Description
Book SynopsisTravel around Turkey in the footsteps of the great British archaelogist Gertrude Bell. In 1889 Gertrude Bell, the great British archaeologist, writer and explorer, arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on the first of many visits to what is now Turkey. Over the next twenty-five years, she would travel the length and breadth of the country, climbing mountains Hasan and Cudi, crossing the Dicle (Tigris) on a raft of inflated goatskins and taking the earliest photographs of remote corners of the country. Veteran guidebook writer Pat Yale set out to retrace Bell's Turkish adventures as one British traveller following another. Her journey took her to the site on the Syrian border where she met Lawrence of Arabia, to forgotten monasteries with solitary occupants and to villages where the conversation of trilingual inhabitants recalled a more multicultural past. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with adherents of faiths that barely survive in modern Turkey, with young men manning barricades in the troubled southeast and refugees struggling to make new lives, with settled nomads making a living from modern tourism and a myriad taxi drivers whose stories exemplify the Turkish dream. Interwoven with each other, the tales of these two women's travels evoke a Turkey of then and now that is so much more complex than its modern tourist image suggests.
Trade Review'affectionate, entertaining ... a fitting tribute to Gertrude Bell.' -- CORNUCOPIA MAGAZINE, December 2023; 'This account is valuable ... a bit of a detective story.' - ANGLO-TURKISH SOCIETY, November 2023; 'I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is an old-fashioned 'footsteps' book with no stuntish symbolism of the personal redemption variety' -- Sara Wheeler, THE SPECTATOR, September 2023; 'This meticulously researched and beautifully written travelogue reminded me of William Dalrymple's 'In Xanadu' and 'From the Holy Mountain' ' - GOODREADS.COM, October 2023; 'Pat Yale takes us on an epic adventure through time, space and the magical landscapes that bewitched a woman in the 1900s. Beautifully written, it entranced me uttlerly.' -- BARBARA NADEL * Author of the Inspector Ikmen series of crime novels;* *'skilful story-telling'; 'a book like no other - juxtaposing two different timelines and two separate worlds.';'a glimpse of Bell's early days as an explorer and recounts the journey that would turn her into that ambitious political player who became an advisor to kings!'- THE MARKAS REVIEW
Table of ContentsPREFACE 7 Gertrude’s Spelling and Other Inconsistencies 12 The Turkish Language 12 PART ONE: Western Wanderings 1 The First East 13 2 The Topless Towers of Ilium 25 3 Shopping like a Native 31 4 The Mediterranean Race 40 5 Alone with History and the Birds 51 6 On the Tourist Trail 57 7 Ephesus Quite to Ourselves 66 8 Crossing the Meander 73 9 From Exiles to Oligarchs 86 10 In Brigand Country 93 11 Claudius the Chippendale 102 12 Moustaches and Marsyas 106 13 Into the Turkish Lake District 115 14 The Road Less Travelled 123 15 The Unlikely Romance of Konya 133 16 Backwater Byzantium 143 PART TWO: The Call of the East 17 Şalvar with Strawberries 153 18 Cardamon Coffee and Aleppo Number Plates 165 19 The Room with Oxblood Walls 180 20 A God Beneath a Mulberry Tree 187 21 The Man in the Cummerbund 198 22 City of Prophets 210 23 The Sultan’s Man in Viranşehir 226 24 How Light Mesopotamia Became 231 25 The Twelve Wise Men 244 26 In Search of Noah’s Ark 267 PART THREE: Homeward Bound 27 The Shadow of the Dam 281 28 The Zebra-Striped City 293 29 Copper Mines and Opium Poppies 306 30 The Devil versus the Kayserilis 320 31 The Funniest Mountaineering 329 32 Constantinople Swansong 346 Epilogue: A Lonesome Gallipoli Grave 366 Maps: Gertrude Bell’s Main Journeys Across Turkey 371 Acknowledgements 376 Further Reading 378 Glossary 381 Index 384
