ROUTES AND RECORDS

Spanning his wider tour from 1842 to 1848, Falkener’s archive reveals his interest in a striking range of architectural and artistic subjects, from the towers of the Kremlin to the domestic interiors of Damascus, monumental tombs of Egypt to the churches of Sicily, the colours of Byzantine mosaics to inscribed Islamic metalwork. His motivations for this wider tour that led him to document this profusion of material culture are never made explicit, but it may be assumed that he was broadly following the lead of his teachers at the RA, the architects Wilkins and Cockerell, whose careers had been launched by publications produced following their youthful travels.Footnote ¹⁷ A growing number of British travellers from the eighteenth century onwards had expanded the traditional western-European Grand Tour route to visit Greece, Egypt and the Levant;Footnote ¹⁸ yet, Falkener’s route to the Mediterranean via the Baltic Sea and cutting overland through Russia to the Black Sea was still unorthodox. Looking beyond architects, the closest parallel is the journey of the self-professed antiquarian Edward Daniel Clarke to Constantinople via Scandinavia and Russia in 1799. Though Falkener does not cite the work, Clarke’s account of this route in Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa seems a possible inspiration.Footnote ¹⁹ Falkener identified himself as an architect, and towards the end of his career was called an archaeologist, but the title of ‘antiquary,’ which he assumes in some of his publications, reflects this capacious interests in cultures across a wide geographical span.Footnote ²⁰

The eclecticism of Falkener’s records contrasts with his professed explanation for his interest in Anatolia, which he retrospectively framed solely as a quest to seek ‘Hellenic’ ruins. After travelling round the main monumental ruins of Greece between July and September 1843, when he visited Attica, Delphi, Corinth, Argos and Bassai, Falkener spent two weeks on Corfu en route to visit more Greek temples at Paestum and in Sicily. In the undated ‘Preface’ of the rough, unpublished draft for a book about buildings studied on his tour of Anatolia, Falkener writes of the happenstance inspiration for modifying his travel plans:

Falkener goes on to explain that staying subsequently in Malta, he read Charles Fellows’ celebrated Journal Written During an Excursion in Asia Minor.Footnote ²² Hearing that Fellows was soon returning to excavate at Xanthus, Falkener’s enthusiasm at the prospect of visiting Anatolia redoubled, and he wrote to Fellows with the intention to visit the site as soon as possible.Footnote ²³

In his reply, Fellows advised Falkener to travel along Anatolia’s south coast during the winter of 1843 to avoid the malarial season, but delays in Sicily meant the architect did not arrive until Spring. When he eventually reached Xanthus in December 1844, he found that he had missed Fellows by about ten months. Nevertheless, the references to Fellows and predecessors illustrates the lively interest in Anatolia at the time. In 1838 the Treaty of Balta Limani had granted Britain free trade in the Ottoman Empire’s interior, which ushered in a new phase of travel and heralded an era of closer ties between the two imperial powers during the period of modernising, secularising and liberalising reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839–76).Footnote ²⁴ This accessibility augmented the steady stream of foreign publications about Türkiye that had been appearing since the first half of the nineteenth century, which could prove challenging to keep up with.Footnote ²⁵ After his period of research on Corfu and Malta in 1843, Falkener admits in the ‘Preface’ that it was not until he reached Smyrna or Izmir in September 1844 – about halfway through his tour of Anatolia – that he read Fellows’ second book of 1841, An Account of Discoveries in Lycia;Footnote ²⁶ he did not read the geologist William Hamilton’s important 1842 work, Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus, and Armenia, until back in Britain. Falkener was fortunate to meet the hydrographer Thomas Spratt during his first stop at Izmir in September 1844; Spratt had just completed the first geographical survey of Lycia’s interior, which would be published in collaboration with Edward Forbes as Travels in Lycia in 1847.Footnote ²⁷ Thanks to this chance meeting with Spratt and the crew of the admiralty survey ship Beacon, Falkener was among the earliest travellers to visit Lycia’s remoter inland cities, which Fellows had not managed to locate.Footnote ²⁸

