Open up a world of Turkish inspiration with a Cornucopia digital subscription

Buy or gift a stand-alone digital subscription and get unlimited access to dozens of back issues for just £18.99 / $18.99 a year.

Please register at www.exacteditions.com/digital/cornucopia with your subscriber account number or contact subscriptions@cornucopia.net

Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital Edition

Extract

Parallel Lives

Both were ambitious men with a penchant for poetry who suffered extremes of fortune. David Barchard charts the ties between two dominant figures in nineteenth-century Turkey, the British Ambassador Stratford Canning, and the Ottoman sultan Mahmut II

  • Sultan Mahmut II, 1789–1839. Stratford Canning, 1786–1880.

On Monday June 28, 1808, when Britain was an isolated power on the edge of a Europe dominated by Napoleon, Stratford Canning, only twenty-one and technically a Cambridge undergraduate, set sail from Spithead on his first trip to Turkey. As the deputy to Robert Adair, the newly appointed English ambassador. he was embarking on a diplomatic career which would last for half a century.

At the other end of the continent, another young man sat in a pavilion in the Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The Ottoman Prince Mahmut, only one year older then Canning, had lived his entire life in Ottoman princely captivity and apparently had received only a Koranic education. On that particular day, he was probably sitting with his uncle, the ill-fated Sultan Selim III, who had been deposed by the Janissaries thirteen months earlier because of his attempts to modernise the Ottoman army. In these final months of his life, Selim – a brilliant, charming and visionary man, perhaps too soft-hearted to be a successful monarch – was tutoring the prince about the modern world in a desperate downloading of ideas about how to enable the Ottoman Empire to survive…

This six-page feature is from David Barchard’s series on 19th-century Ottoman Lives.

To read the full article, purchase Issue 27

Buy the issue
Issue 27, 2002 Sublime Simplicity
£12.00 / $15.16 / €14.00
Other Highlights from Cornucopia 27
  • The Platonic Bowl

    The pots of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye have an ideal serenity and timeless beauty, as visitors to her retrospective in Istanbul have discovered. But their cool simplicity belies the passion that goes into creating them. Alistair McAlpine met the artist in Paris.

  • Drama in the Round

    Robert Ousterhout, who fell in love with the Kariye Camii, the Church of the Chora, 25 years ago. Here he makes an impassioned case for preserving this 14th-century masterpiece.


  • Travels with Turhan

    Brian Mathew pays tribute to the late Turhan Baytop, Turkey’s pre-eminent botanist


  • Fine fast food

    Most fast food is heavy, greasy and bad for your health. Güllaç pancakes, by contrast, are beautiful organza-thin leaves, light as a feather and made from the simplest ingredients. What’s more, they keep for an age. Berrin Torolsan sees the best gullaç in the making


  • Grape Expectations

    Wine is now the most popukar alcoholic drink on the planet, says Esat Ayhan, ‘and we in Turkey are benefitting from this positive wind.’ Owner for the past twenty-two years of a fashionable Cihangir şarküteri, stocking everything from De Cecco pasta to bacon and paté, Esat Bey took the opportunity to expand its renowned La Cave wine section into an entire floor devoted to the grape.

  • Beaufort’s Hunt

    Francis Beaufort’s epic 1812 survey of Turkey’s southern coast and its classical sites sparked a European treasure hunt. It also very nearly cost him his life. By Nicholas Courtney with photgraphs by Kate Clow and James Mortimer



  • Wish you were here

    Max Fruchtermann (1852 –1918) was the publisher who took the postcard to Turkey and thereby took Turkey to the world. His cards sold by the million. Mert Sandalcı – historian, archivist and librettist – has assembled thousands of these cards into three mammoth volumes. Elizabeth Meath Baker leafs through their pages.

  • The Birth of the Big Apple

    Wild apples, with their pink or white blossom in spring, are still a common sight in Turkey. They are collected in the autumn, when they ripen, and preserved for winter.
    More cookery features


Buy the issue
Issue 27, 2002 Sublime Simplicity
£12.00 / $15.16 / 489.69 TL
Cornucopia Digital Subscription

The Digital Edition

Cornucopia works in partnership with the digital publishing platform Exact Editions to offer individual and institutional subscribers unlimited access to a searchable archive of fascinating back issues and every newly published issue. The digital edition of Cornucopia is available cross-platform on web, iOS and Android and offers a comprehensive search function, allowing the title’s cultural content to be delved into at the touch of a button.

Digital Subscription: £18.99 / $18.99 (1 year)

Subscribe now