Category Archives: Istanbul mysteries

Order, order

Over the course of the Istanbul series of Yashim novels it’s inevitable that new readers will begin to discover them in random order – which is why, like JK Rowling, I make sure the characters are re-introduced in each book, subtly enough (I hope) that regular readers won’t be bored.

Here is the Yashim hit-list (linked to Amazon.com) in strict order of appearance:

1. The Janissary Tree

2. The Snake Stone

3. The Bellini Card

4. An Evil Eye

A fifth, provisionally entitled The Latin Reader, is currently entertaining me each day…

Image This is Gentile Bellini’s 1501 Turkish Painter, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Liking stuff – including a duck shoot

Setting up a modern online publishing venture is like picking at a loose thread: before you know it you’ve made a hole in the world wide web and all your schedules are unravelling…

Sunita, the glamorous publicity director of Argonaut Books, insisted that The Gunpowder Gardens should have a Facebook page. Then, that the page should be liked by as many people as possible. So if anyone has a minute – and why should you? – please go over to https://www.facebook.com/GunpowderGardens and click Like: apparently it’s an open sesame.

More congenially, I took Yashim’s friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, duck shooting this morning. It’s September, barely dawn, just outside Istanbul at the Çekmece Lakes, where the duck comes in from the Crimea… Both lakes have bridges built by the masterly Sinan.

Cornucopia

Many readers have written to me to say that Yashim’s exploits have inspired them to visit, or re-visit, Istanbul – where the official city guides, as it happens, recommend the Yashim series to prospective tourists, as a gentle introduction to the city’s long and tumultuous story. My thanks to them all.

If any further spur was required, then Cornucopia should provide it. Cornucopia describes itself as ‘the Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey’, and it is that and more. It is an astonishingly beautiful magazine, published quarterly, with features on everything from old Bosphorus interiors to nomads of the steppe, from attar of roses to neolithic Anatolia, very lavishly illustrated, as the brochures would say, and intelligently written.

One way to look at what it has to offer is via this link, which begins with a review of the Yashim books by Barnaby Rogerson, author and publisher at Eland Books – of whom, and of which, more in a later post.

http://www.cornucopia.net/store/books/an-evil-eye/

A browse through the website to begin with is highly recommended!

Celebrating and chronicling all things Ottoman-inspired and influenced, Cornucopia is a cross between World of Interiors and National Geographic, with a gentle Turkic twist. Tyler Brülé, The Financial Times

Anyone with £100,000 to spare? (£5 million preferred)

Speaking of orientalists (see previous blog), Sotheby’s have a sale of Orientalist paintings on April 24th in London. The link is at the end of this post.

The star of the sale, to my mind, is Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Scholar: it could be Yashim’s young friend Kadri, from An Evil Eye, continuing his studies.

The estimate is £5 million.

If it’s too short notice to free up that amount, why not John Frederick Lewis’s A Halt in the Desert?

Lewis was not the first English artist to go East, but he was unusual in settling in Cairo for ten years from 1840, where he quietly worked on his sketch books. The British were about to fall in love with the Middle East. For one thing it was actually quite easy to go there by the 1840s, so that the sort of journeys which Byron had made so much of became almost everyday. David Wilkie, it’s true, didn’t make it home: his death aboard ship was commemorated in Turner’s Peace – Burial at Sea. Richard Dadd came home only to murder his own dad, afterwards pursuing his career inside Broadmoor; but others – like David Roberts – managed to lash themselves around the sites in short order. Even Edward Lear was able to roam from Albania to Petra (‘striped ham’, he noted) and get home safely. There is a good Lear in the sale, too. By the 1860s you could visit Palmyra with Thomas Cook.

Travellers by then could contrast the warmth and personality-based governance of the Ottomans with the repressive machinery of centralised government represented by Russia. After fighting the Ottomans in the cause of Greek independence, the British (and the French) tried to prop up the Sick Man by any possible means; British forces saw off an Egyptian incursion into the sultan’s dominions in 1840 (see An Evil Eye) and, famously, fought alongside the forces of the Sultan in the Crimea; some historians go so far as to describe the Ottoman Empire as a British protectorate in all but name. Echoing the spirit of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s observations in the previous century, some observers compared eastern freedoms favourably with the industrial slavery of Victorian England.

Lewis was not alone in trying to convey the dignity of Ottoman civilisation, partly by his emphasis on craftsmanship over soulless machine products (although by the 1840s, Europeans were unwittingly cooing over Manchester cottons on sale in the bazaars of Constantinople, fully in the belief that they had stumbled over a cache of exquisite native prints). There was a receptive audience for this stuff at home. Thackeray wrote: ‘There is a fortune to be made by painters in Cairo…I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant colour, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street, and at every bazaar stall.’ Lewis, whom he championed, really did it best: he may have recycled the same stuff for 25 years after he came home, even trying the patience of Ruskin, who had first encouraged him into oils, but he did it with a shy sense of irony.

Both in The Carpet Seller and in Interior of a Mosque, Afternoon Prayer (The ‘Asr) he renders a disguised self-portrait, once as the carpet dealer, the other as an old military man about to pray, which seem to exude a private yearning for fellowship with a world he could, when all is said and done, only watch from the outside. I like this one, A Harem Scene, Cairo, for the detail:

Lewis and his wife had no children. They never went out to parties, he wrote very few letters, and after all the apparent excitement of Cairene life he seems to have lived a life of quiet and blameless activity with his brushes in Walton-on-Thames, part of which, I am sure, can be glimpsed out of the window of his harem picture. His wife modelled for some of the decorous odalisques. Called upon to speak after dinner at a gathering of watercolourists, he apparently gazed silently at the ceiling and then sat down.

