Josephine Powell: An American Nomad by Andrew Finkel
There has been no road map in the life of Josephine Powell. As restless as the nomad tribes she followed, she has simply let things happen. But along the way, she has become a photographer and an expert on the nomads of Turkey and their textiles.
We live in an age of networking. But Josephine is a net-weaver, a nomad who has spun the threads of her very own world.
A Sarikecili Yoruk woman near Alanya in 1987 carries her young baby in time-honoured nomad fashion. She has woven the strap holding the baby herself
Josephine’s huge photograph archive (over 35,000 images), all of her collected artefacts, weavings, books and field notes have been willed to the Vehbi Koç Foundation.
Nomads in Anatolia: by Dr Harald Bohmer with Josephine Powell and Serife Atlihan
How the Hotel Lamballe became the Turkish Embassy in Paris by Patricias Daunt with photographs by Jean Marie del Moral
The Hotel de Lamballe was home to a doomed princess and an asylum for mad artists before it became Turkey’s embassy in Paris. In 1945 the young Nevin Menemencioglu came upon the elegant mansion when she was searching the city for a building where her uncle, the Turkish ambassador, could set up his mission. Patricia Daunt reveals the turbulent past behind its serene façade.
The throne-chair made for the visit of Sultan Abdulaziz in 1863, the first state visit undertaken by a reigning Turkish sovereign.
More glorious interiors by Patricia Daunt with photographs by Fritz von der Schulenburg, Simon Upton, Jean Marie del Moral , Jerome Darblay, Berrin Torolsan and Jürgen Frank.
Beyond the Euphrates Until 1950, no travellers were permitted to cross the Euphrates. Southeast Turkey was simply out of bounds. Among the first to visit when restrictions were finally lifted was the photographer Cafer Turkmen. Travelling by train, truck, Jeep and mule, he discovered a place of dramatic beauty and a way of life barely changed for thousands of years. Turkmen's pictures of this remote land, to which Cornucopia devotes thirty pages, are all the more poignant because roads would soon be built and villages of stone and adobe would vanish beneath concrete. He was the official photographer for two expeditions, led by the great German zoologist Curt Kosswig, in pursuit of two ancient species - a saltwater fish in the hills above Lake Van and the fabled bald ibis of Birecik. Here Cafer Turkmen tells the story of these groundbreaking journeys.
Read the full text Crossing the Euphrates: helmsmen negotiate the Euphrates beneath the medieval stone walls of Birecik, miraculously still intact today.
Related articles:
The Wild East, by Min Hogg, with photographs by Manuel Citak Cornucopia 24
Below: Cafer Turkmen in 1954, Leica at the ready, above the city of Urfa
Last sight of the sacred bald ibis. Mission accomplishe: bald ibis chicks nesting at Birecik in 1954. Regarded as sacrd since ancient times, the bird would return every spring to the same nest, enlarging it year by year, and heading south once the chicks were fledged. Today the species no longer visits Turkey, having lost the migratory habit. Pollution - and the Norht African taste for eating the birds - have left just eighty-five wild breeding pairs in the entire world
Painter in the palace by Philip Mansel
The pictures that fired Europe’s imagination with their visions of Istanbul and the Ottoman court are back in the cityfor the first time in more than 250 years. Philip Mansel looks at the extraordinary paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour
Fruits of the earth: the subtle sweetness of Jerusalem atichokes Story and photographs by Berrin Torolsan
There's nothing grand about the Jerusalem artichoke. The plant thrives on benign neglect, and its gnarled tubers look humle enough. Do not be decieved: its flavour is a revelation - subtle, sweet and quite irresistible.
Giritli Mustafa Naili was a boy soldier who became one of the richest men in the Ottoman Empire, ruling Crete with an even-handedness many foreigners admired. Giritli (Cretan) Mustafa Naili Pasha, painted by Luigi Aquaroni. The Albanian effectively governed the island single-handed for 25 years.
