Starting with a wild taxi ride into town from Atatürk airport, Tillinghast takes his readers on a voyage of discovery through the storied city of Istanbul, known in Byzantine times as the ‘Queen of Cities’ and to the Ottoman Turks as the ‘Abode of Felicity’. As comfortable talking about the distinctive and delicious Turkish cuisine as he is about Byzantine mosaics, dervish ceremonies, Iznik ceramics, Anatolian carpets, and the imperial mosques, Tillinghast illuminates Istanbul’s great buildings with stories that bring Ottoman and Byzantine history to life and is adept at discovering both what the city remembers and what it chooses to forget. Easily overlooked mosaics in the church of Hagia Sophia yield stories of a Byzantine emperor who died playing polo while drunk and an empress with several husbands. From an obscure gravestone, the author brings to life the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, when the Doge of Venice, though over ninety and practically blind, led the assault on the city.

Richard Tillinghast is a poet and author. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Republic and the New Yorker and his Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture was awarded ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for Travel Essays in 2008.


richard tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He first
visited Istanbul as editor-in-chief of the travel guide, Let’s Go, in the early
1960s. He holds a PhD in English literature from Harvard University and
is the author of some fifteen books including Finding Ireland, an introduction
to the culture of the country where he lived for a number of years. His
1995 book, Damaged Grandeur, is a critical memoir of the poet Robert
Lowell, with whom he studied at Harvard. He has written on travel, books
and food for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine,
The Irish Times and other periodicals. His poetry has been published in
The New Yorker, the Paris Review and elsewhere; Dedalus Press in Dublin
published his Selected Poems in 2009. He has received fellowships and
grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Arts Council
of Ireland, the British Council and the American Research Institute in
Turkey. With his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast, he has translated into
English selections from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, collected in a
volume called Dirty August. He currently divides his time between the Big
Island of Hawaii and the Tennessee mountains.