Download or read book A Time of Gifts written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.
Download or read book The Constantinople Trilogy written by Haig Tahta and published by Germinal Productions, Limited/ Black Apollo Press. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Constantinople Trilogy, Tahta examines the momentous epoch, from 1915 through 1923, with insight and compassion. Intellectually challenging and sometimes provocative, Tahta has written an inspired literary account of a critical time too often ignored but essential in understanding the roots of contemporary European hostilities. Compellingly told through stories of personal lives, this is historical fiction at its best - humane and deeply moving. BOOK ONE of Haig Tahta's Constantinople Trilogy, April 1915, is focused around the brutal expulsion of the Armenian community from Anatolia seen from the perspective of four families. BOOK TWO. The British Occupation - chronicles the impending fall of the Ottomans, exploring the circumstances and atmosphere of the City during the British control, culminating in the defeat of the Greek army and the dramatic burning of Smyrna. BOOK THREE, End of Empire - the starting point of this final part of the trilogy is the day after the catastrophic fire that destroyed Smyrna. It follows the same characters and the fate of those forced to flee their ancestral homes, culminating in the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the once great Imperial City.
Download or read book Constantinople End of Empire written by Haig Tahta and published by Black Apollo Press. This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constantinople - End of Empire is the third and final book in Haig Tahta's marvellous trilogy set in and around the city from April 1915 to the end of 1923. It carries forward the characters from the first novel, April 1915, which explored the fateful consequences of the entry by the Ottomans into the Great War, and continued through the second book, Constantinople 1920, revolving round the Greco-Turkish War and reaching its climax in the horrific burning of Smyrna. The starting point of this final part of the trilogy is the day after that catastrophic fire. It follows the same characters and the fate of those forced to flee their ancestral homes, culminating in the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the once great Imperial City.
Download or read book Constantinople in the Age of Justinian written by Glanville Downey and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Terror of Constantinople Death of Rome Saga Book Two written by Richard Blake and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you loved Gladiator and Spartacus, you'll love the second book in the DEATH OF ROME SAGA. 610 AD. Invaded by Persians and barbarians, the Byzantine Empire is tearing itself apart in civil war. Phocas, the maniacally bloodthirsty Emperor, holds Constantinople by a reign of terror. The uninvaded provinces are turning one at a time to the usurper, Heraclius. Just as the battle for the Empire approaches its climax, Aelric of England turns up in Constantinople. Blackmailed by the Papacy to leave off his career of lechery and market-rigging in Rome, he thinks his job is to gather texts for a semi-comprehensible dispute over the Nature of Christ. Only gradually does he realise he is a pawn in a much larger game.
Download or read book Constantinople 1920 written by Haig Tahta and published by Black Apollo Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constantinople 1920, the second book in Haig Tahta's projected trilogy, chronicles the impending fall of the Ottomans and explores the circumstances and atmosphere of Constantinople during the British occupation of the city from 1920 to 1922. It carries forward the same characters from Mr. Tahta's first novel, April 1915, set in the Ottoman Empire at a critical moment following its fateful decision to join the Great War in November 1914. Olga, an Armenian girl, and Selim, a Turk, are impossibly in love. Their relationship, much more difficult and problematic than Romeo and Juliet, develops and unfolds during the Greco-Turkish War, reaching its shocking climax in the burning of Smyrna. An historical novel of deep insight and high passions, Constantinople 1920 brings to focus a time which echoed throughout the world and set in train events that would engulf Europe in flames a few decades later. Written with a rare sense of humanity and peopled with a plethora of characters, bold, sensitive, articulate and always fascinating, Constantinople 1920 is that rare novel of ideas and drama that appeals to both the heart and the intellect.
Download or read book The Fall of Constantinople written by Nanami Shiono and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman Empire did not meet its end when barbarians sacked the City of Seven Hills, but rather a thousand years later with the fall of Constantinople, capital of the surviving Eastern Empire. The Ottoman Turks who conquered the city aslo known to us as Byzantium would force a tense centruy of conflict in the Mediterranean culminating in the famous Battle of Lepanto. The first book in a triptych depicting this monumental confrontation between a Muslim empire and Christendom, The Fall of Constantinople brilliantly captures a defning moment in the two creeds' history too often eclipsed by the Crusades.
Download or read book Istanbul written by Bettany Hughes and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact. From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul -- resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City," but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a global story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities--exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. Hughes investigates what it takes to make a city and tells the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the poor and the voiceless, of the women and men whose aspirations and dreams have continuously reinvented Istanbul. Written with energy and animation, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes deftly guides readers through Istanbul's rich layers of history. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate, and authoritative -- narrative history at its finest.
