Jason Goodwin’s top 10 books about Turkey

August 31, 2011 Jimmy Books, Travel 0

Encompassing poetry, history, fiction and even cookery, the author picks his favourite reading about this ‘elusive and contradictory’ country
  • Jason Goodwin
  • guardian.co.uk,
    • Grand Bazaar, Istanbul

    A carpet seller in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Photograph: Patrick Ward/Corbis
    Jason Goodwin fell in love with Istanbul while studying Byzantine history at Cambridge. Since then, he has written a number of highly praised non-fiction books, including On Foot to the Golden Horn and Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire. He has since begun his series of novels featuring Yashim, the Turkish eunuch detective.
    The first, The Januissary Tree (2006), was winner of the Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel. He followed this with The Snake Stone (2007) and The Bellini Card (2008). His newest Yashim novel, An Evil Eye is published by Faber.
    “Now the top destination for Mediterranean tourists, Turkey is rather more than a sunny spot on the beach. Home to successive civilisations from the ancient Hittites to the Romans, from Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire, this is a country forged by one man, Ataturk, in the 1920s, out of the rubble of a multi-national, multi-faith Ottoman empire. Almost a century later, the identity of the country is still elusive and contradictory. Turkey lies along so many fault-lines, between Europe and the Middle East, between the secularity of the state and popular faith, between a many-splendoured past and current explosive growth. The country’s borders march from Armenia and Iraq to Bulgaria and Greece, from the rain-swept coast of the Black Sea to the indented waters of the Aegean, enclosing 21st century Istanbul as well as remote, almost Biblical landscapes of the interior. “Is Turkey slowly learning to live at ease with its history – or is it set to abandon the secularism of its founder? Is it still a candidate for EU membership – or has that moment passed? Fiction may sometimes bring the reader a closer sense of the shattering transformations as well as continuities of Turkish history. The following selection is influenced by my interest in 19th century Istanbul, where I chose to set my series of thrillers. Then, the Ottoman capital was grappling with the issues of modernity v tradition, nationalism v multiculturalism, the rule of law and the weight of custom, as well as defining its relationship with Europe and Russia. To visitors from the west, this was the east; easterners saw it as a window on the west. With its Greek, Armenian, Jewish minorities, Istanbul was then a cosmopolitan place; today, another multinational crowd strolls amongst the mementoes of imperial grandeur.”

     

    1. Istanbul: Poetry of Place, edited by Ates Orga

    With Strolling Through Istanbul in one pocket, and this slim volume in the other, you should be perfectly equipped to explore the former capital of the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Packed with poetry and a little prose, Istanbul brings you the voices of the city’s inhabitants, from sultans to modern-day feminists.

    2. Snow by Orhan Pamuk

    Complex, fragmentary, unreliable and poetic, this thoroughly postmodern novel abounds with puns, ironies, double-takes and imponderable conflicts of love, faith and social justice, reflecting not only aspects of the human condition but also of 20th-century Turkey’s preoccupations with secularism, religious freedom and revolution. In the city of Kars, a young journalist, Ka, comes to investigate a spate of suicides relating to the wearing of headscarves – and opens up a kaleidoscopic world of claims, counter-claims and conflicting priorities.

    3. Turkey: a Short History by Norman Stone

    A fanfare for modern Turkey and a vivid, provocative, often funny, always insightful account of how it came about. Stone pulls together his accomplishments as a philoturk, a philologist, controversialist and narrative historian to sweep his readers along a short crash course in Turkish origins, their history and current challenges. If you don’t really know why a portrait of Ataturk hangs in almost every shop in Turkey, read this book.

    4. Classical Turkish Cooking by Ayla Algar

    This may allow you to extend the highlights of your trip indefinitely. There are sexier cook books, but I like the austerity of this one, which expresses much that is gentle and domestic in Turkish culture, and then lets you eat it. Classical meze, soups, meat and fish dishes, and of course pilaffs and pastries – hundreds of recipes, with insights into the history and development of a world-class food culture.

    5. Turkish Letters by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq

    The Flemish nobleman wrote his Letters while on an ambassadorial mission to Istanbul between 1554 and 1562, making him a brilliant eye-witness of the Ottoman state at its height, under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Busbecq was a botanist, linguist, antiquarian, scholar and zoologist; he brought back lilac and the tulip.

    6. Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire by Philip Mansel

    The definitive history of the city from 1453, by one of our finest historians, also explains how a multi-ethnic, polyglot empire was controlled by a single dynasty for more than 600 years. Mansel mines a vast range of sources to bring the fashions, pomp and politics of this ancient world capital to life.

    7. Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernières

    I keep picking this up – and putting it down again, because I can’t quite face the onrushing tragedy. Needless to say, it’s the story of a doomed love affair between Philotei and Ibrahim, as relations between Greece and Turkey collapse in the First World War; prelude to the massive population exchange of 1923, which ended Greek settlement of Asia Minor. Gallipoli is in it; so is Ataturk; so are some characters from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. De Bernières insists this is the better book and I believe him.

    8. Eothen by AW Kinglake

    The title, which means “from the east” is, as the author points out, the hardest thing in the book, a sly travel account purporting to be written by a Victorian hooray which makes for spectacularly funny reading. Jonathan Raban has described the narrator as having the “sensibility of someone who is a close blood-relative of Flashman”: witness his thoroughly waspish account of a meeting with Lady Hester Stanhope. Typical, too, is his insouciance towards the plague in Cairo, which claims his heroic doctor while the narrator survives unmoved.

    9. A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

    The three volumes of his magisterial history, boiled down into one, may seem too condensed at times, but Norwich deftly and entertainingly outlines the often outrageous story of an empire that lasted 1,123 years and 18 days. It is as good on Byzantine art and church matters as on the peccadilloes of the emperors – and their triumphs.

    10. Rebel Land by Christopher de Bellaigue

    Caught up in a journalistic furore after his mention of the Armenian massacres that occurred in the dying days of the Ottoman empire, Bellaigue decided to find out for himself what may have happened. He settled on – and in – the town of Varto, which once had a huge Armenian population. Without delivering any final answers, Bellaigue’s beautifully written account of his experiences with locals, secret policemen and even exiles still sheds light on this intractable issue, if only to illuminate the complexity of the situation both then and now.