Stamboul Sketches

Throughout the 1960s, John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd explored every alley, cove, and monument of their adopted home of Istanbul in between their teaching jobs. They created a legendary guidebook, covering 1,500 years of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, to a city that was still innocent of tourists. However, the passages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic, too indulgent of eccentric personalities, too melancholically obsessed with lost monuments, too wrapped up in the love of mid-afternoon banter, and too indulgent of musicians, dancers, gypsies, dervishes, drunks, beggars, fishermen, poets, fortune-tellers, folk healers, mimics, and prostitutes were cut from their scholarly guidebook.

Stamboul Sketches is a slim book compiled from these editorial floor off-cuts. Inspired by travelling in the footsteps of Evliya Çelebi, the Puck-like Pepys who wrote about 17th century Istanbul, Stamboul Sketches is a beautiful, quirky portrait of a city caught like a bird on the wing, "so much changed but so much the same."