Journey to Kars

By Philip Glazebrook

Book Overview

For Victorian travellers a trip to Turkey was a leap into the dark of Islam. Fascinated by their accounts of the far-flung, down-at-heel Ottoman Empire, novelist and traveller Philip Glazebrook followed in their footsteps. His destination was Kars, the city within view of Mount Ararat where the Ark was stranded. Through the old Serbian and Greek provinces and islands, through the ruined cities of Asia Minor, to Kars and then back to Trebizond, Istanbul and the Balkan capitals - this book recounts his adventures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140095330
• ISBN13: 9780140095333
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Penguin Uk
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.6" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

by far the best armchair travel book about Turkey

I'm an American who lived in Turkey for years, and I speak Turkish. I've read most if not all of the contemporary travel accounts. Philip Glazebrook gets it right. Don't worry that this book was written in the 80's. Yes, Turkey has changed since then. Turkey, especially Istanbul, is always changing. Blink, and Istanbul will have changed -- in some ways, but not others. Not the spirit. And that elusive, enduring spirit is what Glazebrook has captured here. It's true that the tourist areas are more touristy now than they were 20 years ago, but where is that NOT the case? Istanbul is a vibrant, enormous city, and tourists barely touch the surface of it. Taksim, Sultanahmet and Kumkapi are not all there is to Istanbul! The cobbled alleys are still there. The chance to lose yourself in another world, away from tourism, is still there -- just as Glazebrook describes. That said, Istanbul is extremely cosmopolitan, and I think this was also true in the 80's. It depends where you go, that's all. Glazebrook takes the trouble to explore, and if you do that you will find not only the cosmopolitan, European side of Istanbul (not all of which is overrun yet with tourism, by the way!), but also the more evocative intimations of the mysterious past. Glazebrook describes, for example, a visit to an ancient city (near Pamukkale and Denizli) which wasn't yet on the tourist map at the time of his visit. He refrains from telling the name of the site, although to anyone familiar with Turkey it is easy enough to identify. That ancient city now IS set up for tourism, but it is still a beautiful, remote, incredible place to visit. I was there in the winter, and there were only a scattered handful of other tourists -- maybe 4 or 5 in the whole site. Is this so different from Glazebrook's experience? Well, yes, and no. The site now has a museum, which it did not at the time he visited. But more to the point, there are other ancient sites still relatively undiscovered. The experience Glazebrook describes, arriving on a minibus into the middle of nowhere, discovering a ruin as if you were the first explorer to find that place -- that experience is still to be had in Turkey. You just have to go looking. What Glazebrook writes is honest, and I RECOGNIZE Turkey the way he describes it. He catches the half-and-half quality of the country, the haunting sense of the ever-present past, of the familiar mixed with the mysterious. The feeling of being very far, in a place very exotic, and yet at the same time known, welcome, and welcoming. That is Turkey, for me. Marry Lee Settle doesn't capture the feeling of Turkey at all. Her writing is cloyingly sweet. Reading her "Turkish Reflections," I see Settle's own reflection more clearly than the land and the people who are supposedly her subject. I have reason to strongly suspect she made up most of her chapter on Selcuk and Ephesus, whole cloth. Whatever you do, do NOT buy Jeremy Seal's bitter, mean-s