The best books to make you love Istanbul

As publishers Dorling Kindersley have invented a great format, juxtaposing pictures and information in a way nobody else has ever done. The volume on Turkey is a browser’s paradise and if it doesn’t inspire you to want to visit the country and its largest city, then there’s something wrong with you. The introduction to Turkish life and the 80 or so pages on Istanbul are superb, cramming in so much knowledge but in a way that lets you skim and peruse it at your own pace, skipping about in the text, and lost in awe over the photographs of human structures and scenery. A Turkish traveler must-have!

For Istanbul the best walking guide ever. This book seamlessly conducts a visitor around the city’s sights, weaving stories from its history into street-by-street locations and managing above all else to avoid the sin of becoming boring. It makes you want to see every stretch of pavement and every building mentioned in the book. The only warning is it’s a thick paperback and you’ll want to take notes from it in advance rather than carrying it around with you.

A big fat, fact-packed but readable history of the city as it changed from Constantinople into Byzantium and finally Istanbul. This is the book that places Viking immigrants alongside Romans, Goths, Moors, Ottomans, Venetians, and so many other races in a glorious cultural stew that makes the history of most other cities seem linear and dull by comparison. 

I confess, I like food. I’m also keen to use cafes and restaurants where the emphasis is on cheap, tasty, and nutritious fare rather than forking out for establishments where a hefty bill is occasioned as much by expenditure on the decoration, linen, and silverware as the quality of the cooking. This is not a book about the westernised hotels and restaurants but about back street locantas serving lentil soup and stewed chicken with bottles of Turkish red wine or even just Coca-Cola and selling satisfying lunches for a pittance (thanks of course in part due to the impact of Turkish inflation on the exchange rate). This book is why even if you’re on a city break in Istanbul as a family you won’t need to rely on self-catering or standardised hotel dinners. There’s a wonderful English language bookshop near the Grand Bazaar that’ll sell you a copy of this book and arguably it should be every Istanbul visitor’s first purchase.

Just as reading the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters primes so many people to want to see Shrewsbury so too do the murders and intrigues investigated by Jason Goodwin’s Ottoman administrator, the eunuch Yashim, provide the same incentive to walk around Istanbul. The old city encompassed by the Byzantine walls still has so many of the buildings which feature as the 1836 setting for the first of this series of unusual historical detective novels and Yashim’s creator is so obviously both a knowledgeable historian and a great storyteller. And you are going to fall in love with Yashim and his cronies – that’s a given!