Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
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Narrated by:
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Bettany Hughes
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By:
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Bettany Hughes
About this listen
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 listeners 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.
©2017 Bettany Hughes (P)2017 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A vibrant, sprawling portrait of a city as enigmatic as it is historically important...Hughes' entertaining narrative style with its visual details, dramatic archaeological discoveries, and cliffhanger chapter endings allows her erudition and exuberance to shine." (Booklist)
"Impressive. In Istanbul, Hughes plays intriguing, sophisticated games with time and space.... By making unlikely connections between well-described locations and events separated by eons, she gives voice to those witchy, diachronic feelings in a spectacular fashion." (The Economist)
"Hughes is not an argumentative historian. She avoids the debates of academe. She is a wistful and impassioned cosmopolitan who has produced a challenging story." (Financial Times)
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As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history.
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Educational and Entertaining but a bit repetitive
- By PETER on 01-02-13
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Taj Mahal
- Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire
- By: Diana Preston, Michael Preston
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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While Galileo was suffering under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the 30 Years War was ruining Europe, and the Pilgrims were struggling to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for centuries dazzled all who have seen it.
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A broad perspective
- By Neil on 11-01-09
By: Diana Preston, and others
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The Vikings
- A History
- By: Robert Ferguson
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 14 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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From Robert Ferguson comes a comprehensive and thrilling history, based on the latest scholarship, that offers the definitive portrait of the Vikings.
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Good Historical Overview
- By Elizabeth Ciminelli on 04-25-12
By: Robert Ferguson
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The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
- By: Toby Wilkinson
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 18 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In this landmark work, one of the world's most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation-state to its final absorption into the Roman Empire - 3,000 years of wild drama, bold spectacle, and unforgettable characters. Award-winning scholar Toby Wilkinson captures not only the lavish pomp and artistic grandeur of this land of pyramids and pharaohs but for the first time reveals the constant propaganda and repression that were its foundations.
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Well Written and Detailed
- By Matthew G. on 01-26-18
By: Toby Wilkinson
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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The History of the Ancient World
- From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
- By: Susan Wise Bauer
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.
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An Historic Achievement
- By Ellen S. Wilds on 04-25-14
By: Susan Wise Bauer
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Lotharingia
- A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
- By: Simon Winder
- Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
- Length: 18 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe. In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany, and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.
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The Loquacious Traveler in Middle Earth
- By Doris on 11-22-19
By: Simon Winder
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Rome
- By: Matthew Kneale
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Rome, the Eternal City. Today visitors can stand on bridges that Julius Caesar and Cicero crossed; walk around temples in the footsteps of emperors; visit churches from the earliest days of Christianity. This is all the more remarkable considering what the city has endured. It has been ravaged by fires, floods, earthquakes, and - most of all - by roving armies. Matthew Kneale uses seven of these crisis moments to create a powerful and captivating account of Rome’s extraordinary history. He paints portraits of the city before each assault, describing how Romans, both rich and poor, lived their everyday lives.
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Lack of language skills an irritation
- By lmc on 07-16-18
By: Matthew Kneale
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The Nile: Travelling Downriver Through Egypt's Past and Present
- The Vintage Departures Series
- By: Toby Wilkinson
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Nile, like all of Egypt, is both timeless and ever-changing. In this audio, renowned Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes us on a journey downriver that is both history and travelogue. We begin at the First Nile Cataract, close to the modern city of Aswan. From there, Wilkinson guides us through the illustrious nation birthed by this great river.
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A Riverboat Cruise from the luxury of your phone
- By Amazon Customer on 02-20-20
By: Toby Wilkinson
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Conquistadors
- By: Michael Wood
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hernán Cortés, Francisco, and Gonzalo Pizarro, Wood describes the dramatic events that accompanied the epic sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.
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Horrific anti-European bias
- By Anonymous User on 08-30-20
By: Michael Wood
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Walls
- A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
- By: David Frye
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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With Frye as our raconteur-guide, we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed - to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone and with them effectively divide humanity: On one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves - rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America....
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A boom that will transform how you view all of history.
- By BB on 08-04-24
By: David Frye
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The Rise and Fall of Alexandria
- Birthplace of the Modern Mind
- By: Justin Pollard, Howard Reid
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Founded by Alexander the Great and built by self-styled Greek pharaohs, the city of Alexandria at its height dwarfed both Athens and Rome. It was the marvel of its age, legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual efflorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the "rebirth" of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its birthplace.
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A good listen
- By Jeffrey on 10-02-08
By: Justin Pollard, and others
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Excellent reading
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Revisiting "Helen," Two Decades Later
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A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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Terrible pronunciation
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The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic Asian antithesis of the Christian European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage.
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Great except for pronunt of Turkish names
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Venus and Aphrodite
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Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today - and how we trivialize her power at our peril.
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I've learned about Aphrodite
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A History Without People
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Excellent reading
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Helen of Troy
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
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The Ottomans
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Great except for pronunt of Turkish names
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I've learned about Aphrodite
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Islamic conquest history from the outside
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A tender gift from far away
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Upon retirement at the age of sixty-two, and grieving his deceased wife, renowned journalist Bernard Ollivier felt a sense of profound emptiness: What do I do now? While some see retirement as a chance to cash in their chips and settle into a comfy armchair, Ollivier still longed for more. Searching for inspiration, he strapped on his gear, donned his hat, and headed out the front door to hike the Way of St. James, a 1400-mile journey from Paris to Compostela, Spain.
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A cerebral quest and a physical test.
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My Name Is Red
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Overall
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Performance
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At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
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Complex and interesting
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1453
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Overall
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A well written narrative with bizarre and biased commentary
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Venus and Aphrodite
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Overall
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Performance
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Through ancient art, evocative myth, exciting archaeological revelations and philosophical explorations Bettany Hughes shows why this immortal goddess endures through to the 21st century and what her journey through time reveals about what matters to us as humans. Charting Venus' origins in powerful ancient deities, Bettany demonstrates that Venus is far more complex than first meets the eye.
