One photo from Mohamed Salah has quietly turned a sleepy corner of Turkey's Black Sea coast into a pilgrimage site. The Liverpool forward shared a picture of himself sitting on a stone at Kurtdere Highland in Maçka, near Trabzon, and the internet did what it does: within days, fans were travelling specifically to recreate the pose.
The spot is now marked with a sign reading "Salah Yaylası" – Salah Highland – and visitors line up to sit on the same rock. What was an ordinary boulder in a quiet upland meadow has become one of the region's most unexpected photo stops.
The story has a local flavour, too. Salah's arrival at Trabzonspor was already a fairytale for football-mad locals; his trip into the Maçka highlands added a second chapter. Tuana Hatipoğlu, who grew up at Kurtdere and returned from Kocaeli for a Galatasaray match, described the crowds as surreal: the highland was never like this before. Fellow visitors echoed the sentiment – Bahtiyar Bekçi, in town from Istanbul for the derby, said he'd visited Sumela Monastery many times but had never come up to Kurtdere until the photo made the stone famous. He cooled his feet in the stream and queued for his turn on the rock.
There's a plea running beneath the excitement, though. Locals are thrilled about the tourism boost but worried about what crowds bring with them. Hatipoğlu's message to new arrivals is blunt: take your rubbish with you. The highland's appeal is its pristine setting, and residents would rather see it promoted than trashed.
For travellers, this is a classic Black Sea detour: combine Trabzon's city sights and the famous cliff-hung Sumela Monastery in Maçka with a drive up to Kurtdere for your own Salah shot. Go early if you want the stone to yourself, pack out what you pack in, and give yourself time for the streams and green slopes that made the highland worth visiting long before a footballer found it.
