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In 1889 Gertrude Bell, the great British archaeologist, writer and explorer, arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on the first of many visits to what is now Turkey. Over the next 25 years, she would travel the length and breadth of the country, crossing the Tigris on a raft of inflated goatskins and taking the earliest photographs of remote corners of the country.
Veteran guidebook writer Pat Yale set out to retrace Bell's Turkish adventures as one British traveller following another. Her journey took her to the site on the Syrian border where she met Lawrence of Arabia, to forgotten monasteries with solitary occupants and to villages where trilingual inhabitants recalled a more multicultural past. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with adherents of faiths that barely survive in modern Turkey, with refugees struggling to make new lives, and with myriad taxi drivers whose stories exemplify the Turkish dream.
Interwoven with each other, the tales of these two women's travels evoke a Turkey of then and now that is so much more complex than its modern tourist image suggests.
List of contents
Contents Illustrations Map: Following Gertrude Bell Preface Gertrude's Spelling and Other Inconsistencies
PART ONE: Western Wanderings The First East The Topless Towers of Ilium 3 Shopping Like a Native 4 The Mediterranean Race 5 Alone With History and the Birds 6 On the Tourist Trail 7 Ephesus Quite to Ourselves 8 Crossing the Meander 9 From Exiles to Oligarchs 10 In Brigand Country 11 Claudius The Chippendale 12 Moustaches and Marsyas 13 Into the Lake District 14 It's Very Laborious Being the Careful Traveller 15 The Unlikely Romance of Konya 16 Backwater Byzantium
PART TWO: The Call of the East 17 Şalvar with Strawberries 18 Cardamon Coffee and Aleppo Number Plates 19 The Room with Oxblood Walls 20 A God Beneath a Mulberry Tree 21 The Man in the Cummerbund 22 City of the Prophets 23 The Sultan's Man in Viranşehir 24 How Light Mesopotamia Became 25 The Twelve Wise Men 26 In Search of Noah's Ark
PART THREE: Homeward Bound 27 The Shadow of the Dam 28 The Zebra-Striped City 29 Is Peace the Exception and Fighting the Norm? 30 The Devil Versus the Kayserilis 31 The Funniest Mountaineering 32 Constantinople Swansong Epilogue: A Lonesome Gallipoli Grave Maps: Gertrude Bell's Main Journeys Across Turkey Acknowledgements Further Reading The Turkish Language Glossary
About the author
By Pat Yale
Summary
The author of the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey interweaves her travels in modern Turkey with those of explorer Gertrude Bell 100 years ago, in an entertaining travelogue.
