ISTANBUL: A TRAVELLER'S READER

Laurence Kelly

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Istanbul, A Traveller's Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans.Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Süleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city's moques; and the death of Atatürk in 1938.It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan's personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

Laurence Kelly

Laurence Kelly English writer. He was born in Brussels, the son of a diplomat father Sir David Kelly and his wife Marie-Noële (née de Vaux). He was educated at Downside and New College, Oxford where he got a scholarship to study history. He first visited Moscow in 1950, where his father was serving as the British ambassador. Serving in the Life Guards, he learnt Russian and became an army interpreter. He also served in the Foreign Office in the mid-1950s. As a writer, he wrote acclaimed biographies of two important Russian figures from the early 19th century: Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Griboyedov. He won the Cheltenham Prize for Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus. He has also edited literary anthologies on Moscow, St Petersburg and Istanbul. He was married to the historian Linda Kelly, who died in 2019