Following Miss Bell

In 1889 Gertrude Bell, the great British archaeologist, writer and explorer, arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on the first of many visits to what is now Turkey. Over the next 25 years, she would travel the length and breadth of the country, crossing the Tigris on a raft of inflated goatskins and taking the earliest photographs of remote corners of the country. Veteran guidebook writer Pat Yale set out to retrace Bell's Turkish adventures as one British traveller following another. Her journey took her to the site on the Syrian border where she met Lawrence of Arabia, to forgotten monasteries with solitary occupants and to villages where trilingual inhabitants recalled a more multicultural past. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with adherents of faiths that barely survive in modern Turkey, with refugees struggling to make new lives, and with myriad taxi drivers whose stories exemplify the Turkish dream. Interwoven with each other, the tales of these two women's travels evoke a Turkey of then and now that is so much more complex than its modern tourist image suggests -