The Town Square

Istanbul

Basil Rathbone

• 1 min read
Istanbul
Armenian painter Ivan Aivazovsky's "View of Constantinople by Moonlight" (1846), Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.
What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores. A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery.

John Buchan Greenmantle (1916)
Jean-Léon Gérôme: "A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer" (1879)
For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all İstanbullus) making it my own.

― Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul: Memories and the City
Antoine Ignace Melling: "View of İstanbul from the Galata Tower" (1787), Pera Museum. 
Sanford Robinson Gifford "Leander's Tower on the Bosporus" (1876), Fogg Museum, Harvard.

Other Constantinoples:

Theodora
The Orientalist Painters
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