From 1-10 September 2005 there was a Skilliter Centre tour organised for a group of 26 Newnham alumnae and friends and led by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet to Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne. Over the ten days of the tour, the group visited sites ranging from a 15th-century mental hospital in Edirne to the 19th-century palace of Dolmabahçe in İstanbul, ate in a hamam, a konak, and a soup kitchen, and drank tea in a former abattoir of a mosque complex.  Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet gave 11 lectures during the tour on various aspects of Ottoman history and culture.

The Skilliter Centre is extremely grateful for the support of all those on the tour and in particular for the generous, and unexpected, donation presented at the final dinner on the Bosphorus. This enabled the Centre to buy a variety of books including the new ten-volume complete edition of the works of the 17th-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. Without this support the Centre would not have been able to buy these volumes.