Stamboul Sketches

Encounters in Old Istanbul

John Freely author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Eland Publishing Ltd

Published:31st Oct '14

Should be back in stock very soon

Stamboul Sketches cover

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 teaching jobs. They created a legendary guidebook, covering 1,500 years of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, to a city that was still innocent of tourists. But the passages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic, too indulgent of eccentric personalities, too melancholically obsessed with lost monuments, too wrapped up in the love of mid-afternoon banter, too indulgent of musicians, dancers, gypsies, dervish, drunks, beggars, fishermen, poets, fortune-tellers, folk healers, 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 who wrote about 17th century Istanbul, Stamboul Sketches is a beautiful, quirky portrait of a city caught like a bird on the wing, so much changed but so much the same.

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

ISBN: 9781780600567

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 210g

176 pages