Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

İstanbul in Print Turkey has a rich but relatively young literary tradition. Its brightest stars tend to be based in İstanbul and are greatly revered throughout the country. Fortunately, many of their works are now available in English translation. It’s not only Turks who are inspired to write about the city. There are a huge number of novels, travel memoirs and histories by foreign writers.

Lord Byron spent two months in Constantinople in 1810 and wrote about the city in his satiric poem Don Juan .

Literary Heritage Under the sultans, literature was really a form of religious devotion. Ottoman poets, borrowing from the great Arabic and Persian traditions, wrote sensual love poems of attraction, longing, fulfilment and ecstasy in the search for union with God. By the late 19th century the influence of Western literature began to be felt. This was the time of the Tanzimat political and social reforms initiated by Sultan Abdül Mecit, and in İstanbul a literary movement was established that became known as ‘Tanzimat Literature’. This movement was responsible for the first serious attacks on the ponderous cadences of Ottoman courtly prose and poetry, but it wasn’t until the foundation of the Republic that the death knell for this form of literature finally rang. Atatürk decreed that the Turkish language should be purified of Arabic and Persian borrowings, and that in the future the nation’s literature should be created using the new Latin-based Turkish alphabet. Major figures in the new literary movement (dubbed ‘National Literature’) included poet Yahya Kemal Beyatli (1884–1958) and novelist Halide Edib Adıvar (1884–1964).