Description
Book SynopsisIstanbul, A Traveller''s Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans.
Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Süleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city''s moques; and the death of Atatürk in 1938.
It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; th
Trade Review
Vividly tells the story of that exotic city. - Spectator
Provides as rich and satisfying a patchwork as the metropolis it describes. - Times
Beguiling . . . should prove indispensable in the field. - Times Literary Supplement