Falkener states in the ‘Preface’ that he began his tour in Aleppo so that he could hire cheaper servants and travel north through Anatolia as the weather improved, and it is in Syria that his travel journal begins on 31 March 1844. This manuscript covers eight densely packed sheets in a minute hand and records the first legs of his trip from Aleppo to Konya via Adalia (modern Antalya) from 31 March to 13 July 1844. A typescript produced by his grandson, Charles Oliver, preserves further missing pages covering his route onto Izmir, then back to Adalia and along the Lycian coast from 14 July to 13 December 1844. In surviving portions of this diary, Falkener diligently recorded his travel times between towns, villages, khans, coffee houses, forts and farms. Travel on horseback ranged from the whole day to a few hours, depending if he stopped to examine buildings or ruins. Falkener spent just one night at most of his rest stops, but paused for multiple days at sites with prominent archaeological remains. Although few versions survive in his archive, Falkener copied more than 300 Latin and Greek inscriptions from across Anatolia. Later, in February 1849, he handed his copies over to the epigraphist Wilhelm Henzen in Rome, who eventually published a selection.Footnote ²⁹ Generally, Falkener rested for a week or longer in larger towns, particularly those that hosted British consuls. As recent scholarship has shown, these agents of the British state were vital for the development of British antiquarian travel and archaeology in the Mediterranean.Footnote ³⁰

After Falkener’s journal cuts off in December 1844, the remainder of his journey up to his arrival in Istanbul on 27 April 1845 can be reconstructed thanks to a daily itinerary. This manuscript provides a meticulous transliteration of contemporary names of settlements complemented, if possible, with a corresponding ancient name. Sometimes Falkener passed through as many as seven named settlements in a single day, noting small villages unrecorded on European maps available at the time. Following demographic changes in the twentieth century, many of these smaller settlements have subsequently had their names changed, or, in the case of some Greek villages, been abandoned. The itinerary is complemented by a large sketch map of the Anatolian landmass with its coasts and rivers outlined on a series of pieces of tracing paper in ink, with places visited in pencil. Two smaller sketch maps respectively record Falkener’s progress along Lycia’s coast following Charles Fellows and around the poorly documented Lycian interior, presumably adopting Spratt’s directions. Based on these documents, Falkener’s journey can be divided into several longer legs: from Aleppo to Adalia via Alexandretta (İskenderun), Adana and Alanya along the Karamanian coast; inland to Isparta then east to Karaman and Konya; west to Izmir via Uşak and the Gediz Valley; back east up the Büyük Menderes valley to Denizli; southeast via the Lycian highlands to Adalia; around the Lycian and Carian coasts to Bodrum; up the Ionian coast to Izmir with a longer stop at Ephesus; and, finally, inland via Bergama, Kütahya and Bursa to Istanbul. A reconstructed map of the journey, which highlights these major legs, can be found in fig 1.

Fig 1. Falkener’s route, adapted by the author from H Kiepert, ‘Carte de l’Asie Mineure contenant les Itinéraires de P. de Tchihatchef (1:2,000,000)’, 1867, lithograph. Image: Based on a map reproduced courtesy of Princeton University Library.

The motivation for Falkener’s route around Anatolia seems to have been governed by a combination of the vicissitudes of travel and a desire to see as many buildings, towns and ruins as possible – in some cases, taking inspiration from his reading, in others, covering new ground. Many parts of Falkener’s route cover established itineraries, and John Murray’s first edition of the Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople seems a likely source for several legs of his journey.Footnote ³¹ This early handbook, however, contained scant detail and many inaccuracies in its Turkish routes; south and central Anatolia was very far from being a tourist destination in the 1840s.Footnote ³² Moreover, Falkener departed from convention: first by travelling along the entire coast of Cilicia and Pamphylia by land between April and June 1844; second in seeking out ruins inland in the Taurus Mountains, or ancient ‘Pisidia’, ‘Isauria’ and Central Anatolian Steppe; and third in visiting the remoter Lycian cities of the ancient ‘Cibyratis’ region. Besides Léon and Alexandre de Laborde’s Voyage de l’Asie Mineur,Footnote ³³ Falkener’s unpublished notes represent one of the earliest attempts by a European traveller to study the archaeology and architecture of the Anatolian interior. It was not until the 1870s that Edwin John Davis would cover the same ground in his Anatolica and Life in Asiatic Turkey,Footnote ³⁴ and not until the 1890s that William Mitchell Ramsay produced historical studies of these regions.Footnote ³⁵

When Falkener later penned a rough ‘Introduction’ for the beginnings of his book draft, he conceded that his route and research overlapped with existing publications by Beaufort, Leake, Arundell, Fellows, Spratt and Forbes, and the Society of Dilettanti’s Antiquities of Ionia. His purpose, therefore, as he declared retrospectively in the ‘Preface’, was not to explore ‘unknown districts,’ but to ‘examine the ruins already discovered by travellers’, with the intention of examining them from the perspective of a trained architect. Again, in the ‘Introduction’, he elaborates on his dual motives for producing a book based on his travels: first, ‘Not a single architect has made a general tour in this country’; second, while there are valuable examples of Greek temples in other parts of the Mediterranean, ‘Asia Minor presents us with innumerable examples of entire plans of cities, walls and towers of similar architecture, baths, gymnasia, agora and numerous other buildings bedside a great number of churches and the early tombs and sarcophagi and the brick tombs of the highest antiquity of previously unknown forms’. Here was his pitch for a publishing niche to fill.

