Turkey

In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great....

Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world while ignoring the other....

This sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West sheds a revealing light on current hostilities....

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's listenable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmed II....

Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact....

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic against their Christian minorities from 1894 to 1924....

An award-winning scholar’s account of an ancient city’s descent into unprecedented communal violence—an event that would mark the end of the old Ottoman order and the beginning of the modern Middle East

Filled with unforgettable stories of emperors, generals, and religious patriarchs, as well as fascinating glimpses into the life of the ordinary citizen, Lost to the West reveals how much we owe to the Byzantine Empire that was the equal of any in its achievements, appetites, and enduring legacy....

A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time....

Over the course of just 200 years, the Ottoman Empire grew from a small, obscure Anatolian state into the most powerful Muslim nation in the world, controlling vast swathes of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa. Then came a period of gradual decline....

A masterful account of the conspiracy of assassins that hunted down the perpetrators of a genocide....

A gripping work by a master historian, The Enemy at the Gate offers a timely examination of an epic clash of civilizations....

A best-selling historian recounts 16 years that shook the world - the epic clash between Europe and the Ottoman Turks that ended the Renaissance and brought Islam to the gates of Vienna....

The Secret History, written by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, is one of the most extraordinary and scandalous documents to have survived from the early Byzantine period....

If you want to discover captivating stories of people and events of the Ottoman Empire then pay attention....

Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the 20th century....

During 1915 to 1923, one and a half million Armenian people were deported and killed in the most appalling ways comprehensible....

Ancient Turkey was a land of myth and mystery, but its secrets are slowly being uncovered. Find out about the legendary cultures that left their mark on this unique region, and discover which stories are fact and which are fiction....

Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the 16th-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire, The Lion House animates with stunning immediacy the fears and stratagems of those brought into orbit around him....

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism.....

The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts....

With beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world....

The Ottoman world was nothing like an exotic fairy tale featuring tyrant sultans, mean pashas, and ill-fated harem women. The true stories of genuine sultans and princes are a bit more complicated and no less exciting....

For centuries, Christians and Muslims were embroiled in one of the most infamous territorial disputes of all time, viciously and relentlessly battling one another for the Holy Land....

Explore a major turning point in the history of Europe and the Middle East....

The Endless Country takes a journey through Turkey’s past – the nation the author’s father left decades ago and he returns to as a young man. It is not about Erdogan or Atatürk, the two towering Presidents who have book-ended that history, and at times have appeared impossible to escape. Instead Sami Kent’s book goes deep beyond them, revealing a history as rich, layered and absurd as his family’s favourite dessert, künefe: a shredded wheat pastry with a core of melted cheese, a topping of pistachios, and a drowning of syrup.

This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide nonrecognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

In this modern adaptation of Shall This Nation Die?, Weam Namou uncovers the overlooked narrative of Reverend Joseph Naayem’s resilience in the face of the 1915 genocide, exploring how it shaped his life. Naayem’s unwavering determination shines through despite enduring imprisonment and abuse by the Turks. In the most desperate times, his story exemplifies the power of hope, faith, and compassion to create change. By sharing this moving story with contemporary readers, Namou hopes to encourage greater moral courage in today’s society.

Drawn from never-before-seen eyewitness accounts of the Damascus Events, eminent Middle East historian Eugene Rogan tells the story of how a peaceful multicultural city came to be engulfed in slaughter. He traces how rising tensions between Muslim and Christian communities led some to regard extermination as a reasonable solution. Rogan also narrates the wake of this disaster, and how the Ottoman government moved quickly to retake control of the city, end the violence, and reintegrate Christians into the community.

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.