Turkey

Lord Byron’s death there in April 1824 created an enduring legend. But the real story of the poet’s mission to help Greece in its revolution against Ottoman Turkish rule is one of hard-headed politics, which goes straight to the heart of the country’s present-day crisis, says Roderick Beaton.

The entry of Turkey into the First World War may have extended the conflict by as much as two years. It certainly changed the country forever. Yet the advent of war was marked by confusion, uncertainty and shifting alliances, says Ian F.W. Beckett.

Seton Lloyd describes how modern research into the early Christian history of what is now Turkey has promoted an Apocryphal story from myth to reality.

Five hundred years ago Constantinople—long a bastion of the Western world—fell to the armies of the Grand Turk. G.R. Potter gives his account of how the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire finally disappeared.

The popular image of crusading is derived almost entirely from western accounts of the victorious First Crusade. Yet when historians examine Byzantine sources about the campaign a very different picture emerges, argues Peter Frankopan.

To mark the 400th anniversary of his birth, UNESCO has declared Evliya Çelebi a ‘man of the year’. His Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, is one of the world’s great works of literature. Caroline Finkel celebrates a figure little known in the West.

The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Bernard Lewis writes that the fall of Constantinople in was no “victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization.” 

Roger Crowley finds that modern European concerns about Turkey are anticipated in an article by Bernard Lewis, first published in 1953.

The building of Istanbul’s new underground railway has uncovered thousands of years of history, including the first complete Byzantine naval craft ever found. Pinar Sevinclidir investigates.

The Turkish government’s plans to flood two ancient towns with the reservoirs created by two dams are being fiercely resisted – but time is rapidly running out, as Pinar Sevinclidir reports.

Robert Johnson puts the decline of a once-great Empire into an international context.

Clive Foss looks at the way in which Kemal Atatürk rewrote history as part of his radical modernization of the Turkish nation.