Cornucopia Magazine

The CALL FOR PAPERS for the next seminar is now open:https://travellersinottomanlands.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/TIOL4-CfP.pdf

PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT of TIOL4 Thessaloniki, Greece, 21–24 April 2027. Read more here: https://travellersinottomanlands.com/next-seminar/

We are delighted to announce issue 69, An Indian Summer, is out and has been dispatched to the four corners of the world. Copies are stocked in the following Istanbul bookshops and going fast…. .kitabevi If you can’t find one in the shops anymore, either SUBSCRIBE (link in bio) and/or take a shortcut and subscribe to our digital edition. (also in the link in bio).

Our digital edition makes the most splendid gift, it includes the complete back-issue archive from 1992 and is fully searchable!

You can now find the new issue No.68, at the Cat Museum in Serdar Ekrem Cad. in Galata! Besides the wonderful ‘pin-up’ cover, there is a spectacular 36-page eloquent description of Mardin by Barnaby Rogerson, photos by Monica Fritz, Andrew Finkel tells of the amazing London Olympia Fair in 1894, book reviews by Maureen Freely and Hannah Lucinda Smith, Alexander Dawes first in a series of ‘Letters from the Islands’ and so much more. Music, film, art, restaurant reviews and even the best homemade ice cream. .db

And it’s out! Cornucopia’s pin-up cover! Get your digital subscription for a preview or subscribe now to receive it at your doorstep. Photo: Monica Fritz Words: Thomas Roueché

Andrew Finkel, author of The Adventure of the Second Wife, will be doing a hybrid presentation: ‘Constantinople in Olympia: How the nineteenth century Eastern Question was transformed by spectacle, song and dance’, at the Royal Anthropology Institute. Register if you are in London or online through the link in our profile. 👆🏽 On Boxing Day 1893, 32,251 travellers descended on Constantinople, not Istanbul’s historical peninsula, but rather a colossal replica of the city, constructed under the vast glass-and-iron canopy of Olympia in West London. For a multitude unlikely to make the journey across Europe, Constantinople in London represented the real thing. Passengers alighting at Addison Road station were invited to board a caique to ferry them down an imitation Bosphorus, through a torch-lit Byzantine cistern, into an ersatz Golden Horn. Twice daily for nearly a year, a cast of 2,000 performed Constantinople or The Revels of the East – A Grand Terpsichorean, Romantic and Lyric Spectacle, and Aquatic Pageant, in Two Acts and Six Tableaux. Orientalist for sure, the extravaganza helped reshape the popular image of the Ottoman empire at a time when the reputation of Abdülhamid II was at a low and Great Game machinations at their height. It also gave birth to other ‘Constantinoples’, from Buffalo to Budapest, and while few traces of these simulacra remain, they arguably created an exotic, indelible, fairy-tale image of the city in the Western imagination. Shaped by commerce and love of spectacle, the performances at Olympia also blazed an all too curious trail to today’s mass tourism.

The Anglo-Turkish Society are offering a fascinating talk by Ekaterina Aygun on Emigré artists from the Former Russian Empire. Not too late to book a place. Tuesday April 22nd - link in bio

Thank you and for the exceptional talk last night hosted by the Belgium consulate. His new novel, The Adventure of the Second Wife can be ordered through our website.
“A beautifully crafted book, a detective story that is also part history, part travelogue, part love letter to a city which has been the writer’s home for close on half a century… Finkel is a master guide, his prose elegant, and often elegiac”
John Murray Brown in Cornucopia magazine.
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