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Notes on a life in music

Christian Tyler meets the formidable pianist İdil Biret

Some 70 years after she joined the Paris Conservatoire as a child progidy from Ankara, İdil Biret’s remarkable musicianship and formidable feats of memory have by turns moved and astonished audiences. Christian Tyler sees the years melt away at Cadogan Hall. Photograph by Monica Fritz

Some 70 years after she joined the Paris Conservatoire as a child progidy from Ankara, İdil Biret’s remarkable musicianship and formidable feats of memory have by turns moved and astonished audiences. Christian Tyler sees the years melt away at Cadogan Hall. Photograph by Monica Fritz

Other Highlights from Cornucopia 59
  • Secret Chambers of the Black Eunuchs

    As the Topkapi prepares to open up parts of the palace long kept hidden, we recall the time Cornucopia was granted rare access to what remains the most secret section of all – the quarters of the Black Agas. These powerful African eunuchs guarded the Harem and controlled the finances of the hugely wealthy Queen Mother. Text by Berrin Torolsan. Photographs by Fritz von der Schulenburg

  • Eye of the Beholder

    Yildiz Moran abandoned photography for lexicography at the age of 30. But her decade behind the lens left an astonishing body of work, celebrated this year at Istanbul Modern. By Jamie Leptien


  • Adventures in the Wild, Wild East

    Robert Ousterhout spies the wonders of Anatolia through the eyes of early Western travellers


  • A room of his own

    ‘How my grandfather took Iznik to Yorkshire’ by Christopher Simon Sykes


  • The road to ruins

    Francis Russell drives the highways and byways of Rough Cilicia

  • Shepherd’s Delight

    Berrin Torolsan on the wonders of white cheese



  • Charmer Chameleon

    Described by his friend the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray as ‘a languid Lotus-eater’, the Victorian Orientalist JF Lewis travelled to Turkey and Egypt and recreated what he saw of Ottoman life in loving, exotic detail – often painting himself and his wife into his pictures clad in elaborate local dress. Briony Llewellyn looks back over a life of many colours

  • Thoroughly Modern Mihri

    Fascinated by the many faces of Mihri Rasim, Jamie Leptien asks how and why this unique artist has been ignored for so long


  • The Oldest Temple on Earth?

    Six millennia before Stonehenge, the dawn of the agrarian revolution came to the now arid Anatolian steppe – and with it came Göbekli Tepe, perhaps the first place of worship built by man. With its T-shaped columns and menacing animal carvings, it is an unacknowledged wonder of the ancient world. But who built it? And what went on here? By Barnaby Rogerson


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Issue 59, June 2019 Behind Closed Doors
£12.00 / $15.04 / 530.24 TL
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