Tag Archives: Yashim

Win an Ottoman audiobook!

‘Astonishingly colourful and provocative history.’

Years ago I was on a train, reading The Independent, when I suddenly blushed. My heart raced. Without warning, I had come across a review by Jan Morris of my Ottoman history, Lords of the Horizons. She described it, among other things, as ‘a high-octane work of art,’ and I remember the jolt it gave me in the carriage, and the effort I made not to stand up and share my excitement with my fellow-passengers.

I suppose I am less excitable and more philosophical now, but I’m grateful to the crime novelist Abir Mukherjee for drawing my attention to a new review in The Times for the same book, in audio format. Abir’s first historical crime novel, A Rising Man, is set in Calcutta in 1921, in the days of the Raj, and if you are looking for a new historical detective series to devour, look no further. A Necessary Evil came out last year. I’ve just got my copy of Smoke and Ashes and I urge crime fans to do the same! Mukherjee is really good.

So Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, read by Grahame Edwards, is The Times on Saturday’s Audiobook of the Week, hurrah! The review is by Christina Hardyment:

Jason Goodwin specialised in Byzantine history at Cambridge in the 1980s, walked there (On Foot to the Golden Horn) in 1993 and wrote this award-winning history of the Ottoman empire in 1998. His five excellent historical mysteries set in Istanbul in the 1830s star the gourmet eunuch detective Yashim; The Janissary Tree and The Snake Stone were superbly read by Andrew Sachs. Now at last we can listen to his acclaimed history.

It is a rewarding, but challenging experience. Like Theodore Zeldin’s histories of France and Jan Morris’s accounts of Venice, Goodwin prefers themes to eras, proceeding crab-wise rather than chronologically. We glimpse such fascinating characters as Suleiman the Magnificent’s charismatic wife Roxelana (whom Titian painted), but then whirl away into art and architecture, imports and exports, religious toleration and brutal executions.

The narrator Grahame Edwards lapses after a while into a regular sing-song that makes concentration difficult. But spread out a map of the Ottomans’ vast territories, google images of their glories and persevere; this astonishingly colourful and provocative history is well worth the effort.

The reading lasts 12 hours and 42 minutes, and the audiobook is available here:

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd?asin=B07B3T42WV&source_code=AUKORWS03211890HU

BUT I have three copies of the audiobook to give away – and I’ll send the secret code to the first three people who email me at yashimcooks@gmail.com with the words LORDS OF THE HORIZONS in the title – and tell me which year Constantinople fell to the Turks.

In other news, the 2^nd UK edition of Yashim Cooks Istanbul: Culinary Adventures in the Ottoman Kitchen has arrived, and is available for a mere £12.99, identical to the 1^st edition, hardback and beautifully illustrated, with nearly 100 recipes inspired by Yashim’s own friends, travels and adventures in Ottoman lands – and in Venice, Istanbul’s Mediterranean alter ego.

The judges at the Guild of Food Writers’ Awards described it as “A highly unusual book, which blends fiction with recipes and whisks you away to this exotic world as though on a magic carpet ride. Evocative, captivating and a treat to read a book that breaks new ground in the field of cookery writing.”

It has dozens of five star reviews on Amazon. If you reviewed it yourself, many thanks!

I’m writing a weekly column for Country Life Magazine, called Spectator. It’s on the back page, above the cartoon Tottering-by-Gently by Annie Tempest, and so far it has dealt with such matters as Russians in Dorset, old ladies, evensong, Marseilles tarts, historic architecture, and power cuts. You can read back numbers here: http://www.countrylife.co.uk/author/jasongoodwin

And finally, I’m judging the HWA’s Non-Fiction Crown 2018, and dozens of jiffy bags arrived this week containing incredibly interesting-looking history books to be consumed over the next two months or so. I hardly know where to begin. If you have read and would recommend any particularly outstanding history, published in the UK in the last twelve months, do let me know and I’ll try to call it in.

‘When you read a historical mystery by Jason Goodwin, you take a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth.’ New York Times.

A Day with the Guild

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I spent a lovely day this week being inducted into the Guild of Food Writers, beginning with a lunch for new members at my favourite restaurant, Quo Vadis, on Dean St. It used to be a brothel, like anywhere worthwhile in Soho, and Karl Marx lived there, too, though I suspect not at the same time. Jeremy Lee – insouciant and ever-upbeat – is the brilliant chef who masterminds a very British seasonal menu – itself decorated almost daily by the jolly artist John Broadley.

