A true story from the Caucasus

From Issue 66

Sowing the seeds

From Issue 63

Silent Witness

The photographs of Metehan Özcan

From Issue 44

These empty homes on Istanbul’s Asian shore were once full of life, hopes and dreams. Maureen Freely studies the haunting photographs of Metehan Özcan

Memories light the corners of my mind

From Issue 52

Maureen Freely goes ‘Bosphorising’ with her father, John Freely, in search of her treasured childhood in Istanbul. Could it be that it was all so simple then?

Setting the Scene: Spirits of Beyoğlu

The European City

From Issue 51

Maureen Freely recalls the artists and writers who enlivened her childhood with their flamboyant bravado and unspoken sadness

A Brave New World

Maureen Freely on the Village Institutes that shaped a generation

From Issue 48

They were stigmatised and despised, and eventually they were closed down. But what would Turkey be today without the Village Institutes, its bravest educational revolution, and the young people they empowered? Maureen Freely tells the moving story of the institutes, the subject of a new book and exhibition

A Passion for Politics

Nâzım Hikmet

From Issue 28

Selected poems translated by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane and Talât Sait Halman

Surprising Freedom

From Issue 46

Portrait of the Artists

Feyhaman and Güzin Duran: A beautiful bequest

From Issue 42

Time stands still in the central-Istanbul house where Feyhaman and Güzin Duran, Turkey’s first recognised portrait painter and his artist wife, lived and worked for 40 years. Maureen Freely celebrates their partnership.

Snow Business

From Issue 26

Moving Freely

From Issue 25

In 1960 Maureen Freely’s family packed up all they possessed, waved goodbye to Princeton, New Jersey, and stepped out into the unknown. She had no idea why. Their destination was to her merely a name on a map: Istanbul. It was to become the place she still thinks of as home. Her father, John Freely, would write the classic guidebook ‘Strolling Through Istanbul’. More than forty years later, Maureen looks back on a golden childhood of parties, laughter and, above all, adventure

Taking to Turkey

From Issue 35

Light Years from New York

From Issue 24

American-born Carla Grissmann wrote ‘Dinner of Herbs’, her portrait of an isolated hamlet in central Anatolia, to assuage her loss when she was forced to leave at a few days’ notice. Thirty years later, she was persuaded to publish it at the moment her second adopted home, Afghanistan, was taken from her. She talks to Maureen Freely of her love of remote places and people.

Brave New Poetry

From Issue 36

A Dual Intelligence

From Issue 30

All Their Yesterdays: The Caravan Moves On

From Issue 27

All Their Yesterdays: South From Ephesus

From Issue 27

And Where Shall We Begin?

An appreciation of the architectural historian Godfrey Goodwin (1921–2005), by Maureen Freely

From Issue 34

And where shall we begin, he would ask, when he’d tired of the adults and defected to the children’s table. Then for the next few hours we would watch him drawing hob goblins in vast tableaux of tilting buildings, crashing planes, wobbling space-ships and ocean lines battling the waves.

Frozen Moments

From Issue 43

Famous for his atmospheric films set in stark landscapes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is now attracting attention with his photography. Maureen Freely leafs through the pages of a fine limited-edition album of his enigmatic, painterly scenes