Istanbul Secrets of the City Faruk Pekin Alfa Yayınları, £11

Strolling Through Istanbul by John Freely has always been my favourite guide to the city. Its academic but warm and informal approach imprinted itself on me back in the last millennium when I was a little gosling newly born to the city. Now, many decades and guidebooks later, Faruk Pekin has produced an ambitious new English-language guide. It is perhaps no coincidence that he was a student at Robert College during Freely’s time there. Describing the development of his passion for the city, he writes: “I went on walks around Istanbul with my teachers – people who loved the city.” This book, it seems, follows in Freely’s rambling footsteps.

But Pekin has a more ambitious focus. Istanbul: Secrets of the City displays a vast knowledge, accumulated over 40 years of guiding and research. It falls naturally into two parts, which could usefully have been published separately. The first 245 pages are a cultural companion exploring features of the city thematically. There is an outline history, as well as informative introductions to the geography and natural history of Istanbul. There are interesting overviews of its water systems and other topics, but other sections offer little more than lists: for example, of all the towers in the city, or of types of transport or of fruit and vegetables. For the convenience of the reader, some of this information might be more appropriately placed in the street-by-street guides that form the second part of the book.
These are arranged in 23 exhaustive and exhausting walks. We follow the tour guide as, impressively, he tells us everything we want to know about each sight, and quite a lot we don’t. Our innocent interest is frequently in danger of being buried under the weight of his formidable knowledge. The effect could be to distract from the actual physical experience of being there, were it not for the power of Istanbul to impress its presence on all-comers. As Pekin says in the foreword, “the best way of getting to know a city is to lose ourselves in its streets… to breathe it in and smell it… deriving pleasure just from being in it”.

And what better way to get lost than to use Google Maps? The directions for the walks are sometimes so complex, and the maps so small and indistinct, that it is necessary to pass through the QR code portal into that alternative Google universe. Pekin has marked the various sites on each map, but not the chosen route. As I zoomed in to identify my location, hordes of Google-approved cafés, hotels, bars and shops popped up to claim my attention, disappearing as I zoomed out. This might be an unintentional perk, offering the flagging tourist suggestions for meals and accommodation, notably absent from the book itself. As a virtual tourist, however, undertaking these walks from my armchair some 2,000 miles away, it merely compounded the annoyance of switching between book and phone. Pekin generously acknowledges John Dyson as his co-author. Dyson translated and edited the Turkish original and rewrote much of the guided-walk section. The index shows the same meticulous attention to detail. The book is suffused with Pekin’s enthusiasm and passion for Istanbul’s chaotic, multilayered magnificence. Secrets of the City will lead readers to a greater appreciation of it and further Pekin’s pleas for the preservation of its multitudinous treasures.

Christopher Trillo’s forthcoming book, ‘Once in a Thousand Years: The Great Anatolian Donkey Trek’ (Cornucopia Books, 2026), describes a journey on foot across rural Turkey in 1981