Marble, Light & Water

Istanbul wears three empires at once. In a single afternoon you can walk from the private rooms of the Ottoman sultans into a church that stood for nine hundred years before it became a mosque, then cross a Roman racecourse to the Blue Mosque.

Go down a flight of stairs a few steps from Hagia Sophia and you are standing in a sixth-century reservoir, among hundreds of columns rising out of still water. A day's drive south, a marble street still runs down a valley to the façade of the Library of Celsus. Inland, hot springs have spent thousands of years building a hillside of white stone.

Marble, Light & Water follows a thirteen-day journey through Türkiye in about 250 photographs and fourteen chapters. Each chapter covers one place, usually in one day, and is arranged hour by hour in the order it was walked. The history comes from the information panels at each site and museum. Where the record is uncertain, the book says so.

This book is for anyone who has walked these places and wants to remember them properly, anyone planning to go, and anyone who would rather walk through them for a while from an armchair.

It is not a guidebook, and it does not pretend to be one. It is an honest record of what two travellers saw over thirteen days, with the history behind every stop.