DIARY AND DRAWINGS

Over the course of his tour of Anatolia, Falkener produced scores of sketches and watercolours. His designs may be divided first into smaller, roughly shaded pencil sketches of buildings in landscapes, profiles of hills or coastlines, architectural features and plans of archaeological sites and ruined buildings annotated with meticulous measurements of exposed foundations and colonnades. Falkener later cut out pages from small sketchbooks filled with these examples of visual notetaking, which he either mounted in thematic collage arrangements on pieces of card in his portfolios or organised in small collections of cuttings by location labelled ‘rough plans of cities’.Footnote ³⁶ An example of the former can be found in fig 2, where Falkener has collated small sketches of lesser-known aqueducts and arched structures from the first stage of his trip between Aleppo and Adalia on a piece of blue card. A specimen of the latter can be seen in fig 3, where Falkener has measured walls and architraves to create rough plans and elevations of the ancient ruins of Myra.Footnote ³⁷ Falkener published a selection of his drawings of Ephesus in his eponymous monograph, and several other sites in individual articles for his Museum of Classical Antiquities or illustrative projects such as the Architectural Publication Society’s Dictionary of Architecture, which reproduced the three images of aqueducts shown in fig 2.Footnote ³⁸ However, the majority of the remaining mounted images and ‘rough plans’ of ancient sites never appeared in print. Presumably many were intended for his planned book on the ancient architecture of Asia Minor.

Fig 2. Edward Falkener, collection of sketches of aqueducts and arched structures, graphite mounted on card. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

Fig 3. a–b: Edward Falkener, rough plans of Myra, recto and verso of two sheets, graphite. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

The second category of images that Falkener produced were larger sketches and watercolours of buildings or landscape views with varying degrees of finish. Some of these he later worked up to a high degree of colour and detail for exhibition at the RA back in Britain or reproduced as lithographs in his Ephesus monograph, but others he mounted on card in his portfolios in their preliminary state. A good example of the latter can be found in his view from above Aspendus’s well-preserved theatre (fig 4). In ‘Asia Minor Portfolio i’, he mounted this watercolour on card, pasting beside it a small pen-and-ink reconstruction of the exterior of the proscenium. Though the washes are incomplete, the design shows Falkener’s facility with tone and conscientious attention to detail in the banks of seating, elaborate pedestals and exposed brickwork of the proscenium. Swathes of green depict vegetation, and a purple hue gives the distant mountains a romantic tint, but the viewer is left in no doubt that the architectural feature of the theatre is the protagonist of the picture.

Fig 4. Edward Falkener, ‘Theatre Aspendus, Interior, 8 June 1844’, graphite and watercolour mounted on card. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

Alongside these dated sketches, Falkener’s diary provides a rich account of his day-to-day activities. Most entries are relatively terse and written in a condensed shorthand, with a system of symbols or letters for buildings like ‘+’ for a church or ‘T’ for temple. Falkener seems to have intended the journal to be primarily architectural and topographical – seemingly as an aide memoire for his publication plans – and accordingly he notes down ruins, arches, state of preservation or else his route through the landscape between sites. Beyond this, like contemporary travellers, he often inserts environmental features or ethnographic observations. Thus, he observes ‘magazines of fire wood’ due to be shipped to Alexandria, ‘curiously stratified rock’ along the Karamanian coast, ‘beautiful butterflies’, ‘excellent honey’, earthquake damage, fluctuating prices, seasonal migration, ‘rich groves of walnuts and poplars’, the carpet trade, the grape harvest and much more. Besides recording travel time, Falkener frequently noted his mode of travel, the behaviour of dragomen or muleteers, the scarcity of farriers and fodder and the state of the roads. For the most part, the narrative of the journal is succinct, except for when things went wrong, as will be discussed below.

