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Turkiye Turing ve Otomobil Kurumu (Turkish Touring and Automobile Club), Published 1989. Paperback, 269 pp.; 27 cm; text in Turkish, English, French, and German; color and black-and-white illustrations throughout; periodical issue No. 78/357.
In good condition. Glossy pictorial wrappers (a collage of world newspaper mastheads). Mild shelf wear, with light bumping and creasing to edges and corners, and a hint of peeling to the thin plastic coating at the corner tips. A crack starting at the inner gutter near the spine, but binding sound. Pages clean and unmarked. A compiled dossier of the international press's rediscovery of Istanbul in the late 1980s, gathering some forty articles from newspapers, magazines, and travel guides worldwide, each reprinted in its original language (English, German, French, Italian, and others) under a Turkish headline. The common thread is the ambitious Ottoman-revival restoration of historic Istanbul led by Celik Gulersoy and the Turkish Touring and Automobile Club, whose projects (the Yesil Ev hotel, the restored wooden houses of Sogukcesme Sokagi beside Hagia Sophia, and the Malta and Yellow Pavilions in Yildiz Park) made the club an unlikely force in heritage conservation and tourism. Contributors include the historians John Julius Norwich (two pieces) and John Freely and the New York Times correspondent Alan Cowell, alongside coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Cosmopolitan, and the major German dailies. A snapshot of the Ozal-era moment when a liberalizing Turkey, newly applied to the European Community, was courting Western attention. [From the introduction] The current issue of our magazine is devoted to articles that have appeared in the international press over the past year in which reference is made to the work of the Association. Many of the writers of these articles spent only a very short time in Istanbul, and readers will notice quite a number of errors in the description of events and even in the dates given. Nevertheless, we are printing these as they stand, without resort to such expedients as emendatory footnotes.