Levantines’ Culture of Recreation, Clubs and Princes’ Islands

4th Annual Conference of the Levantine Heritage Foundation

Büyükada

This conference explores the private lives of Levantine communities, including their recreation, games and sports, pastimes and hobbies and the parallel worlds they inhabited in their ‘out-of-town’ residences where summer months could be spent in the gentler climes of countryside or islands. The Princes Islands of Istanbul has always been a magnet for the better-off residents of the city during the summer, and Levantines were and are part of that mixture and vibrancy, giving these islands a nostalgic flavour.

This conference aims to highlight and explore the more private worlds of Levantines and the location is specially chosen to help set the atmosphere for this world centred more on family and friends rather than business and finance.