Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes (W&N, £25)
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Bettany Hughes’s sprawling, 600-page love letter to one of the most inspiring cities on earth was a decade in the making, as befits a book covering millennia’s worth of history in impressive detail. Images of Neolithic footprints, 4th-century mosaics, medieval tapestries and 19th-century Ottomans are scattered throughout the text, which starts from the first evidence of human habitation in 800,000 BC and runs to the modern republic. Wisely, she decides not to get into a spat with Turkey’s authoritarian leader.
Powerful political women—the 6th-century Byzantine Empress Theodora, for example, or the 16th-century Ottoman Valide Sultan, Nurbanu—feature in a history ostensibly dominated by sword-wielding men. Hughes does not shrink from the distasteful aspects of patriarchal power, like fratricide among the Ottoman sultans, or indeed of daily city life, such as the disease-ridden hammams. She embraces the horror as well as the beauty of Istanbul’s past, and as a result our understanding of the city is correspondingly rich.
Hughes is a meticulous historian who understands the power of stories which exist beyond historical fact—ancient myth and salacious contemporary rumour. “The settlement we now call Istanbul has always been as resonant in the landscape of the imagination as it has in real historical terms,” she writes in one of her concluding chapters.
The book’s subtitle is a reference to Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul— the three names by which the city has been known—but in actuality Istanbul’s history bleeds across terminology, ideology and the centuries of its eclectic rulers, as Hughes admirably proves.
Buy this book on Amazon
Bettany Hughes’s sprawling, 600-page love letter to one of the most inspiring cities on earth was a decade in the making, as befits a book covering millennia’s worth of history in impressive detail. Images of Neolithic footprints, 4th-century mosaics, medieval tapestries and 19th-century Ottomans are scattered throughout the text, which starts from the first evidence of human habitation in 800,000 BC and runs to the modern republic. Wisely, she decides not to get into a spat with Turkey’s authoritarian leader.
Powerful political women—the 6th-century Byzantine Empress Theodora, for example, or the 16th-century Ottoman Valide Sultan, Nurbanu—feature in a history ostensibly dominated by sword-wielding men. Hughes does not shrink from the distasteful aspects of patriarchal power, like fratricide among the Ottoman sultans, or indeed of daily city life, such as the disease-ridden hammams. She embraces the horror as well as the beauty of Istanbul’s past, and as a result our understanding of the city is correspondingly rich.
Hughes is a meticulous historian who understands the power of stories which exist beyond historical fact—ancient myth and salacious contemporary rumour. “The settlement we now call Istanbul has always been as resonant in the landscape of the imagination as it has in real historical terms,” she writes in one of her concluding chapters.
The book’s subtitle is a reference to Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul— the three names by which the city has been known—but in actuality Istanbul’s history bleeds across terminology, ideology and the centuries of its eclectic rulers, as Hughes admirably proves.