Download or read book Between the Woods and the Water written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania. The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.
Download or read book The Broken Road written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick Leigh Fermor recounts the last leg of his epic walk across Europe as he makes his way through Bulgaria, Romania, and finally Greece. In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him almost a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time. The Broken Road is the long-awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prizewinning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds–in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Throughout it we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.
Download or read book 1453 the Conquest written by Beyazit Akman and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Avar Siege of Constantinople in 626 written by Martin Hurbanič and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Avar siege of Constantinople in 626, one of the most significant events of the seventh century, and the impact and repercussions this had on the political, military, economic and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire. The siege put an end to the power politics and hegemony of the Avars in South East Europe and was the first attempt to destroy Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Besides the far-reaching military factors, the siege had deeper ideological effects on the mentality of the inhabitants of the Empire, and it helped establish Constantinople as the spiritual centre of eastern Christianity protected by God and his Mother. Martin Hurbanič discusses, from a chronological and thematic perspective, the process through which the historical siege was transformed into a timeless myth, and examines the various aspects which make the event a unique historical moment in the history of mankind – a moment in which the modern story overlaps with the legend with far-reaching effects, not only in the Byzantine Empire but also in other European countries.
Download or read book Byzantium written by Stephen R. Lawhead and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 1199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to rule Although born to rule, Aidan lives as a scribe in a remote Irish monastery on the far, wild edge of Christendom. Secure in work, contemplation, and dreams of the wider world, a miracle bursts into Aidan's quiet life. He is chosen to accompany a small band of monks on a quest to the farthest eastern reaches of the known world, to the fabled city of Byzantium, where they are to present a beautiful and costly hand-illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, to the Emperor of all Christendom. Thus begins an expedition by sea and over land, as Aidan becomes, by turns, a warrior and a sailor, a slave and a spy, a Viking and a Saracen, and finally, a man. He sees more of the world than most men of his time, becoming an ambassador to kings and an intimate of Byzantium's fabled Golden Court. And finally this valiant Irish monk faces the greatest trial that can confront any man in any age: commanding his own Destiny.
Download or read book Patrick Leigh Fermor written by Michael O'Sullivan and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous pedestrian excursion from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This S.O.E. officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter of 1934 and left Transylvania in August. "A cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, this intrepid traveller published his experiences half a century later. Between the Woods and the Water covers the part of the epic journey on foot from the middle Danube to the Iron Gates. It has been a bestseller since it was first published in 1986. O'Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of their descendants and meticulously recreating Leigh Fermor's time spent among the Hungarian nobility. Leigh Fermor's recollections of his 1934 contacts are at once a proof of a lifelong attraction for the aristocracy, and a confirmation of his passionate love of history and understanding of the region. Rich with photos and other rare documents on places and persons both from the 1930s and today, the book offers a compelling social and political history of the period and the area. Described by Professor Norman Stone as "a major work of Hungarian social archaeology," this book provides a portrait of Hungary and Transylvania on the brink of momentous change.
Download or read book The Fourth Crusade written by Jonathan Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered and raped old and young - they desecrated churches, plundered treasuries and much of the city was put to the torch. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock and disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips follows the fortunes of the leading players and explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement.
Download or read book The Siege of Rhodes written by Nanami Shiono and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knighthood's Final Hour? By the early sixteenth century, Rhodes, the "Isle of Blossoming Roses," had become a thorne in the Ottoman Empire's side. Located only eleven miles from the coast of Asia Minor, the island was controlled by the Order of the Knights of St. John (later known as the Knights of Malta), former crusaders who by then had two specialties: tending to ailing Christians and pirating Muslim ships. In 1522, Sultan Suleiman I resolved to put an end to it and unleashed a force of a hundred thousand troops to beseige the island. Rhodes's proximity to Ottoman territory ensured that the Turkish soldiers would be well armed, well fed, and quickly replaced if killed or injured. Facing them was a force of only six hundred knights, fifteen hundred mercanaries and three thousand native Rhodians. In this, the second installment in The East Mediterranean Trilogy, Nanami Shiono weaves another rich and fascinating narrative around a key battle between Islam and Christendom. An inspiring portrait of nobility and courage in the face of overwhelming odds, it also offers a rare glimpse into the history of one of the most important knightly orders, one that helped establish the tradition of medical care in the West as we know it today.
Download or read book A Flame In Byzantium written by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1988-10-15 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Flame in Byzantium chronicles Atta Olivia Clemens during the reign of Justinian. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
