The Owl’s Watchsong – A Study of Istanbul –

“Istanbul has lured travellers for centuries. The Owl’s Watchsong, by an author who lived and worked there in the 1950s, is an absorbing, intimate study of the ancient capital of the Byzantine Emperors and Turkish Sultans; not only of its Byzantine and Ottoman art and architecture (palaces, churches, cisterns, hans, mosques and the great Seragllio) and the waterways of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, but also of its daily and nightly life in street, market and bazaar, and the numerous characters he meets: merchant, actor, poet, muezzin, spiv, odalique et al. There are also fascinating accounts of life in the harem, Dervish practices, eunuchs, Janissaries, the prayer marathons of the Stylites, Turkish custom and Islamic tradition.
A new introduction puts the pas in more recent perspective.”