For all the rich variety of Falkener’s sketches and the notes in his journal, he was surprisingly modest about his records. In the draft ‘Introduction’, he observes that ‘I contented myself by making general notes on antiquities by such hasty plans and sketches as time would allow’. In his ‘Preface’, moreover, he notes with regret that he found many monuments along the Cilician coast in ‘an indifferent state of preservation’, admitting that ‘the full account given of them by Capt. Beaufort renders it almost unnecessary to add any further remarks’.Footnote ³⁹ This sense of ambition unfulfilled is sometimes apparent in his journal. In a long and tellingly ambivalent entry dated 9 June, a day after completing his watercolour of the theatre of Aspendus, Falkener begins:

He continues to list ancient cities in Pamphylia and descriptions of their remains, but concludes with a contradictory statement, apparently retrospective:

Falkener’s ambivalence in this instance partly arises from confusion about ruins: ‘Pednelissus’ he later realises is Aspendus, and ‘Isionda’ Syllion. These were mistaken attributions made by Leake and Fellows, which Falkener corrected back in Britain, but this was also a case of managing his expectations: here were monumental Roman ruins aplenty, but nothing like the Doric temples he had recently encountered in Greece and Sicily. Aspendus’s theatre, moreover, was already well enough known, and thus would win him no praise were he to publish his records of it.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Falkener visited ancient cities he often recorded remains in the unexcavated sites such as Selge, Side and Cremna with diligent enthusiasm in his diary, but the passage quoted above reveals a moment of reckoning: the cities he had encountered would not furnish him with material to produce a work like Wilkins’ Antiquities of Magna Graecia or Atheniensia, or Cockerell’s contributions to the Society of Dilettanti’s Antiquities of Ionia.

For all that Falkener lamented the lack of ‘Grecian art’, and worried about the crowded publishing market, other subjects from his portfolio and journal reveal a different dimension to his interests. Not far on from Aspendus, the first leg of Falkener’s journey came to an end on 12 June 1844 in Adalia, where he produced a watercolour that he later worked up in 1859 into a finished painting to exhibit at the RA, reproduced in fig 5.Footnote ⁴¹ In the next entry in his diary to that quoted above, he described Adalia as a ‘beautiful and pleasant city […] placed on a quickly rising hollow in the cliff resembling a Theatre […] surrounded by continuous gardens & has conduits of water partly open partly covd. running thro’ every street’. This sense of admiration comes through in the watercolour: the curvature of the bay captures Falkener’s expressive comparison to a theatre; foliage between the buildings gives the city a lush feel, and he lavishes attention on the irregular red-tile roofs and variety of asymmetrical architectural forms. The viewer is granted a privileged vista of this city of rooftop galleries, like the terrace in the bottom right where they may spy a veiled woman attending her plants. Together the diary entry and watercolour exemplify Falkener’s attentiveness to the appearance of contemporary Ottoman towns alongside his quest for classical Greek cities.

Fig 5. Edward Falkener, ‘Adalia’, exhibited 1859, watercolour. Image: Reproduced courtesy of Cheffins Auction House.

Situating this view of Adalia in Falkener’s wider archive, this is one among many depictions of mosques, fortifications and examples of contemporary Ottoman architecture in addition to images of Greek and Roman sites that were Falkener’s professed subject. The architect recorded village huts near Konya, doors and windows in Bursa, watermills at Antioch, provincial townscapes such as Silifke and Afyonkarahisar, interiors of houses in Aleppo and Myra, hammams in Adalia and Tarsus, assorted Christian churches, and mosques in Adana, Akşehir, Ayasuluk, Ballat, Iznik, Istanbul and Milas. Konya yielded the most non-antique subjects of any single settlement, with a series of studies of the citadel, the Karatay Madrasa, the Sahib Ata Mosque and the Alâeddin Mosque. In fig 6, Falkener’s facility with handling material surface is apparent in his striking rendition of a portion of the city walls. In 1820 Léon de Laborde had drawn the same gateway in a looser sketch, but Falkener provides a more striking record of the architectural grandeur of the gatehouse as it looms to a pinnacle above the viewer. Figures appear for scale – one the familiar Orientalist visual cliché of man with a hookah pipe – yet their picturesque status is perhaps secondary to Falkener’s concern with scale and the effect of the shadows cast by the monumental bastions. This and other watercolours by Falkener are all the more compelling today given that the citadel walls were demolished in 1896.Footnote ⁴²

Fig 6. Edward Falkener, ‘Walls of Koniah, July 25 1844’, watercolour and graphite. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

