Recommended Reading

I recommend the colorful and attractive DK Eyewitness Travel Guides to Turkey and Istanbul because they are easy and fun to use.  They give you a brief introduction , with lots of pictures and diagrams, without a lot of details.

An extremely good book for our “pilgrimage” purposes is Anna G. Edmonds, Turkey’s Religious Sites.  Although it’s very well written and illustrated, it’s very expense (for a relatively small book), and almost unavailable in the USA.  It’s published in Turkey, but I haven’t seen it a lot even there.  If you find it, buy it – it may be your very best souvenir.  Even so, expect to pay $30-40 for it.

A very nice, compact introduction that touches bases of both geography and history is Richard Stoneman, A Traveller’s History of Turkey, about $15.

For Byzantine/Eastern Orthodox history and background, two very accessible books:

Mary Cunningham, Faith in the Byzantine World, Inter Varsity Press, $14

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, about $15.

For a beginners understanding of Islam:

Yahiya Emerick, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam, $19

Karen Armstrong, Islam: a Short History, Modern Library, $14

For the most part, however, I think time (and money) would be best spent examining the material to be found on the internet—there’s really a lot of unique and excellent stuff, FREE!  Follow the links in the “itinerary” page of our website: www.olaclaremont.org/ecw.