Stamboul Sketches : Encounters in Old Istanbul

Throughout the 1960s, John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd explored every alley, cove and monument of their adopted home of Istanbul between teaching jobs. Together they created a legendary guidebook covering 1,500 years of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture in a city still innocent of tourists. But the passages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic—too indulgent of eccentric personalities, too melancholically obsessed with lost monuments, too wrapped up in the love of mid-afternoon banter—were cut from their scholarly work.

Those rejected passages were too indulgent of musicians, dancers, gypsies, dervishes, drunks, beggars, fishermen, poets, fortune-tellers, folk healers, mimics and prostitutes to make it into a conventional guidebook. Stamboul Sketches is a slim volume compiled from these editorial off-cuts—the stories that were simply too rich, too human, too alive to fit the mold.

Inspired by travelling in the footsteps of Evliya Çelebi, the Puck-like Pepys who chronicled 17th-century Istanbul, this is a beautiful, quirky portrait of a city caught like a bird on the wing: so much changed, yet so much the same.