Istanbul [antikvár]

The book you hold in your hands is the younger of a pair of "Irish twins" conceived and born within the same year at Apa Publi- cations in Singapore. It was a tough task, as the parents of any set of human Irish twins can tell you. How to devote sufficient atten- tion to the first born, while at the same time insur- ing that the sec- ond is sufficiently Hoefer Goltz "individual"? In the case of a book, the problem is made more acute when the sub- jects are a country, Turkey, which finds its richest cultural expression in its primary city, Istanbul. Somewhere in the middle of his 17th year of publishing the award-winning Insight Guide series, and with over 60 titles under his belt, publisher Hans Hoefer began toy- ing with the idea of a new series of sophisti- cated guides to the Great Cities of the world. Hoefer, the managing director and founder of the APA Publications, had long wanted to do a book on Istanbul, the Janus-faced me- tropolis that strides both Europe and Asia. A graduate in printing, book production and photography in Krefeld, West Germany, Hoefer had more than an academic interest in the city: he had first visited Istanbul dur- ing his youth as an itinerant car merchant plying the highways between his native Stuttgart and the Middle East, and, with the prospect of the Cityguide Guides on the table, and especially due to the keen German interest in the city, Istanbul absolutely had to be included. The first step to realizing the task was to find a project editor who knew the turf, and Hoefer was able to turn to Thomas Goltz, a writer and journalist resident in Turkey for the past five years who was also the editor of Insight Guide: Turkey. An MA from New York University's Near East department, Goltz has a long and variegated resume indeed, ranging from such bizarre credits as having wandered through Africa as a one- man Shakespeare show to testifying before the US Congress on the plight of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. Inundated with the . material and pho- tographs for the country-guide, he nonetheless accepted the challenge to or- ganize and edit Cityguide: Is- Nisanyan tanbul, and, tak- ing a six month leave of absence from his regular duties as a writer for such variegated publications as Business Week, Playboy and Reader s Digest, he next enlisted the help of assistant editor Sevan Nisanyan to put to- gether a new conceptual framework the book on Istanbul. After days—nay, weeks!—of "creative tension," they finally came up with the leitmotif of "the big ba- zaar"—a radical departure from all other guides to the City of the Sultans astride the Bosphorus. Goltz, who studied under Orientalist- cum-urbanologist Frank Peters at NYU, and translator of Eugen Wirth's twin studies Zum Problem des Bazaars and Die Orien- talische Stadt, undertook the leading chap- ter on the development of the city as seen through the experience of the bazaar, with research assistance from Raoul Perez, the nom-de-plume of one of the faceless observ- ers of the modern Turkish economy. Ni$anyan, a graduate in political science from Yale and an amateur historian (whose reflections on the North-East and Black Sea readers of the Turkey guide are familiar with), undertook the writing of the historical walk-around chapter on the traces of lost Byzantium. Put on your most comfortable walking shoes when strolling through the city with Nisanyan, as he leaves few stones unturned, even if hidden in the depths of the more "popular" quarters of the city. Yorgo Paseaus, currently a professor of journalism