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“It was early in April, so early in the morning that the old city of Stamboul was turning over its bed for yet another snooze, when the Oriental Express puffed into the Sirkedji Station.” This is how “The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul” stages the return of Demetra Vaka, an ethnic Greek, to her natal city of Istanbul. Twenty-seven years since her immigration to America in 1894 and 20 years after her first homecoming in 1901, the author revisited the place of her childhood when she counted Muslim girls as intimate friends, and the Sultan commanded the political loyalty of the empire’s subjects. When the Oriental Express puffed into Istanbul’s railway station, Vaka was about to be confronted with a reality of a different order. Turkey was caught in a raging war; the empire was crumbling in the mist of competing nationalisms; and Istanbul, occupied by the allies, was a city in political and cultural unrest. Vaka, by then an accomplished American correspondent, set out to investigate and report this profound transformation. More than 80 years since its original publication, the book is now brought back into circulation by Gorgias Press. When Greeks and Turks Met: Cultures in Dialogue
This effort brings into re-publication some of the best-known late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works of "harem literature" and travel literature through which Anglophone readers formed (and re- formed) their mental images of Ottoman society, a set of constructions centrally organized around that of "the harem." Authored by elite Ottoman women and by British and North American female journalists and travelers, these works both reified and challenged Orientalist stereotypes about "the East" and in particular, ideas about gender arrangements which continue to strongly shape the collective ways that people in Euro/America discursively capture their "Others." |