This is what we had:

I sat beside Eleanor Ford, one half of the brilliant team who made Samarkand:

Her membership had lapsed, but then she rejoined, which gave her another lunch. There were no speeches, just friendly chatter and Pic St Loup.

Later the same day, I went to a Guild event on the subject of self-publishing, to offer a few words of encouragement to anyone thinking of going down that route. Lots of good people, fizzing with ideas. My own prescription was a pancake lens, northern light – and getting the distribution right.

To which end, copies of Yashim Cooks Istanbul, which was shortlisted for a Guild Award this year, are now available as Christmas presents for the cook or crime aficionado in your life. The reviews are almost unstintingly enthusiastic, and there is no other cookery book quite like it.

Argonaut Books have also published this Christmas’s stocking filler, a genuinely pocket sized guide to London’s holy places: The Pilgrim’s Guide to Sacred London. It takes you on five walks around the churches, stones, holy wells and forgotten palaces of London, and the reviewer for the Catholic Herald said ‘I can’t think of a better volume to have in your pocket.’

The Pilgrim’s Guide to Sacred London is out in the US in Spring, but pre-Christmas copies are available here.

Istanbul, mon amour

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Cumhuriyet Kitap, Turkey’s answer to the TLS or The New York Review of Books, recently ran an essay I wrote on Istanbul. It was translated and introduced by Selçuk Altun, whose novels include The Sultan of Byzantium. Here’s the English version, with a few illustrations added:

ISTANBUL

It was an Irishman who introduced me to Istanbul, the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats. He had never been, himself: he never got further east than Ravenna. But he thought of Constantinople as the Holy City where, for a moment in the early days of Byzantium, art and action, feeling and intellect, had been fused into a single, graspable Truth.

That is no country for old men...Yeats wrote, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.

His belief had nothing to do with Istanbul; yet the outsider’s view cannot be disqualified. Istanbul has always been, in part, a figment of the imagination. The emperor Constantine, who founded the city in 330 AD, envisioned it as the New Rome; and it was as Romans, Romanoii, that the Greek-speaking rulers of the city faced their nemesis 1100 years later. The rough Frankish knights who turned the energies of the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople in 1204 saw the city as a painted harlot; the Venetians, meanwhile, as their California. The Vikings called it Micklegard, the Great City. The Muslims, who first attacked it in 668 AD, called it the Red Apple. Osman, whose descendants were to capture it in 1453, saw the city in his dreams, and even today, on the walls of old mosques and mansions throughout the Balkans and the Middle East, you may find it wistfully represented, a city of hills and kiosks, trees and minarets rising gracefully from the water: a glimpse of an earthly paradise.Some of these illusions may even survive an encounter with the physical city, too.

The young in one another’s arms…

I first came to Istanbul on a wave of youthful romanticism, making my own Haj across eastern Europe, on foot, treading woodland paths from the Baltic to the Bosphorus. I was 26 years old. I stood beneath the dome of Aya Sofia like those ambassadors of old who said: ‘We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth.’ Outside, old men waved us to share their café chairs. The bread was dazzlingly fresh, the mackerel came off the boats, and in the Grand Bazaar a concoction of mint and chicken blew away months of dreary, Soviet-style meals. Walking across Europe was like a fairy-tale adventure; Topkapi was a fairytale palace; and the streets of Istanbul seemed tinged with gold. Of course I fell in love.

I married the girl who shared the journey: and in a way, I married Istanbul.

It was a city where you could bump your shins on history, eat well, take a ferry, ride a tram, and travel from one civilisation to another in ten steps. It took me a while to get to know Istanbul. I began like a jealous husband, raking up the past, combing through the stories people had told about her over the years. It helped that I had decided to write a book on that very subject: Lords of the Horizons, A History of the Ottoman Empire.

I wrote it to explain the Ottomans to myself. In Cracow, we saw some of the war tents captured at Vienna in 1683. In Hungary, we walked past a beautiful minaret, in a dusty town square. Who were those Ottomans? Where had they gone? I discovered there were many answers to those simple questions. For four years I immersed myself in books. There was something in the Ottoman style I liked – a gracefulness, a grandeur. As the former Yugoslavia tore itself apart, the old Ottoman settlement seemed less arbitrary, perhaps more merciful. My source for many stories was not in Istanbul, but at a private circulating library in the heart of what was once fashionable London, near Piccadilly. Among millions of books, all cloth-bound in library bindings, with stamped titles, I fell on the dusty memoirs and reminiscences of travellers and diplomats.

