I devised this series on “Famous Travelers to Türkiye” as a gift for the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Türkiye, as Türkiye is a country that I both dearly love and regard as my home, having lived about half of my life here. That the series is intended as an anniversary gift in 2023 for a republic founded in 1923 has also been reflected numerically in its total number of travelers being 23. Before wrapping up this series with some points both concerning its composition and inspired by it, I would first like to thank the Daily Sabah newspaper and its staff, in particular, its Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Altay and the Culture and Arts Editor Buse Keskin for their generous support that enabled me to realize this project.
The geographic boundaries of Türkiye in the series have been the borders of the Turkish republic established by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and modified by the accession of Hatay Province in 1939. I wish to highlight one point about the geography of the series here. I had the particular aim of wishing to demonstrate just how much of a vast and fascinating country Türkiye actually is. This meant that I did not want the focus in it to lie overly heavily on Istanbul. This is not due to any sense of prejudice against that city. Although I currently live in Afyonkarahisar, I lived in Istanbul for many years, and I regard it for what it indisputably is – the greatest city in the country. Also, many of the travelers in this series were drawn to Istanbul and their stay there is covered, for instance, in the first piece of the series on Mary Montagu or those of the artists Eugene Flandin and Fausto Zonaro. Yet sometimes, the criticism is justly made of the U.K. and France that they are more than just London or Paris, and it is also the case that Türkiye too is more than just its preeminent city, however magnificent it may be. My own opinion is that if someone wishes to understand Türkiye and especially Turkish history, be they Turkish or foreign, they need to make a profound acquaintance with Istanbul, but it is also equally necessary to leave that city and cross this vast country as well, otherwise, one’s perspective on it is necessarily impaired. The same is obviously true for those whose experience of Türkiye starts and ends at its picturesque coastal regions.
Thus, Istanbul is featured a great deal in this series, but it is not the exclusive destination of all its travelers, and some do not visit it. Indeed, Türkiye is divided into seven regions, and each area has been visited more than once by more than one traveler within the series. I have taken this approach to demonstrate the true scope of this fascinating country.
Historically, I wished the series to cover all the main historical eras of the land that is now the Turkish republic. If the archaeological discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, Bedrich Hrozny and Winifred Lamb are also accepted as part of the series, then it indeed goes back through the Hittites to the earliest human settlements in Anatolia. In terms of specific travelers, Cyrus the Great is the earliest, and his invasion of Anatolia marks the beginning of the roughly two-century period of Persian domination. The Hellenistic culture and Roman history of Anatolia are reflected in the pieces on Cleopatra and the emperor Hadrian. Then, the Byzantine Empire, as the later evolution of the Roman Empire, features in the pieces on Ayyub al-Ansari and Liudprand of Cremona.
In these pieces, I wished to hint at the rich history of what is now Türkiye. But as a series for the Turkish people on the anniversary of the founding of their republic, its main focus has, of course, been on the ongoing Turkish period. Nonetheless, it may have been noticed that there are more travelers to the Ottoman Empire and its preceding Turkish states than to the republic itself, and it might be thought that for a project to mark its anniversary, the series ought to have focused mainly on if not exclusively, on travelers that actually visited the Turkish republic. It is the case that in the series, only four of the travelers – Hrozny, Freya Stark, Bela Bartok and Lamb – actually came to the Republic of Türkiye, with John Dos Passos being present in the upheavals from which it emerged.
I did not focus exclusively on travelers to the Turkish republic because I felt that, were that to be done, the series would become somewhat monotone. People of the same period tend to be at least somewhat similar to one another, and this is especially true in the modern era, in which the boundaries that caused distinct cultural differences in the past have largely disappeared. Moreover, I would not have wished to produce a series that could not include that preeminent traveler Ibn Battuta or to which I could not add Edward Lear. In addition, I feel that the late Ottoman period, in particular, is the most exciting period for foreign travel in Türkiye, leading to my selection of travelers for the series.
Back in October, I took a brief trip to London and during it, I visited the British Museum. Among the books for sale, I saw one entitled “Great Cities through Traveller Eyes,” with a section on Istanbul. As I was then coming to the end of this series, I was intrigued to look and see what overlap they might have. It turned out that save for Ibn Battuta, the other travelers it covers are not included in my series. I did not cover Ibn Battuta’s visit to Byzantine Constantinople. What this illustrates is that in the drawing up of a selection of famous personages, the writer’s prejudices and predilections will be in play, especially from a field as wide as that of foreign travelers to what is now Türkiye.
For myself, I find the period of travel from around the middle of the 19th century up to the outbreak of World War I to be the most interesting. This travel in this period has that beguiling mixture of the familiar and the strange. In this period, some elements were familiar to us, such as photography, instant communication through the telegraph and luxury hotels. However, the immediate cultural differences between countries regarding food, dress and the items vended in a market remain. It was also a period in which individuals, if they were intrepid enough, could set out on their own into areas about which little was known in their homelands and be reasonably sure of an avid reading audience should they set down their experiences upon their return. My bias for this era is somewhat reflected in the choice of travelers for the series.
As for the other biases in the work, they are obvious. The series is highly Eurocentric, indeed Anglocentric, and the gender bias is clearly heavily male. However, the first commandment for a writer is “to write what you know” and to deal with the first bias first; as an Englishperson, I have long been interested in those travelers from my country or continent who, like myself, have been drawn to this most fascinating of countries. On the whole, I, therefore, know these travelers better, and as such, I feel I can write better about them. So, I make no apology for this bias. All I can say on this point is my hope that having lived as long as I have in Türkiye and knowing its language and culture, I have been able to present these travelers in a way that, in turn, makes them more accessible to a Turkish audience.
