Stamboul Ghosts

A Stroll Through Bohemian Istanbul

By John Freely

2018

First Published

4.38

Average Rating

144

Number of Pages

4H22M

Audio Length

The Irish-American physicist, academic and traveler John Freely wrote more than sixty lively books on travel, history and science before he died in 2017, aged 90. But It was Istanbul, where he emigrated with his family in 1960 to take up a post teaching physics at the American Robert College, that turned him into a writer. His first book, Strolling Through Istanbul, written with his fellow academic Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was an instant success when it was published in 1972 and has never been out of print since. With the exception of Oğuz, so thin that he was known as The Ghost because he barely cast a shadow, everyone in John Freely's rumbustious memoir, including the author himself, is larger than life. Bohemian Istanbul was a haven for myriad misfits who found their feet in the city. Clamorous, glamorous, eccentric, cosmopolitan and frequently outrageous, they included the 'berserker' Peter Pfeiffer, a resourceful exile with three passports; Aliye Berger, the beautiful queen of bohemian Pera; the writer James Baldwin; and, fleetingly, the future Pope John XXIII. This elegy for a lost world encapsulates the flavor of their daily life and nightly excesses. Well lubricated with lemon vodka and Hill Cocktails served by Sumner-Boyd's gloomy housekeeper, Monik Depressive, the Freely crowd weave their way from the Galatasaray fish market and the taverns of CiCek Pasajı to the Russian restaurant Rejans, and frequently on to the Freely household on the Bosphorus hills, where a party will soon be in full swing and eggnog flowing freely. Stamboul Ghosts is illustrated with Ara Guler's poignant black-and-white photographs, which make of Freely's beloved city an evocative stage-set.

Avg Rating

4.38

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

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4 STARS

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3 STARS

15%

2 STARS

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Author

John Freely

Author · 20 books

John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents, and spent half of his early childhood in Ireland. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the U. S. Navy, serving for two years, including combat duty with a commando unit in the Pacific, India, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G. I. Bill and eventually received a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, followed by a year of post-doctoral study at Oxford in the history of science. He worked as a research physicist for nine years, including five years at Princeton University. In 1960 he went to İstanbul to teach physics at the Robert College, now the Boğaziçi University, and taught there until 1976. He then went on to teach and write in Athens (1976-79), Boston (1979-87), London (1987-88), İstanbul (1988-91) and Venice (1991-93). In 1993 he returned to Boğaziçi University, where he taught a course on the history of science. His first book, co-authored by the late Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was Strolling Through İstanbul (1972). Since then he has published more than forty books.