Some were fools. Some were wits. Charles White collaborated with Ahmet Vefik Pasha to write a three-volume description of the city in 1846. Eduardo de Amicis spent only six weeks in Istanbul, to write Constantinople (1878). They described the texture of daily life, which Istanbullu of the period seldom bothered to record. Everyone knows London, from Dickens or Sherlock Holmes: Istanbul never had that sort of chronicler. Those foreigners, amazed by everything they saw, wrote for posterity, creating prose pictures for their friends at home in an age before photography. They wrote down the mundane details of Ottoman life, and that is how I got to know Istanbul.

In time, of course, I discovered my city, not through the eyes of other lovers, but through my own. I came back three, four times every year, making new friends, visiting new places, tramping the streets of the city. My friends took me to places I might never have guessed existed, like Sinan’s bents in the Belgrade Forest. I liked ferries; forgotten parts of the old Genoese walls in Pera; hammam towels (but not hammams); mouldering hans; Istanbul Modern; smoking in taxis; and the certainty that there would be something extraordinary, memorable, perhaps invisible, within ten metres of anywhere I stood.

I liked Istanbul’s energy.

Perhaps it infected me: I started to write novels set in the city I knew from books. My detective hero Yashim investigated a coup attempt in the reign of Mahmud II, and a murder in Topkapi. Fiction gave me another way of telling an Ottoman story, another way of looking at Istanbul. The Janissary Tree won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Novel, and I felt encouraged to write more, trying to bring Ottoman Istanbul alive for readers all over the world.

One way was through the food. When Yashim wants to be quiet, and think, he goes home and cooks simple Ottoman-inspired dishes. Soon my readers were asking for recipes, and now I have collected and improved them, and added more, to make an Istanbul detective’s cookbook: Yashim Cooks Istanbul. So even when I am not in Istanbul, I can taste the city, and dream. It always was, partly, a figment of the imagination.

Yashim Cooks Istanbul Storms US Charts!

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You may imagine how thrilled I was to wake up to a fabulous piece about Yashim’s cook book on America’s number one radio show, Morning Edition. They gave it the great title: “Popular Detective Series Gets Its Own Cookbook” which is succinct, accurate and somehow funny. Very professional.

We did the interview about a month back, with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR, in my sister’s kitchen in London. Garlic, pumpkin AND fuzzy microphone.

The interview isn’t without its own drama, either – do listen to the 4 minute broadcast (and check out a few recipes) via this link:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/11/15/501588281/assassins-steak-tartare-popular-detective-series-gets-its-own-cookbook

Anyway, it’s a really generous launch present and immediately sent the book skimming up the Amazon rankings into the top 300: heady stuff for a 19th century Ottoman sleuth. Best of all, though, is the feedback from people who have started cooking from the book.

Signed copies are still available via this link: http://bit.ly/2c7fkIU and we’ll be using an express route to ship to the States, too.

Yashim Cooks Istanbul

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A Yashim cookery book would be an appetising prospect.
The Guardian

Here is the cover design for YASHIM COOKS ISTANBUL, featuring the recipes used by Yashim, my Ottoman investigator, over the course of his five published adventures. They range from light meze to serious dishes, pilafs, puddings, pastries and pickles, imbued with Ottoman flavours.

So many of you urged me to write this book. It has meant a lot of testing and experimentation. So nettle pilaf didn’t make the cut; nor did Priest’s Stew, a beef daube with vinegar backnotes. Good, but not that good – but wait till you try the sensational beetroot pilaf! And please let me know what you think of the cover.

One of the great things about the book is that it allows me to take control, seeing it through from conception to design to edit to print. I’ve had some brilliant professional assistance, especially on design and editing. I’m talking to several printers, in the UK, China and Italy and – whoever gets the job – the book is going to be a feast. It will be a hard case book of 224 pages, full colour throughout, on tactile, bulky, offset woodfree paper. Head and tail bands, gorgeous endpapers. Final details to be decided.

