Blue Guide Istanbul

by John Freely

Huge, busy, full of atmosphere, and with a tremendously rich architectural heritage, Istanbul is one of the world's most beautiful cities. All of Istanbul's monuments, including the Haghia Sophia, Topkapi Sarayi, and the Covered Bazaar, are covered in a series of carefully planned walks. Away from the center, the guide describes walks along the Byzantine land walls and the historic Bosphorus and excursions to the delightful Princes' Isles. 25 illustrations, 30 maps and plans, 16-page color street atlas.

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents, and spent half of his early childhood in Ireland. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the U. S. Navy, serving for two years, including combat duty with a commando unit in the Pacific, India, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G. I. Bill and eventually received a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, followed by a year of post-doctoral study at Oxford in the history of science. He worked as a research physicist for nine years, including five years at Princeton University. In 1960 he went to İstanbul to teach physics at the Robert College, now the Boğaziçi University, and taught there until 1976. He then went on to teach and write in Athens (1976-79), Boston (1979-87), London (1987-88), İstanbul (1988-91) and Venice (1991-93). In 1993 he returned to Boğaziçi University, where he taught a course on the history of science. His first book, co-authored by the late Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was Strolling Through İstanbul (1972). Since then he has published more than forty books.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Setting out, my girlfriend ribbed me for carrying such an “impractical” guide – that is one concerned almost entirely with art, museums and monuments – but it so happened that Freely’s Blue Guide Istanbul contains the clearest and most detailed maps – is eminently “practical.” Freely explicates the half-obliterated mosaics in a Byzantine church better than the clownish hired guide whose dumb, distracting wisecracks raise feebly polite laughs from the gullible and now regretful group; and then he helps you find a hole in the wall shop on some precipitous back street. His restaurant recommendations seem afterthoughts but they aren’t. My favorite was the place just inside the Edirne Gate (through which Mehmet II, “the Conqueror,” entered vanquished Constantinople) whose chefs recreate, as far as is possible, recipes found in the Ottoman archives. The 1469 hummus was a little too pasty and sweet for my taste, but the 1844 pudding, almonds and seasonal fruits in a rosewater syrup, had an unearthly daintiness that reminded me of the Ottoman Rococo writing chests, all tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl, that I’d admired behind museum glass (word to you potential Goncourts out there: the “Tulip Era” Ottoman court is one of the "eighteenth century wonderlands," and an aesthete could make an emotional home in the study its handicrafts). That restaurant didn’t serve manti, or ravioli alla turca, a favorite dish of Mehmet II, and a temporary obsession of mine.


I also liked Freely’s generous extracts from the vast travel literature – sober merchants’ notes to lubricious orientalisme; and in his own prose Freely frequently mounts from mere instruction to eloquent vistas:

The Byzantine land walls stretch for 6.5km from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. These fortifications protected Byzantium from its enemies for more than a thousand years, until the fateful day in late May 1453 when they were breached by Mehmet II and his army using a colossal cannon cast by a Hungarian. Today the walls are in ruins, the districts around them prey to dereliction and stray dogs. Nevertheless, they are still an impressive and evocative sight, with their tower-studded battlements marching across what were once the empty plains of Thrace.

[Juozas Šalna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book adds historical background to all the places you can visit in Istanbul.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a guidebook that's fun to read. Indeed it can be done, though as a former guidebook editor I can tell you it's not easy. This is the best one I know. John Freely is a cultural and literary jack of all trades. When we visited him at his wonderful home on the campus of the University of the Bosphurus he showed us three of his new books just out, a biography of Fatih the Conqueror, a history of the Seljuks, and from Knopf, Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World .

[Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite guide to Istanbul because of its seriousness about places that create the power and beauty of this amazing city.