The Libraries They Left Behind

The Libraries They Left Behind

Constantinople, November 3, 1494The city has been Ottoman for forty years. The scholars who fled westward after the fall took what they could carry. What they could not carry remained, and what remained is what drew me here: the libraries no one thought to burn...
Constantinople and the Weight of What Was Lost

Constantinople and the Weight of What Was Lost

Constantinople, 1490sI arrived in Constantinople several decades after the fall. The city had been Ottoman for long enough that it had begun to absorb its new identity while still carrying the wounds of the transition, the way a body carries a scar: healed but not...