As well as illustrating the recipes we have studded the book with stunning visual references that put Yashim’s Istanbul on display – Ottoman costume, street scenes, some really early photographs. The recipes are interlaced with scenes from the Yashim books which deal with food. The recipes themselves aren’t complex and they don’t need to you to go out and find wildly exotic ingredients. Turkish food isn’t like that – it’s more about warm spices, nuts, vegetable dishes, pilafs. There are recipes for lamb and fish, lots of salads, and little meze for snacks or starters. If you know Istanbul, you’ll know it’s about freshness, things in season, and sometimes the simplest things being the most delicious.

The official launch date for publication is October 27th.

Meanwhile I’m going to keep in closer touch with Yashim’s readers by sending out the occasional email. Letters are, frankly, more my style. If you’d like to receive them, just subscribe here.

Saving Istanbul’s unique urban farms

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Istanbul’s 1500-year old market gardens are on the brink of destruction – to make a park.

Istanbul’s massive city walls stretch seven miles across the Istanbul peninsula like a collar, from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. They were built in the fifth century when Constantinople was still young, double walls of stone with bands of red brick, regularly punctuated by crenelated towers. For centuries they successfully defied the enemies of Byzantium, resisting over thirty sieges before succumbing in 1204 to a Crusader army, and to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. They are what city walls should be, vast and forbidding, the model for castles in far-off Wales, and a thousand episodes of Game of Thrones. Defenders have flocked to them, many have died upon them, scaling ladders have been hurled upon them, and they have been cursed and blessed in a hundred languages, in the name of half a dozen gods.

But when the smoke clears and the rubble slithers to a stop, while empires fall and kingdoms are overthrown, you may hear the persistent scratching sound that marks the passage of those walls down the centuries. It is the sound of mattock and hoe on soil, the sound of untold generations of gardeners planting seed in the shadow of the city walls. Even today, peering down from the ruined towers of Yedikule, it is thrilling and sobering to see the little plots of lettuces and onion shoots, leeks and radishes, rolling away from you in a green ribbon as far as the eye can see. Like the walls, these little gardens have survived right down from the days of the Byzantines to our own, and Yashim, I imagine, strolled here, and bought an oka of fresh tomatoes from the gardeners of his day.

Actually, the gardens have lasted better. The walls were kept up until the early 19^th century, and then allowed to decline. For much of their length they are crumbling, and in places they have suffered the indignity of being bulldozed aside to accommodate more roads, in a city that has ballooned from 2 million to 16 million inhabitants in twenty years. The walls no longer enclose the city, as it marches away across the hills towards the airport, and Thrace, devouring and disembowelling the landscape with structures more massive – and unquestionably more repellent – than anything the fifth century could conceive.

The line of the walls, shaded with green, visibly encloses old – crowded – Istanbul

The gardens have flourished, while the stone decays. If you are in a philosophical mood, you might see the counterpoint between the walls and the gardens, between these two currents of human activity, as positively Ozymandean. Up there, the ravages of war and conflict, and the gestures of pride; down here, quiet digging and planting, and basketloads of edible leaves. The lettuce of Yedikule is famous across Istanbul. The two, as ever, march side by side.

The Yedikule market gardens in the 1880s

But not for very much longer, if Istanbul’s mayor has his way. For some years we’ve been hearing about a plan to turn the market gardens of Yedikule into a park. There would be lighting, and landscaping, and a pool. There would be paths, and swings. A scruffy and essentially unregulated zone that has scarcely changed in fifteen hundred years would be Cleaned Up. The plans have that air of slightly desperate sadness we have learned to expect from architectural visions: lonely trees, anonymous people, purposeless activity. And, one half-assumed, the whole thing would be put off indefinitely.

This January, contractors came to the Yedikule gardens and tore down the gardener’s sheds, where they keep their tools and seed.

That they haven’t yet – at time of writing this post – bulldozed the gardens themselves is a miracle, and may have something to do with a surge of protest led by the gardeners themselves and supported by Istanbul’s Slow Food movement.

http://www.slowfood.com/istanbuls-historical-yedikule-gardens-face-destruction/

If you can, do click on the link below and help Slow Food by signing the petition.

