Marine Sciences facility at Istanbul University, went on a TV programme at Turkey’s public broadcaster TRT 1 to make some pretty wild claims about the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

Örnek said technologies were much more advanced 10,000 years ago than most people realize, and that Noah built his ark using steel, using nuclear energy to power it. Örnek also claimed that Prophet Noah used a mobile phone to contact his son to convince his faraway son to board the ark with his family, and that instead of bringing live animals onto the ark, Noah stocked it with one male and one female egg from every living species. All life on Earth today supposedly derived from that ancient sperm and egg bank.

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If alien conspiracy theories are your thing or you simply believe in extraterrestrial life and eagerly await the first contact, you’ll feel right at home at Akdeniz University in Turkey. This educational establishment, based in the province of Antalya, has made a course called “Ufology and Exopolitics” part of its latest curriculum. Its aim is to get students ready to give a proper welcome to visitors from space, which tutor Erhan Kolbaşi believes to have already touched down multiple times.

Practical preparations and interstellar diplomacy are only part of the course focus. As Kolbaşi told the Dogan News Agency, students will also learn about alleged government cover-ups of alien activity on Earth. Kolbaşi, who serves as deputy chair of Istanbul-based Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, claims that fiber optic cable, microchips and night vision devices are technologies we have because of information collected at UFO crash sites.

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Seen from afar, the works of Turkish artist Çağatay Odabaş look like large-scale printed movie posters, but as viewers approach them to take a closer look, they discover that they are actually made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny hand-drawn circles.

37-year-old Odabaş says that his art is largely influenced by his two most favorite activities growing up in the 80s and 90s – playing with LEGO bricks and watching movies. He starts out by picking out the movie stills he wants to recreate from his collection of thousands of films, which he considers his research library. He then proceeds to split this image into several pieces, mapping out each one with tiny circles, which are all assigned a certain code, to serve during the coloring process. Then, like a complicated but fascinating LEGO model, he puts all the pieces together to create these ultra-realistic masterpieces of pointilism.

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When Murat Karlıoğlu rolls into town in his tractor, his neighbors can literally hear him coming from a mile away. The 30-year-old farmer has spent over 7,000 Turkish lira on a custom sound system for his farming vehicle, which he uses to pump out his favorite music wherever he goes.

Karlıoğlu, from the town of Nazilli, Turkey’s Aydın Province, loves listening to music as he works in the fields. He had a decent sound system installed on his tractor a while back, but was never really satisfied with the output, so after saving a bit of money, he decided to invest it in a custom sound system you would expect to find in an expensive sports car or a tuning project from the likes of West Coast Customs.

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Winter in the Turkish town of Terkirdag has been particularly cold this year, but a local cat lover has come up with an ingenious solution that allows stray cats in her neighborhood to escape the chill – installing a tiny metal ladder leading up into her cozy apartment.

Sebnem Ilhan couldn’t just sit by and let the stray cats freeze to death, so she decided to open up her home to them. But since inviting them in through the front door wasn’t going to work, she had to come up with a more practical solution. The window seemed like the best choice, but even though her apartment is on the ground floor of an apartment building, the window is still to high for cats to jump on to. So she had a tiny metal ladder made that the strays could climb to reach her window.

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Don’t you hate it when you’re using your smartphone on public transportation and notice strangers looking at it over your shoulder? Those people are the worst! But thanks to Celal Göger special glasses, you won’t have to deal with them ever again.

Göger, a 42-year-old mobile phone repairman from the Turkish town of Bismil, Diyarbakır province, has invented special glasses that interact with a smartphone’s screen so that only the wearer can see it. He said he came up with the idea for the glasses four months ago, when, while checking his emails on the local tram, he noticed people on the packed vehicle were staring at the screen of his phone. He realized it was a serious privacy issue that surely other people were facing on a daily basis. So he went back to his phone repair shop and started working on a solution.

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A tailor from Turkey is in the news for making the smallest machine-sewn pair of jeans in the world, measuring a mere 0.9 cm in length. Kasim Andaç, 34, is now hoping that his liliput jeans will earn him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Tailoring has been in Kasim’s family for generations, and he now manages the family business in Konya city, in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region. “I was bored by the profession at first, but after working on being a tailor with my father, I learned to love it and to love the opportunities for innovation and creativity,” Kasim said.

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Frustrated by their lack of marriage prospects, a group of single men in the Turkish village of Uzumlu have taken to the streets in protest. The women of the remote village are apparently refusing to accept any marriage proposalz made by the men because they do not want to be trapped there forever. And the men think they’re being ridiculous.

The last wedding in Uzumlu took place nine years ago, and since then the population of the village has dwindled from 400 to 233. According to mayor Mustafa Bashbilan, many women have chosen to move away from the village to cities like Istanbul and Ankara, but the men stayed behind to care for their inherited farm lands. He added that the lack of prospective wives has made the men unhappy, although they are economically well off.

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In a rather extreme display of patriotism, a Turkish truck driver is suing his own wife for insulting the nation’s president. He told reporters that she would say “unspeakable obscenities” whenever President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appeared on television, despite knowing that it bothered him.

The latest incident occurred a few days ago during one of Erdoğan’s televised speeches. Ali Dinç repeatedly warned his wife Gülcan not to curse the man, but she did it anyway and even dared to change the channel, earning his wrath.

The wife apparently went ahead with the insults, telling Ali to “record and lodge a complaint” if it upset him so much. So he did just that – he recorded the insults as evidence and then lodged a complaint with prosecutors in Izmir city. “I kept on warning her, saying why are you doing this?” he said, speaking to Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak. “Our president is a good person and did good things for Turkey.”

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