Not many painters do so well.

http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2012/the-orientalist-sale#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.L12100.html+r.m=/en/ecat.grid.L12100.html/0/15/lotnum/asc/?cmp=L12100_0412_2_ECATexample/

Going Dutch (and French)

ALL parcels are exciting, but this morning’s delivery brought two thrills in one box.

Mauvais Oeil is the French edition of An Evil Eye – impeccably translated by Fortunato Israel who has been responsible for translating the whole series, published by Plon and by the French thriller house 10/18.

The cover illustration is from an 1893 painting, Les Almees, by Paul Louis Bouchard, a second rank orientalist; I suspect the setting is actually north African. Like Gerome’s subjects, Bouchard’s veer towards the sleazy… there is something about them taken from the brothels of Paris, not the palaces of the Orient.

Out of the same box, forwarded by my agent, came Het Boze Oog, translated by Auke Leistra and Atty Mensinga and published by De Bezige Bij.

It is a great picture, by Gaston Casemir Saint-Pierre, of Soudja-Sari, a character from Theophile Gautier’s Fortuno:

“I must be content with telling you that Soudja-Sari 
means “The Languorous Eye,” in accordance with 
Eastern custom which gives women names drawn from 
their physical peculiarities. Thanks to the translation 
of this significant name, which I owe to the kindness of a member of the Asiatic Society deeply versed in Javanese, Malay, and other Indian tongues, we now 
know that Soudja-Sari is a beautiful girl with a voluptuous eye, with a velvety, dreamy look.”

I think I like her best, but the whole affair requires some consideration. After all, Yashim’s world is exotic, no doubt; but it is also quite specific: Istanbul, 1839. The women of An Evil Eye are denizens of a sultan’s harem, but they are rather more than idle odalisques. They manage power; they have histories; they have ambitions.

If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have a story!

Invite your Dutch and French friends to view the blog if you think they might be interested.

Emilia Plater revealed!

Well done everyone who guessed the identity of the Polish amazon: it was Countess Emilia Plater. Born in Lithuania, raised in modern-day Latvia, she died at Kapčiamiestis (Kopciowo) in Lithuania in 1831. This is her monument.

Her extraordinary and short life is well told on Wikipedia, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilia_Plater

The first right answer came from Canada, I believe – so congratulations to falcon44! And if they want their copy of An Evil Eye, I just need an address…

Another quiz soon!

 

Not Nancy Mitford

The dashing girl whose picture I posted yesterday has been identified as – among others –  Mulan, Maria Walewska (closer), Lady Hester Stanhope, Maria Lebstuck, the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria (from The Bellini Card), Juana Galan, Lady Chatterton and the young Nancy Mitford.

No. She ain’t any one of them. And the only person who got it right so far is my sister Tabitha, who just knows a lot – but she can’t have the prize copy of An Evil Eye because she’s got one already and anyway family members are debarred from winning, as it says on the cornflake packets.

But here’s a clue or two: Stanislaw Palewski would have both known and admired her, and mourned her passing in 1831 at the tender age of 25.

Here she is, doing her thing the year she died. And that really is a clue.

Another portrait – and a quiz

One of the joys of writing historical novels, crime or otherwise, is discovering real-life characters and making them part of the story.

I’ve recently become devoted to this young lady. Note the sword, and the fly-away hair – and just begin to guess her life history!

 

To tell the truth, it all ends rather sadly, especially for Ambassador Palewski, Yashim’s old friend. That’s a clue by the way.

Any ideas? Email me secretly at jsn.goodwin@gmail.com and a copy of An Evil Eye to the first right answer: who is she?

Gentleman with – ouch!

A reader just wrote to me about her research into Turkish knives, especially the curved knives used for cutting up borek and baklava. She had prompted by visiting Aygun Bozdogan at Kalite Bicak, the little cutler’s shop between the Spice Bazaar and Rustem Pasha Mosque.

His collection is quite astonishing, from the tiniest shiny penknife that the Valide might wield to huge meat choppers for mincing lamb for a kebab. Obvious destination for a crime writer…

I did an interview with him a couple of years ago, with a reading from The Snake Stone:

Hope you enjoy this! ‘Like’ it and share it if you want…

Lady with – ouch!

One of the joys of writing is Doing Research – ie, not actually writing at all but following a hunch.

The hunch I’ve been following up today is the story of the Czartoryski family, formerly Princes of Lithuania, whose beautiful museum in Cracow contains – among many wonderful things, including full suits of Sarmatian armour, with wings – Leonardo’s sinisterly captivating Lady with Ermine.

I first saw this painting in 1984, when Poland was under martial law; and again in 1990, when I walked through Cracow on my way to Istanbul. I saw it there a couple of years ago, too, but missed it when it came to the National Gallery last Winter. Forget the Mona Lisa’s smile – this Lady is far more mysterious!

 

The Czartoryski I’m interested in is Adam (1770-1861), who was at different times Russia’s foreign minister and also President of the Polish National Government  in 1830, when the Poles rose in revolt against Russia. A little like the Georgian Shevardnadze, perhaps, who was the USSR’s foreign minister and later President of independent Georgia.

Though the Prince never went to Istanbul himself, he sent Michał Czajkowski, a trusted lieutenant there in 1842 to investigate the possibility of creating a Polish enclave on the Bosphorus, where Poles exiled after the failure of their rebellion could settle.

The remarkable thing is that Czajkowski succeeded: a village called Adampol, or Adamköy, still exists about twenty miles outside Istanbul, and people there still speak Polish. What’s more, Czajkowski stayed in Turkey, converted to Islam, and served in the Ottoman army as Sadyk Pasha, in charge of a regiment of Ottoman Cossacks.

I feel sure that Ambassador Palewski, Yashim’s old friend, must have had something to do with it all…