Reading list | North America

From Toronto to San Francisco, Cornucopia selects the best places to see and buy Turkish and Ottoman art, and finds restaurants with the authentic taste of Turkey. Outstanding collections can be seen at the Metroplitan Museum of Art in New York, and at the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington. There are a number of interestig textile outlets and an Antique Rug & Textile Show takes place in San Francisco and Boston every year. Visitors to St Louis may be surprised to see an Ottoman garden re-created in Missouri Botanical Gardens. The many cultural links between North America and Turkey may be traced back to Christopher Robert, the New York millionaire, who founded Istanbul's famous Robert College, the first American school outside the United States.

An historic note:  The first Turks to arrive in North America landed in 1586 when Sir Francis Drake brought at least two hundred Turks and Moors to the newly established English colony of Roanoke, now in North Carolina. With a fleet of some 30 ships, the Elizabethan buccaneer had liberated these Muslims from Spanish colonial forces in the Caribbean where they had been condemned to hard labour as galley slaves. About one hundred of them were subsequently repatriated to the Ottoman empire