As for the number of women in the series, this too is limited through a mixture of limited knowledge on my part and surely the fact that in the more prejudicial past, it was far more difficult for women to make the journey to Türkiye than for men. However, that perhaps also helps to explain why, with the greater barriers women needed to overcome to break into the field of travel writing, those who have succeeded in doing so have tended to be of a higher quality as writers. For myself, of my top five travel writers, four of them are women – two of which, Gertrude Bell and Stark, are included in the series.
The problem for me concerning women travelers to Türkiye is not that I knew of no others than those I included, but rather that the ones I am familiar with are from a similar time period and socioeconomic background. For instance, one of my favorite travel writers I just referred to is Vita Sackville-West and she actually visited Türkiye and would warrant inclusion in the series. In addition, Rose Macaulay was also eminently deserving of inclusion within it. Nevertheless, I excluded them on the grounds that they were too similar to the three English women travelers from the 20th century that I had included, and although Macaulay or Sackville-West is better known than Lamb, I wished to include her, as I made clear, for the personal reason of her visiting and working in the province in which I live.
Regarding travelers from the wider world, I lack the linguistic abilities to do them credit. Those whom I have been able to access in translation, such as Ibn Battuta, whose translation by H.A.R. Gibb has itself long traveled from place to place with me, Saadi and Kang Youwei, have been fascinating, and I wish I could have accessed more.
As for any value this series may have, it is not for me but for its readers to determine. Here, however, I would like to close with an observation on the value that may be taken from following in print the travels of others, aside from it obviously increasing our geographical and cultural knowledge about other places.
The travels of others also better allow us to understand ourselves. For the travelers themselves, travel can be a means of escaping the distortion of the familiar and thus enable clarity of vision. For instance, in Uludere, Stark pondered why she bothered to travel at all and had the realization that “travel does what good novelists also do to the life of every day, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made clear.” This clear sight can be turned inward for self-understanding. So Stark also feels that “perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and writing too.”
And I feel that for for those who are less adventurous than Stark, a similar, though lesser, degree of self-understanding can be made from the writings of her and her kind. By reading about travelers, we can put ourselves in their place, wondering what we would have done in the situations they faced. For instance, after long and often fruitless labor at a difficult dig site, would we have been tempted, when our fortunes suddenly and unexpectedly changed, to try to smuggle newly discovered treasure out of it as Schliemann did from Troy? In the face of constant provocations or imagined slights, would we have been more patient than the irascible Liudprand of Cremona or the touchy Lord Byron? Would we have proved to have been as faithful to the fountainhead of our religion as Ayyub al-Ansari or as unfaithful to the one we loved as Pierre Loti? By getting us to ponder such questions, travel writing does not simply increase our knowledge of the wider world and our understanding of our true selves.
Writing about travel can also act as a trigger for our own memories. As an armchair traveler, I have journeyed on foot in Yemen with Tim Mackintosh-Smith, wound the waterways of Bengal in the company of Rabindranath Tagore and I am at present with Rebecca West’s magnum opus working my way down through the northern parts of the former Yugoslavia. Having not actually visited any of these places myself, my imagination paints a picture of what the travelers encounter as I read these words. Yet, the images are somewhat ephemeral, no more solid to me than the wholly imaginary places I come across in fiction, like Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gondor. Yet, when reading a travel account of a place one is familiar with, the experience is quite different. In mentally setting the scenes, instead of insubstantial imaginings, the mind produces concrete images of memory. This will happen to me when I reach Bosnia in West’s book.
Our minds have to be such that the vast majority of our memories are stored away to avoid cluttering up the mental space needed for our usual day-to-day thoughts. But a familiar name, like a webpage link, will instantly reopen these stored memories. This is one of the joys of the travel literature on places we know. When I read, for instance, Ibn Battuta in Bursa, I feel as if I am once again on the height of Tophane with the great mountain of Uludağ rising behind me and the panorama of the city and the plain extending toward the Sea of Marmara breathtakingly opened up in front of me, or when he mentions Sinop, I can see that protective isthmus that encloses the port from the capricious weather of the Black Sea. Other places in Türkiye with other travelers produce a similar result. But in addition to what these places conjure out of my memories, now, should I revisit them, I can also add the associations made through the travelers of the series, with an even richer result. The sight of the Çanakkale Straits will no longer hold exclusively military associations, but also, albeit on a less dramatic scale, I will now see Byron struggling to swim across its powerfully flowing current or Kaiser Wilhelm II proudly reveling in the 101-gun salute fired in his honor. As for other places not yet been reached, such as Erzurum, the end destination of Alexander Pushkin’s travelogue, their names remain as siren calls that can inspire us to go and see them ourselves.
The memories above are not only mental but emotive, too. For, I am sure that for those travelers who came here and fell in love with this land – the vast majority of them in the series – once back home in their own armchairs, should their eyes have alit on a familiar name from Türkiye, would instantly have felt the potent wrench of nostalgia. From that form of self-inflicted emotional pain, I am, fortunately, still unaffected, for I continue to live in this remarkable country. But should Fate decree my departure, I can easily imagine myself also somewhere far from here, turning such works as those by or on the travelers in this series to trigger memories whose fondness would necessitate their pain.
