7 authors who called Istanbul home: A literary travel guide to the city

From late 1922 to 1923, American journalist, novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway was based in Istanbul, documenting the end of a five-year campaign led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk that saw the Allies ousted and Türkiye become a republic.

Hemingway stayed at the famed Pera Palace Hotel, and his reports about daily life disrupted by thousands of refugees passing through the city and troop movements on the outskirts and elsewhere painted vivid and enthralling pictures for Toronto Star readers.

Of his many novels, “A Farewell to Arms” is perhaps most enduring for the message it delivers.

A love affair juxtaposed with the horror and devastation of combat suggests it’s possible to find hope during a time of war.

Hemingway isn’t the only famous author to have called Istanbul’s home. Intellectual Orhan Pamuk, teacher Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, navy officer Pierre Loti, revolutionary Leon Trotsky, journalist Sabahattin Ali and patriot Adam Mickiewicz all lived in the city at one time or another.

Orhan Pamuk

A five-story building on an ordinary-looking street in Tesvikiye was once home to the intellectual Orhan Pamuk. This now world-famous Nobel Laureate recipient lived on the fourth floor of the Pamuk Apartments along with his immediate family, while uncles, aunts, and cousins filled the other floors. Young Pamuk first indulged his passion for photography here and later began to write novels, short stories and works of non-fiction.

“Istanbul: Memories of a City” details both Pamuk’s coming of age and a place undergoing massive change. Abandoned Ottoman mansions, narrow crooked streets and Bosphorus views form a backdrop to the clash of tradition and modernity as a new world rises from the old.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Although writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar studied literature at university in Istanbul under famous poet and author Yahya Kemal, at graduation, he took up a teaching post in Erzurum. Nonetheless, he continued to write, and in 1949, while living in Narmanli Han on Istiklal Street in Beyoglu, finished “A Mind at Peace.”

Tanpinar used the age-old story of a young man pursuing the woman he loves to critique the impact of nationalism on Ataturk’s new Türkiye. He invokes the cosmopolitan nature of Istanbul in lyric descriptions of daily life where modernity overlays tradition and his protagonist grapples with the realization it’s impossible to separate the two.

Instead, they form a synthesis unique to a particular people and place.

Pierre Loti

After his first visit to Istanbul in 1876, French author and navy officer Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, better known as Pierre Loti, was enchanted. He returned repeatedly and resided at over half a dozen addresses, but only one was still standing.

The inscription recording his stay, written in Ottoman Turkish and French above the entryway of an apartment block on Divan Yolu near the Grand Bazaar, is still visible. Loti also lived in Eyupsultan on the Golden Horn, where there’s a popular cafe named after him. The neighborhood was the setting for his love story “Aziyade.”

Loti’s Istanbul is a dreamy landscape viewed through nighttime fogs, lights dancing across the water from passing caiques and the melodious cacophony of calls to prayer echoing off a forest of minarets.

Beauties swathed in sensuous silks cast beguiling smiles from behind delicate latticework and love and passion are all.

Leon Trotsky

In summer, ferries are packed with people heading for Buyukada, the largest of the Princes Islands just off Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara. Most head straight to the beach, only stopping briefly to enjoy an ice cream. Few, if any, know that revolutionary Leon Trotsky lived in exile here from 1929 to 1933.

His former residence, a once grand house named Sevastopulo, is set on the water’s edge. Sadly, it’s falling into ruins. Nonetheless, it’s easy to imagine Trotsky finding inspiration in the lapping waves as he wrote his three-volume “History of the Russian Revolution”.

Rich in analytical incisiveness and evocative prose, it’s considered the definitive work about events that changed the course of Russian history.

Sabahattin Ali

“Madonna in a Fur Coat” is the story of a failed love affair, a struggling artist and Berlin in the 1920s where innovation and daring were the norm. It was originally penned by Sabahattin Ali, a journalist, poet and writer, as a serial, with chapters coming out at regular intervals between December 1940 and February 1941. He wrote it while housed in a tent in a military camp in Maslak.

Now hailed as a bestselling author, Ali’s career was anything but smooth. He was jailed several times, first in 1933 for allegedly insulting Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic and then in 1944. Ali was killed at the Bulgarian border in 1948 as he attempted to flee the country and his body has never been found.

Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz was a Polish poet known for his lyrical intensity and dramatic flair and for rewriting Pan Tadeusz, the national epic of the Poles. Revered as a patriot who fought for Polish independence, he was arrested and deported to Russia in 1823 while still at university.

After his release, Mickiewicz worked at different European universities before coming to Istanbul in 1855, on the orders of Polish statesman Prince Adam Czartoryski. Mickiewicz was to organize the Poles fighting with the Ottomans during the Crimean War but fell victim to the cholera epidemic sweeping through the city and died the same year.

The house where he’d lived in Dolapdere was razed to the ground by a fire in 1877, but an admirer had it faithfully reconstructed. It now operates as the Adam Mickiewicz Museum.