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JOHN FREELY, Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in İstanbul (London , New York, IB Tauris, 2016), Pp. 384 $18.00 Reprint. Paper.
The author of this book, who died early in 2017 at the age of ninety, was a very unusual individual and writer. He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, and served in the US Navy for two years, taking part in combat. He and his family moved to İstanbul in 1960 to reside thereafter-aside from travels to Athens, Venice, etc., that were recounted in various books. Having received his PhD in physics at New York University, followed by postdoctoral studies at Oxford, Freely taught physics at Bogazici University (Roberts College), on a permanent basis after 1993, but he was known universally through his more than fifty books, translated into various languages, that reflected his abiding love for İstanbul and its Byzantine and Ottoman past. İstanbul and its suburbs contain thousands of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments still underground. Construction of a metro had to be stopped after it ran into hundreds of Ottoman and Byzantine dwellings buried under 5-6 meters of dirt. Recently, a friend invited me to dinner at "his house" located on mid-Bosphorus, which turned out to be a Byzantine palace he had managed to discover, dig out and make his home. Freely's still unsurpassed Strolling through İstanbul lists some of these monuments that remain unknown to the general public, for Freely knew where to find thousands of ancient palaces, churches, mosques, gardens and bazaars- many in ruins-as well as the location of the sultans' abodes.
The book under review, originally published in 1999, is the best evidence of Freely's erudition and insight into Ottoman sultans' lives and the history of their palaces, including their architecture, ornamentation, festivals and receptions. It is based on letters written by the baglios of Venice, the ambassadors of England and France,...