Save Yedikule Gardens

Yashim’s Istanbul Cook Book – a big thank you

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Yashim put out the call, and you came from Wisconsin and Istanbul, from Pakistan and California, from Europe, Asia and the Americas, generously offering to roadtest Yashim’s favourite Ottoman recipes for his Istanbul Cook Book. Soups and stews and dolma and sarma, salads and puddings and meze and fish: they have all been sampled, in kitchens from Ankara to Aberdeen. Many of you already have sent in your comments to yashimcooks@gmail.com – most of them, I’m glad to say, enthusiastic.

A well-known crime author loved the lamb and loved the beans, and will definitely do them both again.

A kindly tester took her Albanian dish to a Greek film night and adroitly avoided sparking an international incident.

A five-year old ate everything on his plate, all cooked by his grandfather!

In America a translator set aside his work to deal with the tiny fish lady, and prepared fresh tuna. He came back for more.

In Poland, two women cooked three dishes together – and took the skins off a pot of beans, for Yashim’s salad.

People tracked down urfa biber (aka isot biber) from ethnic groceries – and even on the internet.

The listings magazine Time Out Istanbul did a recipe – and asked to review the book when it comes out on July 9^th.

Somewhere in America, a tester went to the store for eggplant and only found leeks, so I offered her a recipe with leeks. When she got back to the shop she found the leeks sold out and eggplant back in stock. She made the dish (and a sensible remark about quantities) and loved it.

A surprising number of cooks sprang a new dish on friends – and were glad that it turned out so well.

Me too.

I’ve had really useful feedback, too, on quantities, and spicing, and oven temperatures and timing, all of which have gone into the book. If you don’t use metric and centigrade, I’ll be adding a dead simple conversion chart.

So I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has got involved, and hope that you had fun, and to thank your friends and families. I love these photos! Some of you are still engaged on Yashim’s behalf, so thank you: I am really looking forward to your thoughts and reactions, too.

Yashim’s fantastic chefs!

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A few days ago I sent out a call for people who might enjoy testing the recipes for Yashim’s Istanbul Cook Book. Are the instructions clear? Is the result scrumptious? Are you transported by a touch of heat and cumin seed to the shores of the Bosphorus?

: A page from Yashim’s Istanbul Cook Book

The response has been fabulous – I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who got in touch at yashimcooks@gmail.com. People are road-testing these Ottoman dishes all over the world, from Pakistan to Wisconsin, Estonia to Washington DC (hello to the Culinary Historians of Washington: CHoW!), which makes it a lovely peaceful international effort. To all those who have been in touch, a big thank you for taking part.

I’ve asked Jillian’s permission to include this great photo of a soup – she was the first to send it in. Great saucepan (and I like the book getting a light grilling, too)!

: Widow Matalya’s Chicken Soup – with a pleasantly battered copy of Yashim’s fourth adventure!

As far as I know, there are no representatives of the southern hemisphere involved yet – but I have a number of recipes yet to check over, so if there are any Aussies out there, give us a shout! And do pass the email yashimcooks@gmail.com around to your friends if they fancy getting a recipe to try: I’m not planning to close the hatch until Wednesday evening, February 4th.

Peasant bread – made with a traditional chickpea starter

You might like to know this, taken from the introduction to Yashim’s Istanbul Cook Book:

Most of the ingredients need no further introduction but there are a few spices which may be worth tracking down online or at a likely grocery shop.

I use two kinds of chilli pepper. Pul biber is hot chilli, in flakes or powder – like paprika or cayenne, the more you add the hotter the dish. Isot, or Urfa, biber, is a more subtle creature, darker in colour, made from Urfa red peppers that darken as they grow to deep purple. They are dried in the sun by day and wrapped up at night, the better to concentrate their flavour, which is slightly smoky, slightly sweet, and deliciously warm.

In the Spice Market and elsewhere you want to buy pepper in dry rustling flakes – vendors sometimes add salt and oil to make the mix richer and heavier. Nothing to worry about, just good to know. And powder will contain the seeds, while flakes are all flesh.

Sumac is now thoroughly available, made from a berry with a curiously good lemony and slightly sour taste.

A word on measures and quantities. Most of these recipes specify precise quantities, but we would do well to bear in mind the advice offered to a French chef sent into the kitchens by the Empress Eugenie, the consort of Napoleon III, when the imperial couple made a state visit to Istanbul in 1873. The quote is from my Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire.

