Cover story

It's a wonderfully weird world

Gurbuz Dogan Eksioglu's wit and graphic sensibility won over the Big Apple when his cartoon was chosen for the cover of The New Yorker on the anniversary of 9/11. Yet he has only spent a month in their city, without time even to visit the Empire State Building. But irony is central to his life as well as his art, Andrew Finkel discovers.

Order the catalogue of the exhibition at the Mili Reasurans Art Gallery, Istanbul

Ankara's Palaces of Diplomacy

Part 1:
Ataturk's Ankara
by Patricia Daunt


How the diplomatic world dragged itself away from Istanbul and settled in the new capital..

A new capital called for new architecture. Ankara in the 1920s and 1930s produced a fascinating diversity of styes as the foreign powers decided to abandon their buildings on the Bosphorus and set up a new. Patricia Daunt, who came to know the embassies when her husband served as British envoy in the late 1980s, picks her favourites, while Fritz von der Schulenburg captures them on camera.

 

Cornucopia 5 and Cornucopia 6 for Patricia Daunt on the embassies of Ottoman Istanbul, photographed by Fritz von der Schulenburg
Palaces of Diplomacy Three Issue Special Offer

The photographs by Othmar Pferschy in this article are from the Istanbul Modern catalogue and were the subject of the cover story in Cornucopia 35

Part 2:
The Embassies
by Patricia Daunt

The French Embassy in Ankara
Monumental modernism

The British Embassy in Ankara
A delightfully English house

The Italian Embassy in Ankara
Easy grandeur behind a formal façade

Also featured:

The Belgian, Russian, Polish, Austrian, German, Hungarian and Swiss embassies.

Part 3:
Diplomacy in Ankara

Birth of a Nation
by Norman Stone

Ankara, when it became Turkey's capital was a very sleepy and provincial place, and it was chosen because it was on the way to somewhere else. It had a railway station, one of the stopovers of the German-planned Berlin-Baghdad line, and its buffet served as the first French embassy. However, when the first Excellency put his head out of the swing doors, he contemplated a marsh, with some ruins on a hill, and when the First British Excellency arrived, to have dinner with the President, he would have to pick his white-tied way through snow-drifts, being careful to avoid being eaten by a wolf or a Turkish feminist....

George Maw 1832-1912

The passions of a Victorian enthusiast
by Martyn and Alison Rix

Illustrations courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the Irongorge Museums

Full list of botany features in Cornucopia

The Phrygian Highlands

The land that Midas touched
by David Barchard
with photographs by Fritz von der Schulenburg

Phrygia, in western Anatolia, was once one of the most poweful kingdoms in the Near East - home to Midas, Gordius and Alcibiades. Today the remnants of their lives litter this forgotten landscape.

Map by Susana Hickling

Cookery

Melons
The sweet taste of summer
Text and photographs by Berrin Torolsan

What would summer be without fragrant melons and their honeyed, juicy, cooling flesh?

Recipes include Mehmet Kamil Efendi's Kavun Dolmasi (baked melon stuffed with Nuts and Lamb).....

Cookery features and recipes in every issue of Cornucopia.

Recipe index

Seasonal menus
 

Books
 

The story of the smiling camel
Nomads in Anatolia by Harald Boehmer,
reviewed by Robert Chenciner

Plus
Travels in Thrace and the Dark Arts of diplomacy

Out of the Shadows
David Barchard reviews
Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865-1939)
by GR Berridge

Travels in no-man's-land
Heath Lowry reviews
The Byzantine Monuments of theEvros/Meric River Valley
by Robert Ousterhout and Charalombos Bakirtzis'
 

Nomads in Anatolia

Connoisseur

Bold and Bright

Kicking off with Alev Ebuzzaya Siesbe's punchy flask, a special 10-page conoisseur round up f sales and exhibitions, with contributions from John Carswell and Daniel Shaffer

Turkish Delight: Turkish Design

Regular features

Village Voices:
Azize Ethem's Iznik diary
 

Restaurants:
Andrew Finkel; in Alanya and Istanbul

Arts:
David Elliot's Turkish arts round up