Stamboul Sketches: Encounters in Old Istanbul

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Description

Throughout the 1960's John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd explored every alley,cove and monument of their adopted home of Istanbul in between their teachingjobs. They created a legendary guidebook, covering 1,500 years of Byzantine andOttoman architecture, to a city that was still innocent of tourists. But thepassages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic, too indulgentof eccentric personalities, too melancholically obsessed with lost monuments, toowrapped up in the love of mid-afternoon banter, too indulgent of musicians,dancers, gypsies, dervish, drunks, beggars, fishermen, poets, fortune-tellers, folkhealers,mimics and prostitutes were cut from their scholarly guidebook.Stamboul Sketches is a slim book compiled from these editorial floor off-cuts.

Inspired by travelling in the footsteps of Evliya Celebi, the Puck-like Pepys whowrote about 17th century Istanbul, Stamboul Sketches is a beautiful, quirkyportrait of a city caught like a bird on the wing, "so much changed but so muchthe same."

Reviews

Written when Orhan Pamuk was just a pup and when John Freely was in his prime. Freely had explored every inch of the city for Strolling Through Istanbul but that was a book about the history behind the facades - this is a picture of the city that he loved. - Andrew Finkel

Author Bio

John Freely was born into a dissident, hard-drinking Irish-American family in 1927. He dropped out of school aged 17 and joined the US Navy, serving as a marine in the last years of the Second World War and as a G.I. student discovered as genius for Physics. His postgraduate studies took him to All Souls, Oxford before taking up a teaching post in 1960 at Roberts College (later Bosphorus University) in Istanbul. Aside from his career as a Professor of Physics he has written forty books about the intertwined history and culture of Turkey and Greece starting with the guidebook he wrote with Hilary Sumner-Boyd, Strolling Through Istanbul.