For centuries following its reestablishment as Constantinople in AD 330, Istanbul served as the capital of three great empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. The city’s maze-like streets and high balconies, its steep alleys, flower gardens, and forested hillsides remain soaked in the vestiges of that imperial past, and it is to that past and to Istanbul’s unearthly moods and waters that so many writers and diarists journeyed in search of escape, knowledge, happiness, or sheer wonderment. An Istanbul Anthology takes us on a nostalgic journey through the city with travelers’ accounts of the sights, smells, and sounds of Istanbul’s bazaars and coffeehouses, its grand palaces and gardens, crumbling buildings, and ancient churches and mosques, and the waters that so haunt and define it. With writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, and André Gide, we discover and rediscover the many delights of this great city of antiquity, meeting point of East and West, and gateway to peoples and civilizations. About the series: The elegant, pocket-sized volumes in the AUC Press Anthology series feature the writings and observations of travel writers and diarists through the centuries. Vivid and evocative travelers’ accounts of some of the world’s great cities and regions are enhanced by the exquisite vintage design in small hardback format that make the books ideal gift books as well as perfect travel companions. Designed on cream paper stock and beautifully illustrated with line drawings and archival photographs.
An Istanbul Anthology
Travel Writing through the Centuries
Edited by
Kaya Genç
18 November 2015
160 pp.
24 b/w illus.
12X16cm
ISBN 9789774167218
For sale worldwide
11.99
Related products
Gardens of a Sacred Landscape
Bedouin Heritage and Natural History in the High Mountains of Sinai
Samy ZalatFrancis Gilbert
Illustrations byAhmed Gheith
This beautifully illustrated book describes the unique environment and the natural history of St. Katherine in Sinai from the perspective of its inhabitants—the Gabaliya Bedouin. The Gabaliya live in the high and rugged mountain massif of South Sinai, enclosed within the St. Katherine Protectorate in an area now declared as a World Heritage Site. St. Katherine is one of the world’s most important protected areas for its special historical, cultural, religious, and environmental heritage. It contains Egypt’s highest mountain—Mount Katherine—and one of the world’s most sacred: Mount Sinai. The Gabaliya have a unique history, and their intimate relationship with their harsh environment is equally unique. In the arid landscape within the great Ring Dyke they have created their own orchard agriculture, growing fruit and vegetables in irrigated walled gardens that seem to grow out of the rock on remote wadi floors or on the steep mountainsides themselves. This book introduces—from their own observations—the gardens and the unique culture and heritage of the Gabaliya, the vegetables and fruits they grow, and the mammals, birds, lizards, and insects associated with their gardens and environment in this remarkable landscape. The book is fully illustrated with photographs and watercolor paintings.
...read more
Hardbound
208 pp.230 illus.
16.5X23.5cm
24.95
Cities, Citadels, and Sights of the Near East
Francis Bedford’s Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, the Levant, and Constantinople
Text by Sophie GordonBadr El Hage
In 1862, the Prince of Wales, eldest son of Britain’s Queen Victoria, embarked on a grand tour of the Middle East, for his education and enlightenment. Accompanying the royal party was Francis Bedford, an accomplished practitioner of the still young art of photography, charged with taking views of the cities and historic places visited on the tour for the royal album. The result is an extraordinary collection of some of the best early photographs of Cairo and the temples of Upper Egypt, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Lebanon and Damascus, Izmir and Constantinople. From timeless views of the Pyramids, the Dome of the Rock, Baalbek, and Hagia Sophia to scenes from another age of the streets of Cairo or tall ships on the Bosphorus, 120 of Bedford’s most outstanding photographs are showcased here in this fascinating visual tour of ancient lands in royal company.
...read more
Flexibound
160 pp.120 illus.
25X25cm
24.95
A Cairo Anthology
Two Hundred Years of Travel Writing
Edited by Deborah ManleyCairo has long been recognized as one of the great cities of the world, and many travelers have recorded their descriptions of it over the centuries—from the early eye-witness account of Herodotus to the reflections of Sir Richard Burton, Florence Nightingale, and Mark Twain.
A Cairo Anthology gathers together the impressions of many of these writers: with them we experience the excitement of exploring the great city, through its crowded streets and colorful bazaars, we enter the hotels, hire donkeys, ascend to the historic Citadel, and look out across the Nile toward the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and we visit those vast monuments that are in reality always larger and more extraordinary than one can believe, and climb to their summits to gaze back at Cairo, the Mother of the World.
...read more
Hardbound
160 pp.27 b/w illus.
12X16cm
11.99
Cairo’s Street Stories
Exploring the City’s Statues, Squares, Bridges, Gardens, and Sidewalk Cafés
Lesley LababidiIn 1872, Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, was the first to adopt the European custom of positioning heroic statues on public display as a symbolic message of the continuing authority of the ruling Muhammad Ali dynasty to which he belonged, but it was not until the early twentieth century and the determination of sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar that such public art gained general acceptance, and today statues stand, ride, or sit in the streets, squares, and gardens of Cairo. Each sculpture adds a piece to the jigsaw of history spanning personalities and events that shaped the city and wider Egypt from 1805 to 1970, and here Cairo-based author Lesley Lababidi provides a unique perspective on Egyptian history through looking at more than thirty statues and monumental sculptures and the stories behind them. Between statues, she explores Cairo’s growth and its multidimensional identity, as manifested in the development and changing use of city space over the centuries, and examines the relationship of Cairo’s modern denizens with the landscapes, districts, palaces, archaeological sites, cafés, bridges, and gardens of their great and maddening city, the Mother of the World. Illustrated throughout with color photographs and archival pictures, Cairo’s Street Stories presents a unique and lively view of the history that fashioned the city’s streets and open spaces, and of the many and often unexpected uses to which its inventive inhabitants put them.
...read more
Paperback
152 pp.Over 100 color illus.
16.5X23.5cm
18.95