Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [3]
Istanbul is an extraordinary city, filled with much that is old and plenty that is new. Asia Minor (or Anatolia, Greek for “east” or “the land of sunrise”), note Hugh and Nicole Pope in Turkey Unveiled, “is extraordinarily rich in ancient peoples. It bears some of the world’s earliest traces of civilization. Like the architectural jumble of Istanbul, where buildings have been piling up on top of each other for millennia, the ethnic and historical origins of Turkey’s peoples are inextricably intertwined.” The layers of history in Istanbul, combined with its vibrant pulse, ensure that to know the city well would take a lifetime. I hope that after reading this book, and traveling to Istanbul, you, too, will realize that, as Verity Campbell wrote in the Lonely Planet Turkey guide, “There simply is no other city like it.”
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A traveller without knowledge is a bird without wings.
—SA’ADI, Persian poet,
Gulistan
The Collected Traveler editions are meant to be companion volumes to guidebooks that go beyond the practical information that traditional guidebooks supply. Each individual volume is perfect to bring along, but each is also a sort of planning package—the books guide readers to many other sources, and they are sources of inspiration. James Pope-Hennessy, in his wonderful book Aspects of Provence, notes that “if one is to get the best value out of places visited, some skeletal knowledge of their history is necessary.… Sight-seeing is by no means the only object of a journey, but it is as unintelligent as it is lazy not to equip ourselves to understand the sights we see.” Immerse yourself in a destination and you’ll acquire a deeper understanding and appreciation of the place and the people who live there, and, not surprisingly, you’ll have more fun.
This series promotes the strategy of staying longer within a smaller area so as to experience it more fully. Susan Allen Toth refers to this in one of her many wonderful books, England as You Like It, in which she subscribes to the “thumbprint theory of travel”: spending at least a week in one spot no larger than her thumbprint covers on a large-scale map of England. She goes on to explain that excursions are encouraged, as long as they’re about an hour’s drive away.
I have discovered in my own travels that a week in one place, even a spot no bigger than my thumbprint, is rarely long enough to see and enjoy it all. For this reason, most of the books in The Collected Traveler series focus on either cities or regions, as opposed to entire countries. Though I did not plan to compile a book on all of Turkey, I am mindful that Turkey is a member of three communities: European, Mediterranean, and Asian. I have tried to reflect this wider world sense of community throughout the book.
The major portion of this book features a selection of articles and essays from various periodicals and recommended reading relevant to the theme of each section. The articles and books were chosen from my own files and home library, which I’ve maintained for over two decades. (I often feel I am the living embodiment of a comment that Samuel Johnson made in 1775, that “a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”) The selected writings reflect the culture, politics, history, current social issues, religion, cuisine, and arts of the people you’ll be visiting. They also represent the observations and opinions of a wide variety of novelists,