Clichéd encounters in old Istanbul

?Stamboul Sketches: Encounters in Old Istanbul? by John Freely (Eland, 208 pages, £12.99)

John Freely is seen as the doyenne of travel writing on Turkey, with over 40 titles to his name. As Maureen Freely - the great translator of Orhan Pamuk - writes in the afterword to this volume, the most recent available guidebook when her father first started perambulating around Istanbul was published on the year he was born. Today, his ?Strolling Through Istanbul? from 1974 is regarded as a classic, with a place in the suitcase of many naïve tourists arriving in the city.

Recently reissued, the slim selection in ?Stamboul Sketches? was mostly written before Freely put together his oeuvre. But it captures most of what he was about: The tone is sentimental; the prose is purple; the overwhelming impression is dated rather than romantic. Towards the beginning, Freely writes that for the title he has ?used the old-fashioned name of the city, as seeming more appropriate for the atmosphere I have tried to create.? That should set alarm bells ringing. Over the course of 200 pages we get the flâneurial peregrinations of a second-rate Victorian Orientalist, dropping in at Istanbul during a 1960s version of the Grand Tour.

But Freely has a deeper historical knowledge than most. He has a particular fondness for the 17th century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, whose famous account of the procession of the Istanbul guilds for Sultan Murat IV is a constant reference point. But while Evliya?s ?Seyahatname? is full of boisterous authenticity and (often unintentional) humor, Freely?s work is terribly clichéd. Take this hummer of a passage, to be read in the quaint accent of a 1950s BBC documentary: