Surviving Istanbul

448 pp, hb, b/w figures, in English

In this curation of her recent articles, Suraiya Faroqhi takes the reader to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, with occasional forays into

earlier and later periods. The city’s “ordinary” inhabitants take center stage. While epidemics and large-scale conflagrations might wreck lives overnight, the residents of Istanbul worked hard to keep alive and feed their families. From the foods eaten and the streets traversed, to the miseries endured because of recurring fires, Surviving Istanbul illustrates a city of immigrants, slaves, artisans, and rural dwellers supplying the urban markets, with all the struggles that living in (and around) the city entailed.

 However, this was a population of youngsters, who whenever possible were good at finding opportunities for fun and games, at public festivities or when taking a swim in a river emptying into the Bosporus. Using archival and narrative sources, especially the impressions of Evliya Çelebi (1611–about 1685), this book is a mosaic depicting what daily life may have looked like in pre-modern Istanbul.