Description
An incomparable portrait of Turkey and its artistic heritage. South from Ephesus is Brian Sewell’s account of his winter journey from Ephesus to Side along Turkey’s Aegean coast. Sewell — Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic — first came to Turkey weary of what he called the “tyranny” of western art.
What he found surprised and delighted him: an unexpected wealth of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic treasures, from great classical ruins to remote villages where ancient traditions still live. With typically acerbic commentary, Sewell describes — not always favourably — the archaeological sites, landscapes, and people he encounters, bringing an art critic’s eye and a contrarian’s wit to everything from Ephesus’s marble streets to the winter-quiet resorts of the Aegean coast.
Essential reading for lovers of travel writing, classical antiquity, and Sewell’s contrarian eye misses nothing — the tour buses, the restorations, the tour guides — and his judgments, harsh or delighted, are never dull. the sharpest pen in British art criticism.
South from Ephesus: Travels through Aegean Turkey is Brian Sewell’s account of his winter journey from Ephesus to Side along Turkey’s Aegean coast. Sewell — Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic — first came to Turkey weary of what he called the “tyranny” of western art. What he found surprised and delighted him: an unexpected wealth of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic treasures, from great classical ruins to remote villages where ancient traditions still live.
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nWith typically acerbic commentary, Sewell describes — not always favourably — the archaeological sites, landscapes, and people he encounters, bringing an art critic’s eye and a contrarian’s wit to everything from Ephesus’s marble streets to the winter-quiet resorts of the Aegean coast. Along the way he reflects on empires risen and fallen, and on what two millennia of art can teach a traveler willing to look.
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nAn incomparable portrait of Turkey and its artistic heritage, South from Ephesus is essential reading for lovers of travel writing, classical antiquity, and Sewell’s gloriously opinionated prose — a book that could only have been written by him.
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