The Liquid Continent - Volume III - Istanbul

£12.99

This wonderful book is part of Nicholas Woodsworth’s “Liquid Continent” trilogy, combining travel narrative, history and a reflection on the essence of life in the Mediterranean.

Volume III, the final chapter in the trilogy, sees Woodsworth go to Istanbul. As ever, he takes the road less travelled, through Albania towards the Aegean archipelago, visiting Lesbos and Dardanelles on the way to Istanbul.

Under the Ottomans, who ruled the eastern Mediterranean for 500 years, cosmopolitan life in Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was then, took a particularly vigourous and productive form, creating a web of connection and identity that is conspicuously absent in our own era.

Installing himself in a former Benedictine monastery overlooking the Golden Horn, Nicholas Woodsworth looks into the social life of a city that was once the capital of a vast and ethnically-complex empire. He meets a diverse range of citizens, from fishermen of the Bosphorus to the remnants of the port-city’s Greek and Armenian communities.

On the stage of a vital drama now being played out between modern secularism and traditional Islam, Nicholas Woodsworth finds in today’s Istanbul a city that offers solutions to the future of globalisation. Despite the seriousness of the book’s theme, he keeps his narrative lively and down-to-earth by letting Mediterraneans do their own talking, something they excel at in any case.