Book Description

Exhibition book:

The 2015 exhibition at the İstanbul Research Institute, explores the İstanbul-centered travels of curious Westerners, who ventured out to the East from the 18th century onwards to quench their thirst for knowledge and discovery in their respective areas of interest.

Geographers, archaeologists, linguists, architects, botanist and clergymen all travelled across the East from the late 18th until the mid-19th century researching their particular interests.

After the Crimean War, the expedition-oriented travel that was so popular until the 1850s was replaced by a different kind of travel. The objective was no longer information gathering, but tourism.

Based on materials selected from the vast collection of Pierre de Gigord, one of the leading collectors of Ottoman-era photographs and ephemera, this exhibition sheds light on the early years of mass tourism that replaced individual journeys of discovery and transformed travel culture.