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Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital EditionThousands of glass negatives record the travels of John Garstang in search of the lost pre-Hellenic civilisation of the Hittites
John Garstang was a somewhat chaotic figure who scraped a third in maths at Oxford and once cancelled a meeting with Atatürk because he’d forgotten his suit trousers.
Yet he did more than anyone to illuminate the world of the Hittites, legendary builders and charioteers, who bestrode Anatolia in the second millennium bc, even enthusing the hard-headed commercial princes of his native Liverpool with his passion for archaeology.
Garstang pioneered the use of photography to document archaeological findings, and his 1907 survey of Anatolia and northern Syria established the full extent of the Hittite empire.
At Oxford he had been inspired by the Rev Archibald Henry Sayce to seek the great pre-Hellenic empire Sayce believed was waiting to be discovered. He was apprenticed in Abydos under William Flinders Petrie. In Egypt and Nubia he worked at 20 sites, honing his camera skills. His quest in Turkey began with a setback when the permit to dig at the Hittite capital, Boğazköy, was granted to a German team.
Undaunted, Garstang set out on horseback across Anatolia on “a grand journey… brimful of interest”. Thousands of glass negatives from his explorations, many taken by the Georgian-born Russo-German Horst Schliephack, survive, although Garstang’s Aegean and Hittite Museum in Liverpool was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War, with the loss of many valuable artefacts, including plaster casts he had made at Yazılıkaya and Sakçagözü. The images were left to the University of Liverpool’s Garstang Museum, and are the subject of a compelling new exhibition and book.
Luigi Mayer made his mark with lively, quirky scenes for the British ambassador to Constantinople, painting viziers and villagers, soldiers and servants across the Ottoman Empire. He deserves to be plucked from obscurity, argues Briony Llewellyn
London’s luminous Liotards, prayers on a shirt, bare truths in Beyoğlu, and a Biennial all at sea… Plus three lost Anatolian empires and their intrepid champions
The 18th-century Swiss portrait artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) is widely regarded as the first Orientalist. The four years he spent in Turkey from 1738, drawing and painting Western merchants and diplomats as well as Ottoman citizens, made him the first serious European artist to find his subject matter in the East.
Few statesmen of the turbulent last years of the Ottoman Empire can have held more illustrious titles – at a less auspicious time – than the diminutive Küçük Said Pasha. David Barchard looks back over the eventful and chequered career of a man of many parts.
Owen Matthews introduces our portrait of the Princes Islands, from busy Büyükada, via pretty Heybeliada, one-hill Burgaz and arid Kinaliada, to the haunting, deserted Yassıada
Besides being quite delicious, the simple broad bean is nothing short of a little bundle of magic. Rich in minerals and vitamins, it contains the chemical L-dopa, which feeds dopamine and adrenaline to the brain and body.
Since he became enchanted by the ‘Big Island’ 15 years ago, Owen Matthews has enjoyed its seasonal changes and watched its popularity grow – not least among soap-opera fans
Heybeliada is more compact and less showy than Büyükada, but just as fair
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