ariel *ੈ✩‧₊˚’s Reviews > The Historian > Status Update

This books makes me want to visit Turkey and Bulgaria baaaad lol 2026 vacation goal?!

“There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian…. It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history.

“It is fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us.”

“This was to become a theme of our days there — her brief, pungent remarks on all that was already familiar to her: Turkish place-names, a cucumber salad consumed in an outdoor restaurant, the pointed arch of a window frame. This had a peculiar effect on me, too, a sort of doubling of my experience, so that I seemed to be seeing Istanbul and Romania at the same time.”

Absolutely devouring and loving this book

“Immediately I became aware of something very strange. A smell rose from is pages that was not merely the delicate scent of aging paper and cracked vel-lum. It was a reck of decay, a terrible, sickening odor, a smell of old meat or corrupted flesh.” Reading this right after Dracula, I appreciate the care and detail Kostova put in this to callback to the previous text