‘The French emperor Napoleon III and his empress, Eugenie, spent a week in Istanbul as the Sultan’s guests in 1862. The Empress was so taken with a concoction of aubergine puree and lamb that she asked for permission to send her own chef to the kitchens to study the recipe. The request was graciously granted by their host, and the chef duly set off with his scales and notebook. The Sultan’s cook slung him out, roaring, ‘An imperial chef cooks with his feelings, his eyes, and his nose!’

Afiyet olsun!

Who’s Who in Yashim’s Istanbul

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We must begin with the sleuth himself, of course. Yashim is as old as the 19th century, thirty six years old when he makes his first appearance in The Janissary Tree. He is the sultan’s confidential agent, or tebdil khasseky, in succession to Fevzi Ahmed – of whom much more in An Evil Eye (Yashim No. 4). Unlike Fevzi Ahmed, Yashim can visit anywhere and talk to anyone in Istanbul… for Yashim is a eunuch. Although he can make love, he will never father children.

You want to know how that works? Then you need to read Yashim No. 5, The Baklava Club. I’m afraid that’s all the explanation I can give you here.

I don’t want to press the eunuch theme (which makes some men cross their legs), but it is a metaphor for Yashim’s role as a sleuth. All through history, eunuchs were created to serve in the palace bureaucracy – it’s true for imperial China, and ancient Persia, as for the Byzantines and their successors, the Ottomans. Without family, their interests were allied with the ruler’s own ambitions and desires, making them men a ruler could safely trust.

The Byzantines are thought to have modelled their representations of angels on eunuchs: chaste, and intercessionary, passing between the divine and the sublunary world. Above all, their role is to serve.

Angel from a mosaic in La Matorana, a Byzantine church in Palermo

So Yashim, too, serves his sultan, and the people, and the requirements of justice.

He is also a fabulous cook, preparing the Thursday night dinner for his old friend Count Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Porte, as the Ottoman court was called. He draws on the full repetoire of Ottoman Turkish dishes, many of them first elucidated in the kitchens of Topkapi Palace, where Yashim was trained. It’s this palace tradition that allows Turkish cookery to be ranked as one of the three great classical cuisines of the world. The other two are French and Chinese.

Chimneys of the kitchens at Topkapi

Turkish buns

Yashim has been well-trained. He has worked in the palace, and out of it, for a Greek merchant. He speaks many languages, and reads voraciously – French novels are a favourite, passed to him by the Valide, the Queen Mother, of whom more in a subsequent post!

Jean Leon Gerome’s finest work – Arnaut and his dog.

Yashim in the Crimea

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‘I was told you were in the Crimea.’

Yashim blinked. ‘I found a ship. There was nothing to detain me.’

The seraskier cocked an eyebrow. ‘You failed there, then?’

Yashim leaned forwards. ‘We failed there many years ago, efendi. There is little that can be done.’ He held the seraskier’s gaze. ‘That little, I did. I worked fast. Then I came back.’

There was nothing else to be said. The Tartar khans of the the Crimea no longer ruled the southern steppe, like little brothers to the Ottoman state. Yashim had been shaken to see Russian Cossacks riding through Crimean villages, bearing guns. Disarmed, defeated, the Tartars drank, sitting about the doors of their huts and staring listlessly at the Cossacks while their women worked in the fields. The khan himself had fretted in exile, tormented by a dream of lost gold. He had sent others to recover it, before he heard about Yashim – Yashim the guardian, the lala. In spite of Yashim’s efforts, the gold remained a dream. Perhaps there was none.

The Janissary Tree

The palace of the Tartar Khan at Bakhchisaray, Crimea

At the beginning of The Janissary Tree, Yashim has just returned to Istanbul, telling himself that ‘anything was better than seeing out the winter in that shattered palace in the Crimea, surrounded by the ghosts of fearless riders, eaten away by the cold and gloom. He had needed to come home.’

One irony that won’t be lost on anyone following recent developments in the Crimea is that Catherine the Great stole the territory illegally in the first place. By the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed between the Ottomans and the Russians in 1774, Crimea was to remain in Ottoman hands. Nine years later, the Russians seized it.

The harem at Bakhchisaray Palace today

The narrator Grahame Edwards lapses after a while into a regular sing-song that makes concentration difficult. But spread out a map of the Ottomans’ vast territories, google images of their glories and persevere; this astonishingly colourful and provocative history is well worth the effort.

A Yashim cookery book would be an appetising prospect. The Guardian

Afiyet olsun!

A Yashim cookery book would be an appetising prospect.
The Guardian