Bosphorus Private
Bosphorus Private

Author: Nevbahar Koç

Publisher: Assouline Publishing

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 6

ISBN-13: 1614286515

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From the ancient Greek, Roman, Persian, and Byzantine eras to the Ottoman Empire to the present day, the Bosphorus strait is a storied and scenic region of Turkey. As the crossroads of the country’s European and Asian subsections, it is home to rich culture, incredible people, delicious food, unique architecture, and unmistakable style. Countless creatives have been awed and inspired here, including Tommy Hilfiger, Christian Louboutin, Nicky Haslam, and Cher. Turkish denizens and visitors alike are thrilled by the skyline, a breathtaking view of calming waters and magnificent bridges. But some of the best places to discover the style of the Bosphorus are within the private homes of its welcoming residents, who are always gracious and ready to entertain, and who know just the right balance of old and new to both pay homage to their country’s glorious past and herald its future. These vibrant personalities each have a story to tell, something that tethers them to this enchanted slice of the world. Bosphorus Private, showcasing twenty homes, is the melding of two continents, countless creative influences, and millennia of history.

To Save an Empire
To Save an Empire

Author: Allan R Gall

Publisher: eBook Partnership

Published: 2018-04-06

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1912643081

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In 1877, when Russia attacks the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abduelhamit II must fight a devastating war to preserve his ethnically diverse territories that stretch across three continents. At home, he feels threatened from within by Mithat Pasha, a respected reformer, who has popular support for a constitution that would curb the sultan's authority and give the people a voice in their government. Aware of these challenges, Abduelhamit's Belgian wife, Flora Cordier, hopes to remain his confidante and helpmate as he decides how to govern: the iron-fisted rule of his ancestors, the democracy proposed by Mithat, or the diplomacy that exposes his weakened military power. No matter his choice, he is responsible for the suffering of his people.To Save an Empire explores the impact of religious and ethnic conflict in the Ottoman Empire of the late 19th century on the lives of ordinary people-Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Refugees flee atrocities that incite revenge, but also arouse charity and love. A story of love found and lost, of war and its consequences. Today's Balkans and Middle East emerge from the era's political forces of terrorism, imperialism, nationalism, and religion. It is a modern story.______________________________________________________________________________"e;[Gall]...artfully brings to life the political intrigues of an empire sliding into irrelevance. The Ottoman Empire emerges as a kind of protagonist all its own, eager to become strengthened by its embrace of modernity and the West, but also anxious about surrendering its cultural and religious identity. ... A magnificently researched tale of a troubled empire that's also dramatically captivating."e; - Kirkus reviews "e;Fiction as only history can tell it, all the more moving because we know it is not fiction. ...a compelling story."e; - Bulent Atalay, physicist and author of Math and the Mona Lisa and Leonardo's Universe

The Book of Devices
The Book of Devices

Author: İhsan Oktay Anar

Publisher: Imprint

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 9786059389747

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"He had sought to be the agent of all forces and actions on the Earth, and thus, just as he had transformed iron ingot into a music box, so had he strived to transform the Earth and all it contained into a machine." Ihsan Oktay Anar's 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author's fictional world set in the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, "as reported by the narrators of events and relators of traditions." By turns humorous and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d''tats, Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation. Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, The Book of Devices is Anar at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a cabinet of dreamy curiosities.

A Useless Man
A Useless Man

Author: Sait Faik Abasiyanik

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0914671081

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With all the wit and brilliance of Chekhov, a distinctive collection of lyrical stories from Sait Faik Abasıyanık, “Turkey’s greatest short story writer” (The Guardian) Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.

Istanbul Istanbul
Istanbul Istanbul

Author: Burhan Sönmez

Publisher: OR Books

Published: 2016-05-05

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1682190390

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“Istanbul, Istanbul turns on the tension between the confines of a prison cell and the vastness of the imagination; between the vulnerable borders of the body and the unassailable depths of the mind. This is a harrowing, riveting novel, as unforgettable as it is inescapable.” —Dale Peck, author of Visions and Revisions “A wrenching love poem to Istanbul told between torture sessions by four prisoners in their cell beneath the city. An ode to pain in which Dostoevsky meets The Decameron.” —John Ralston Saul, author of On Equilibrium; former president, PEN International “Istanbul is a city of a million cells, and every cell is an Istanbul unto itself.” Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners—Demirtay the student, the doctor, Kamo the barber, and Uncle Küheylan—sit, awaiting their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Quiet laughter is the prisoners’ balm, delivered through parables and riddles. Gradually, the underground narrative turns into a narrative of the above-ground. Initially centered around people, the book comes to focus on the city itself. And we discover there is as much suffering and hope in the Istanbul above ground as there is in the cells underground. Despite its apparently bleak setting, this novel—translated into seventeen languages—is about creation, compassion, and the ultimate triumph of the imagination.

Splendours of the Bosphorus
Splendours of the Bosphorus

Author: Chris Hellier

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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The Bosphorus - the strait which separates European and Asian Turkey - is one of the world's most beautiful and romantic waterways, eulogized by Byron and many other travellers. Here Eastern and Western cultures meet in the architecture of houses and palaces built along its shores by generations of Ottoman families and sultans.

Istanbul
Istanbul

Author: Orhan Pamuk

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2006-12-05

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0307386481

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From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. "Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." —The Washington Post Book World A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share. With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters—both Turkish and foreign—who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

Istanbul
Istanbul

Author: Bettany Hughes

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 0306825856

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Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact. From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul -- resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City," but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a global story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities--exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. Hughes investigates what it takes to make a city and tells the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the poor and the voiceless, of the women and men whose aspirations and dreams have continuously reinvented Istanbul. Written with energy and animation, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes deftly guides readers through Istanbul's rich layers of history. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate, and authoritative -- narrative history at its finest.