Richard Stoneman’s approach to discover Turkey in his
book Across the Hellespont (ISBN
978-1-84885-422-2) is quite unique and the subtitle “A Literary Guide to Turkey” in fact says it all.
Rather than a dreary sequence of texts, the author ably summarizes Turkey’s rich history inserting pieces of literature ranging from antiquity to modern writers. As history progresses, the author shares a panoply of documents, letters and poems written by the countless travelers who from the 17th all the way to the 20th century came in touch with the Ottoman Empire of which close to nothing had transpired to the West.
The main part of the book is centered on Istanbul (Stamboul or Constantinople as the city was known before) but also the western part of modern Turkey with the regions of Ionia and Lydia, Lycia and the now popular Turkish Riviera are widely illustrated by those early visitors.
Moreover, this book provides plenty of information to whoever wants to dig further into Turkey’s rich history. All the quoted texts are extremely well referenced and the most curious mind can certainly pick his choice from the elaborate Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading listed at the end of the book, from biographies to fiction, from modern accounts to guidebooks, from Turkish history to more specialized books about Istanbul.
In spite of these bits and pieces, Richard Stoneman manages to write a coherent and captivating story about this land on the crossroad between East and West that fascinated and still fascinates so many of us.
Rather than a dreary sequence of texts, the author ably summarizes Turkey’s rich history inserting pieces of literature ranging from antiquity to modern writers. As history progresses, the author shares a panoply of documents, letters and poems written by the countless travelers who from the 17th all the way to the 20th century came in touch with the Ottoman Empire of which close to nothing had transpired to the West.
The main part of the book is centered on Istanbul (Stamboul or Constantinople as the city was known before) but also the western part of modern Turkey with the regions of Ionia and Lydia, Lycia and the now popular Turkish Riviera are widely illustrated by those early visitors.
Moreover, this book provides plenty of information to whoever wants to dig further into Turkey’s rich history. All the quoted texts are extremely well referenced and the most curious mind can certainly pick his choice from the elaborate Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading listed at the end of the book, from biographies to fiction, from modern accounts to guidebooks, from Turkish history to more specialized books about Istanbul.
In spite of these bits and pieces, Richard Stoneman manages to write a coherent and captivating story about this land on the crossroad between East and West that fascinated and still fascinates so many of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment