INTERVIEW: Author Kaya Genç talks centuries of Istanbul writing

Istanbul has always been a rich source of inspiration and a new book (reviewed in HDN here) gives a taste of writing about the city by classic names including Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Kaya Genç, the editor of "An Istanbul Anthology," spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about centuries of literary reflections on the city, the writers he included in the selection, and those he had to leave out. 

Istanbul is constantly changing, but what are some of the recurring themes that visitors have written about Istanbul over the years?

There has always been a kind of feeling of mystery - a feeling that there's a will over Istanbul that the foreign traveler could go beneath to discover something. There is a sense of discovery in most writings in the book.

One is by Arthur Conan Doyle, so there is a kind of Sherlockian quality to it. This power and how it fascinates the Western observer is a continuing theme in many of these writings.

I also picked some writings from the 16th and 17th centuries. Of course the concerns here were very different; as the ages change the observers' point of view also changes. The 19th century was the great age of Orientalism, where all information about the Orient becomes something else entirely - something much more politically important. Earlier writings look more innocent in a way, but there was a great escalation in the number of travelers to Istanbul towards the end of the 19th century. That's a period I really like to write about and explore academically. So it was fun and really interesting to read the Decadent writers visiting Istanbul from the 1870s, and how their observations were different from visitors in the 17th or 18th centuries.

I'd never actually...