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The Fluidity of Memory

By Cornucopia UK | March 16, 2018


Katie Nadworny & Alison Luntz, 'Dreamspace 1', 2016, Pigment Fine Art Print (35mm), 50x70 cm As Cornucopia’s Online Arts Editor, I spend much of my time visiting and reading and writing about exhibitions all over Istanbul. But I am an artist as well–  a photographer working in analogue, with old...
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Praise for The Palace Lady’s Summerhouse

By Cornucopia | March 11, 2018


Congratulations to Patricia Daunt. The Palace Lady’s Summerhouse and other inside stories from a vanishing Turkey has gathered two more glowing reviews from writers impressed by the author’s rare combination of passion and precision. Patricia Daunt has spent ‘most of a lifetime exploring Turkey – as walker, rider, knower of...
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Posted in Books

A very happy Palace Lady

By John Scott | March 11, 2018

Very happy to see glowing reviews of Patricia Daunt's Palace Lady's Summerhouse this week, in The Times Literary Supplement and April edition of The World of Interiors. Yasmine Sealle, writing in the TLS (Red Brown to the Horizon)
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Portrait of an artist: İnci Eviner

Monica Fritz meets a pioneer for whom ‘creativity is power’

By Monica Fritz | March 8, 2018


A star in the international contemporary art world, İnci Eviner has done much to transform Turkish contemporary art. She spoke to me of her great hope for the future as we drank tea in her high-ceilinged loft studio, hidden in the back streets of Hasköy on the Golden Horn. If...
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Silent witness

Üsküdar’s ancient planes

By Monica Fritz | March 4, 2018


Deep in Üsküdar, up on a hill overlooking the sea next to the famous barracks where Florence Nightingale nursed the sick and the dying of another pointless war, lies the Baroque Selimiye Mosque and its garden, now stark and into the pre-spring pruning season. John Freely describes the garden as...
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Welcome to Hampstead’s careful lokanta

By Andrew Finkel and Monica Fritz | February 26, 2018


Turkish cuisine is enjoying a new wave of popularity in Britain but for the last decade residents of London’s Hampstead have been nurturing deep affection for a modest but careful ‘lokanta’ at the entrance to the Heath. Zara takes its name after the small district in the eastern province of...
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Shevaun Mizrahi

It's not for the faint-hearted but Monica Fritz finds poetry in Distant Constellations at !F

By Monica Fritz | February 24, 2018


Shevaun Mizrahi's film Distant Constellations is a poetic rendition of life, hope and dreams portrayed in two different Istanbul realities, through conversations with the elderly in the Bomonti Sisters of the Poor home and construction workers building a skyscraper next door. Mizrahi herself is of mixed descent, Turkish and American,...
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Life goes on… but sometimes badly

Monica Fritz meets Salih Demirci, director of Cano

By Monica Fritz | February 24, 2018

​Salih Demirci's first film Cano is a story of a schoolteacher named Ibrahim and his search for a missing friend, Cano. Ibrahim is portrayed beautifully by the director himself who is also a schoolteacher. A portrait of a lost man and a man lost. ​The search for a friend became...
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The unexpected Kamikaze 1989

The !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival delivers surprises

By Cornucopia UK | February 22, 2018


This week, I walked into a movie blind. The !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival is ongoing through this weekend, and I’ve been determined to catch as many film screenings as I can fit into my schedule. This time, I showed up at the cinema alone and in ignorance. I hadn’t...
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Ergun Çağatay (1937–2018)

By Cornucopia | February 17, 2018


It is with utmost sadness that we must report the loss this week of Ergun Çağatay, one of Turkey's great photographers (portrait by Ali Bayram). Ergun Çağatay captured numerous iconic photographs of the Bosphorus and Anatolia, but his most celebrated legacy will be his magnum opus, The Turkic Speaking Peoples,...
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Saving Lady Mary

Important NPG portrait needs conserving

By Cornucopia UK | February 17, 2018


The National Portrait Gallery in London is trying to raise £6,900 to conserve an important painting of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century poet and author of Travels in Turkey, which inspired many European writers and artists, such as Ingres, not least for her description of her experiences of a...
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Digital art makes some Noise

From projections to GIFs, this exhibition elevates innovative art

By Cornucopia UK | February 14, 2018


On one of these grey Istanbul winter days, I took the metro way out to Maslak to chase a rumour about a particularly bright and exciting exhibition. Spiraling two floors down in Orjin Maslak and turning a sharp corner, I entered a large white room that flickered and flashed with...
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Kadıköy’s forgotten wonder

The Kadıköy Cinema

By Monica Fritz | February 11, 2018


Slightly down the street from The Süreyya Opera house, hidden away in a pasaj cluttered with gaudy shops, is the wonderful Kadikoy Cinema, built in 1967 and in store for some unknown changes. This week you can still see Fatih Akın's latest film, In the Fade, and enjoy the cinema,...
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St Stephens on the Golden Horn

Monica’s meanderings

By Monica Fritz | February 3, 2018


The once rusting St Stephen of the Bulgars in Balat has opened its doors again after years of silence and then restoration. This extraordinary structure now gleams from tip to toe, with the Fener/Balat weekend crowds of local tourists pouring in. The church was made of cast iron in Vienna,...
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X is for…

A memorable London must-see

By Cornucopia UK | February 3, 2018


The mid-19th century Alphabet of London includes this entry, and shows the importance of the British Museum's collection from the Lycian city of Xanthos.  Elgin's marbles don't get a mention. This comes from the Bishopsgate Institute in London. Xanthos features in Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring's article on the Lycean...
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All the fun of the fair

A cornucopia at The London Antique Rug & Textile Art Fair

By Cornucopia UK | January 25, 2018


The Decorative Antiques and Textiles Winter Fair in London’s Battersea Park is in full swing, with 150 exhibitors putting a huge variety of items on display. In the upstairs mezzanine the gloriously colourful world of LARTA, the London Antique Rug & Textile Fair, spreads out its wares. Pictured here is...
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Baroque on the Bosphorus

A Sunday afternoon at the splendid Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi Yalı

By Cornucopia UK | January 17, 2018


Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi Yalı perches like a queen’s ruby underneath the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, the object of envy for casual boaters who dream of residing in summer mansions. From the back, it hides behind the stone wall that rims the main seaside road past Anadolu Hisarı. With the clouds...
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Princes Islands’ most endangered building

Europa Nostra puts the Greek Orphanage on a short list

By Cornucopia UK | January 17, 2018


The Greek Orphanage on Büyükada, formerly Prinkipo, largest of the Princes Islands, is one of 12 heritage sites shortlisted for the ‘7 Most Endangered’ programme for 2018, just announced by Europa Nova, at the start of the new European Year of Cultural Heritage. The story of the Greek Orphanage, built...
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Weekend gallery guide: Unexpected Textures

The tactile exhibitions taking over Karaköy

By Cornucopia UK | January 12, 2018


The new space housing four galleries (with one more across the way) in Karaköy allows the terrific experience of a different artistic thrill on every floor. I was struck by how many of these exhibitions don’t seem to translate to photographs; the textures and intricacies are best experienced up close....
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Antiques (and not quite): the Üsküdar flea market

Monica's meanderings (cont.)

By Monica Fritz | December 10, 2017


Uskudar's flea market is one, or maybe even the last, of the bazaars in Istanbul where a bargain is still to be found. On a Saturday afternoon the empty shops and busier workshops have a sleepy atmosphere – a shopkeeper actually remembered me from when I bought my first furniture...
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