Results by title

The author is an old Istanbul hand who has seen it change over the years from a provincial backwater to today's vibrant metropolis. With Tillinghast as a guide through Istanbul's cafés, mosques and palaces, and along its streets and waterways, readers will feel at home both in the Constantinople of bygone days and on the streets of the modern town.

Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, sits majestically atop the plateau that commands the straits separating Europe and Asia. Located near the acropolis of the ancient city of Byzantium, this unparalleled structure has enjoyed an extensive and colorful history, as it has successively been transformed into a cathedral, mosque, monument, and museum. In Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950, Robert S. Nelson explores its many lives.

Built from 532 to 537 as the Cathedral of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia was little studied and seldom recognized as a great monument of world art until the nineteenth century, and Nelson examines the causes and consequences of the building's newly elevated status during that time. He chronicles the grand dome's modern history through a vibrant cast of characters—emperors, sultans, critics, poets, archaeologists, architects, philanthropists, and religious congregations—some of whom spent years studying it, others never visiting the building. But as Nelson shows, they all had a hand in the recreation of Hagia Sophia as a modern architectural icon. By many means and for its own purposes, the West has conceptually transformed Hagia Sophia into the international symbol that it is today.

While other books have covered the architectural history of the structure, this is the first study to address its status as a modern monument. With his narrative of the building's rebirth, Nelson captures its importance for the diverse communities that shape and find meaning in Hagia Sophia. His book will resonate with cultural, architectural, and art historians as well as with those seeking to acquaint themselves with the modern life of an inspired and inspiring building.

Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo. As invited guests, these Europeans were “intimate outsiders” within the women’s quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time, elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers.

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.

With its varied and glorious history, Istanbul remains one of the world’s perennially fascinating cities. Richard Tillinghast, who first visited Istanbul in the early 1960s and has watched it transform over the decades into a vibrant metropolis, explores its rich art and architecture, culture, cuisine, and much more in this book.

Istanbul was known in Byzantine times as the “Queen of Cities” and to the Ottoman Turks as the “Abode of Felicity.” Steeped in Istanbul’s history, Tillinghast takes his readers on a voyage of discovery through this storied cultural hub, and he is as comfortable talking about Byzantine mosaics and dervish ceremonies as Iznik ceramics and the imperial mosques. His lyrical writing brings Istanbul alive on the page as he accompanies readers to cafés, palaces, and taverns, perfectly conjuring the atmospheric delights, sounds, and senses of the city. Illuminating Istanbul’s great buildings with tales that bring Ottoman and Byzantine history to life, Tillinghast is adept at discovering both what the city remembers and what it chooses to forget.

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows. 

Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.  
 

Jennette Williams’s stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease—floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects—homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that evoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

A CDS Book
Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Photography

    Research reveals a clear connection between the legal and social status of the Jews in Palestine in the 18th century and their ties with the Diaspora. The Jews who had immigrated to Palestine in that period were mostly poor and elderly. The country was economically backward and politically unstable, which made it impossible for the immigrants to support themselves through productive work. Therefore they lived off the contributions of their brethren overseas. Taxes and fees imposed by the Ottoman rulers increased the financial desperation of the Jews in Palestine. Prohibitions against young unmarried immigrant men and women made for an unstable population largely of old men, many of whom died shortly after immigrating. Families succumbed to disease, earthquakes, and famine, but in the face of these problems, the Jewish communities in Palestine persevered.

This omnibus edition brings together Nicholas Woodsworth’s critically acclaimed Mediterranean trilogy into a single volume for the first time, allowing readers to fully appreciate the scope of Woodsworth’s search for a distinctively Mediterranean “cosmopolitanism.” Combining travel narrative, history, and reflection on contemporary lives and cultures, Woodsworth finds an intimacy, a garrulous warmth, and an extraordinary sociability as he travels from Alexandria through Venice and finally installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery in Istanbul overlooking the Golden Horn. Responding to this experience, he argues that the sea should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia, and Africa, but rather as a single entity, a place from whose coastlines people look inwards over the water to each other—for it has its own cities, its own life, its own way of being.
 

From Head-On to Murder on the Orient Express, World Film Locations: Istanbul offers a compelling look at the many films shot on location in this multicultural metropolis on the Black Sea. Central to this volume are the film industry’s changing representations of Istanbul, which have ranged from progressive cultural center to the authoritarian police state of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Evident in both in films made in the West and throughout Turkey over time, these divergent accounts are analyzed with regard to their role in continually reshaping our perception of the city. Essays explore this topic and many others, including the significance of Istanbul to the works of critically-acclaimed directors, among them Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

 

Illustrated throughout with film stills as well as photographs of featured locations as they appear today, World Film Locations: Istanbul visits all of the important cinematic landmarks, including the Topkapi Palace and the Haydarpasa train station and offers a vivid picture of this historic and culturally stimulating city.