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masterpiece. Dr. Ousterhout is one of the world’s leading archaeologists and historians of Byzantine art and architecture, and is on the faculty in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Ousterhout wrote in Cornucopia that when he first set foot in the Kariye Camii many years ago, he fell in love. “It was the academic equivalent of a blind date—I’d committed myself, sight unseen, to write a PhD dissertation about a building I’d never seen in a city I’d never visited. Happily, the Kariye caught and held my interest.” The building he refers to as the key monument of late Byzantine art and architecture—“there is absolutely nothing that can compare with it in Istanbul, or anywhere else for that matter”—has continued to hold his attention for more than thirty years. And now he is worried for its future, and recommends a fresh evaluation of the building. It would indeed be a tragedy if the Kariye were allowed to further deteriorate.

Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, by John Freely and Ahmet S. Çakmak (Cambridge, 2004). This magnificent book is hard to find, but well worth the effort. The monuments are presented here in chronological order and are described in the context of their times. The text, accompanied by maps and photographs (most in black and white but plenty in color), really tells the story about each monument, which is why this book is so valuable. If you can locate this only in your local library (I had to request an inter-library loan), it’s better than not reading it at all; but this is one you’ll want to keep.

A History of Ottoman Architecture, by Godfrey Goodwin (Thames & Hudson, 1971). You will find references to this book in nearly every guidebook and with good reason: it is hands down the single best work on the subject—absolutely essential. It is not for light reading, however—this is a large, heavy tome of 511 pages—but even for dipping into only a few chapters I highly recommend it. Goodwin relates in his autobiographical Life’s Episodes: Discovering Ottoman Architecture (below) that when he finished the manuscript, he turned it into Thames & Hudson “without warning since I knew nobody there. Later I learnt that they said at least it was something new and the next day they sent it to Professor Géza Fehérvári, then at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Geza brought it back to Thames & Hudson on the Thursday saying, not that it was worth publishing, but that it had to be published forthwith.” Goodwin made a pledge to himself years before when he was visiting Bursa that he would “explore every nook and cranny of Ottoman architecture and also the people who lived here over many centuries, to include the farmer sitting next to me on a bus. I did not then know that I had made such a promise but the monuments themselves did. The task is not yet finished.”

İpek: The Crescent and the Rose: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets, compiled and edited by Julian Raby and Alison Effeny (Azimuth Editions, 2001). This positively stunning book—about 14 × 11 inches, with hundreds of lavish color and black-and-white pattern designs and other illustrations—is a must for anyone who has a yen for textiles in particular and Ottoman history in general. Though this is a thick volume (360 pages), the author team has focused on silk (ipek) textiles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the book combines immense visual appeal with the most comprehensive scholarly research to date. The authors visited all of the major collections of Ottoman textiles in the world, traveling to seventeen countries, and finding masterpieces not only in Topkapı and the Mevlana Museum in Konya but also in monasteries and museums in the Balkans, Sweden, Poland, and Russia. The book brings together an “unparalleled range of information on Ottoman silks,” and examines many of the different factors that determined the history of these textiles.

Turkish silks were held in high regard by Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while, initially, wearing silk was considered an infidel custom (the Prophet