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it was pretty good
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A Concise History of Turkey
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Performance
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Story
Through archaeological remains, ancient texts, and work by a new generation of historians, a picture can today be built of this remarkable civilization and their capital city. Although the city had been destroyed, the legacy of the Persians survived, even as they mostly remain an enigma to the West and are not nearly as well understood as the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians. In a sense, the Achaemenid Persian Empire holds some of the most enduring mysteries of ancient civilization.
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Waste of $5
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Istanbul
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Turkey's greatest living novelist guides us through the monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets, and waterways of Istanbul - the city of his birth and the home of his imagination.
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Lords of the Horizons
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts. For over 600 years the empire swelled and declined, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled over the Danube and the Euphrates with the richest court in Europe. But its decline was prodigious, protracted and total.
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Good introduction to the Ottomans, bad narration
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The Lion House
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire, The Lion House animates with stunning immediacy the fears and stratagems of those around him: the Greek slave who becomes his Grand Vizier, the Venetian jewel dealer who acts as his go-between, the Russian consort who becomes his wife. Christopher de Bellaigue tells not just the story of rival superpowers, nor of one of the most consequential lives in human history, but of what it means to live in a time when a few men get to decide the fate of the world.
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Amazing Magical Storytelling
- By Amazon Customer on 02-23-23
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Rome
- Strategy of Empire
- By: James Lacey
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Roman Empire lasted a solid 500 years—an impressive number by any standard. The decline and final collapse of the Roman Empire took longer than most other empires even existed. Any historian trying to unearth the grand strategy of the Roman Empire must, therefore, always remain cognizant of the time scale. Over the centuries, the Empire's underlying economy, political arrangements, military affairs, and the myriad of external threats it faced were in constant flux, making adaptability to changing circumstances as important to Roman strategists as it is to strategists of the modern era.
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Antony NOT Anthony
- By Cody Rankin on 12-14-23
By: James Lacey
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The Ideas That Make Us
- By: Bettany Hughes
- Narrated by: Bettany Hughes
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Original Recording
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Bettany Hughes reveals the surprising and invigorating history of civilisation's most influential ideas. In this compelling 'archaeology of philosophy', award-winning historian Bettany Hughes takes 25 single-word ideas from ancient Greek culture and traces their development. Travelling backwards and forwards through time, she investigates how they first emerged and have evolved throughout history - and how those changes have shaped us
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Well Worth a Listen!
- By Marge on 03-02-23
By: Bettany Hughes
What listeners say about Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Steven
- 03-21-23
One of the best works of non-fiction I've read
This was fun engaging and informative without being dull or dead. I was surprised because even though it's not dramatized, I was emotionally invested in the story. Fantastic work and the authors knowledge of the subject and passion are wonderfully infectious
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- Brian Hayward
- 03-16-23
Fascinating! You'll definitely want to visit
Never heard an audiobook that spans such a huge timespan on one city. The author sells
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- Agatha Holmes
- 06-15-22
Bettany Hughes excellence
I chose this because i am a big fan of her documentaries and felt confident this book would be equally enjoyable, especially since she is the narrator. I was not disappointed. I learned a lot about a part of the world i knew little of.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-17-22
If you love history. This is a must read.
Bettany Hughes never dissapoints this a great read. Istanbul now is now on my bucket list of places to visit.
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- james
- 05-13-19
Great Book - Huge Scope Suceedes
Hughes manages to include detail and write a coherent narrative. This book is an accomplishment.
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1 person found this helpful
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- emax
- 08-19-23
Inaccuracies
Great performance and story, but with some rather annoying inaccuracies that make me question how accurate the rest of the content is. For example, she describes Kyivan Rus as being part of modern Russia. Well, that's what Putin thinks too, but the fact is Kyiv is the capital of modern Ukraine. The only time she mentions Ukraine in the book, she calls it "The Ukraine," typical of people who know nothing of that part of the world and the tensions there.
She also gives in to the modern woke alternative facts and mocks views that Europeans came out of Caucasus. There is vast modern research literature on that subject, providing ample evidence that this inconvenient truth is in fact accurate. DNA research suggests that European ancestors came out of Africa and first settled in Caucasus, as suggested by the vast diversity in DNA mutations in that region (DNA tends to mutate, so the more mutations, the longer it was there).
So, based on my read of the book and my knowledge of these two topics, Hughes is a good storyteller, but like all good storytellers tends to bend facts to her preferences.
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- Victoria
- 06-10-24
loooong book but worth it
This is the longest audiobook that I’ve listened to. Took me more than a year on and off, almost abandoned it several times. It takes patience but pays off. The history of Istanbul is so rich and complicated that it deserves the time to unfold. The author has a way of telling stories and a fresh viewpoint. I will be listening to her other books.
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- Jane
- 11-15-24
Fascinating story
I like that it covered the whole history of the city. Am learning a great deal. However, I find the narration difficult - her voice is at a pitch that is hard for me hear clearly, and frankly somewhat monotonous. I may have to switch to reading the book and start again.
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- Farooq Hussain
- 05-31-23
If you love Istanbul…
This is a substantial book and needs some commitment and reading endurance to get through. Bettany Hughes is fantastic-of course- and her reading of the book makes it all the more fun. You can catch her excitement with the city and it’s history. Highly recommended
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- Casey
- 06-09-22
Great writing, read well
A great social, economic, and political, and military history of multicultural Istanbul through the ages. Hughes’s narration of her own writing captures the emotion and intellect of the text—while making easy work of Istanbul’s tricky multilingualism.
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