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
Egypt
Yesterday and Today
Lithographs and diaries byDavid Roberts, R.A.Text byFabio Bourbon
Photographs byAntonio Attini
David Roberts, one of the most skilled landscape artists of his time, set out for Egypt in 1838, where he made countless sketches of the most remarkable sites and monuments during the course of his eleven-month journey through Egypt, Sinai, and the Levant. Superb lithographs made from his work, first published between 1846 and 1848, are richly reproduced here in resplendent color, along with Roberts’s diary accounts of his travels along the Nile Valley from Alexandria to the fabulous Abu Simbel temples. Each illustration is accompanied by a photograph showing the same view more than 150 years later. Fabio Bourbon’s lucid essay introduces anew this nineteenth-century fine artist and contextualizes his images for the modern reader.
...read more
Flexibound
304 pp.252 color illus.
21X29.5cm
24.95
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
Egypt 1250 BC
A Traveler’s Companion
Donald P. RyanStrap on your sturdiest sandals and start planning your trip to Egypt in 1250 BC. You may have heard the rumors: the language is perplexing, there are no tourist facilities, and an aggressive, egocentric pharaoh rules the land. But Egypt will be a must-see vacation destination for millennia to come! So don’t delay—visit now, before the Roman tourist hordes arrive. Drawing on contemporary sources and years of experience excavating in Egypt, archaeologist Donald P. Ryan guides the time-traveling tourist on a journey up the Nile, taking in the sights of Memphis, the pyramids, Thebes, and beyond. En route he offers useful advice on everything from deciphering hieroglyphs to deciding which god to petition in the event of a scorpion sting. So leave the protective amulets at home and banish all fear of being sold as a galley slave. This imaginative guide is all you need to survive and enjoy your visit to Egypt in its glorious age of empire.
...read more
Hardbound
144 pp.88 illus. incl. 12 color illus.
13.5X20cm
12.99
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