A fascinating exploration of everyday life in premodern Istanbul.

In Surviving Istanbul, Suraiya Faroqhi takes the reader to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, with occasional forays into earlier and later periods, focusing in particular on the city’s ordinary inhabitants. From the foods eaten and the streets traversed, to the miseries endured because of recurring fires, Surviving Istanbul illustrates a city of immigrants, slaves, artisans, and rural dwellers supplying the urban markets, with all the struggles that living in (and around) the city entailed. At the same time, Faroqhi shows, the city’s relatively young population also found ways to have fun, such as celebrating at public festivals or taking a swim in a river emptying into the Bosporus. Drawing on archival and narrative sources, with particular reliance on the impressions of Evliya Çelebi (1611–about 1685), this book offers a mosaic of daily life in premodern Istanbul.