In one sense, Falkener’s designs are of a piece with engraved illustrations published in the books of British predecessors in Anatolia such as Beaufort, Fellows or contributors to the Society of Dilettanti volumes. A recent exhibition devoted to Dilettanti’s Ionian Antiquities, for instance, summarises draughtsmen’s strategies for recording ‘classical ruins [but] also the living landscape – its flora and fauna, and the customs, manners and dress of the people’.Footnote ⁴³ Yet in his conscientious use of watercolour to capture atmospheric effects, architectural details and vivid colours, Falkener’s pictures also show the impress of a recognisable artistic category of Orientalist painting that was developing in Britain by the 1840s.Footnote ⁴⁴ This genre finds expression in David Roberts’ lithographs, David Wilkie’s portraits, William Müller’s landscapes and steel engravings of sites of historical interest in popular works such as the Finden brothers’ Landscape Illustrations to the Bible (1835–6) or John Carne’s Syria, The Holy Land, Asia Minor (1836–8). This movement’s influence is more obvious in the paintings that Falkener reworked for exhibition at the RA, filled out with richer colours and enlivened with picturesque human activity. Yet we might still compare the sweeping, atmospheric landscape view like Falkener’s preliminary in situ sketch of Aspendus to the varied tones of Müller’s watercolours, or the imposing architectural sublime of his version of Konya’s citadel dwarfing Ottoman figures with the grandeur conveyed in Roberts’ views. Reviewing Falkener’s work shows the arbitrariness of drawing a line between ‘documentary’ draughtsmanship and artistry. The latter was as important as the former for communicating his travels to a broad audience – middlebrow as well as academic – back in Britain.

Despite his preference for classical architecture, Falkener’s parallel interest in sketching Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman subjects was not only aesthetic. First, it had a precedent in his tutor Cockerell, who was an early appreciator of Byzantine buildings and recorded ‘modern Turkish Architecture’ in Istanbul in 1810.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here it is worth noting that relatively few among Falkener’s predecessors valued Seljuk and Ottoman architecture on its own terms. In this respect, Mark Crinson distinguishes between figures such as Cockerell, who were dismissive of Mediterranean Islamic architecture, merely interested in its ‘novelty’, ‘frisson’ and ‘associational values of the Picturesque’, and a more serious scholarly movement that Crinson calls ‘New Orientalism’, which developed in the 1830s.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this vein, Falkener sits alongside figures such as Robert Hay, Edward Lane and Owen Jones, who were invested in ‘reading of [Eastern] artifacts, especially architecture, and a deeper consideration of their worth for contemporary production’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though Falkener does not admit the influence in his draft, and may have only read their work after his tour, the travellers with the most similar approach to recording Anatolia’s post-classical architecture in this respect were the French scholars Léon de Laborde and Charles Texier.Footnote ⁴⁸

Upon returning to Britain, Falkener joined a circle of architectural scholars that included Jones, James Fergusson and continental European writers such as Jacques-Ignace Hittorff and Gottfried Semper, who were interested in assessing and learning from non-Western architecture.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such theoretically informed ‘reading’ of Ottoman or Islamic architecture was not without prejudice and often judged styles hierarchically as expressions of a national or racial character.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, it reflected what Stacey Sloboda calls ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’, a mid-Victorian view epitomised by the Great Exhibition of 1851 that saw ‘historically and culturally distant cultures as objects of emulation, at the same time as seeking conceptual and categorical mastery over those cultures’.Footnote ⁵¹

Besides his visual records of Ottoman architecture, Falkener took rubbings of Islamic metalwork, copied Arabic inscriptions and visited ‘Oriental’ collections outside of the Ottoman Empire such as the Türckische Cammer in the Dresden Residenzschloss. During his travels he collected Ottoman metalwork and arms, which he exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857 and later at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.Footnote ⁵² When he retired from London to Wales, photos show his house filled with Islamic material culture of a piece with the aestheticised interiors of Frederic Leighton or John Gardner Wilkinson. To see a contradiction between Falkener’s enthusiasm for Greek and Roman and post-classical material culture is perhaps misleading; as Rosemary Barrow notes, for many Victorian artists, ‘Orientalising and classicising imaginations impacted on each other in mutually informing ways, with several artists moving effortlessly between the genres’.Footnote ⁵³

Notwithstanding this keen interest, Falkener’s written judgements of Seljuk and Ottoman art and architecture are sparse. The most sustained example can be found in his Ephesus monograph, where he includes a chapter on the İsa Bey Mosque at Ayasuluk (modern Selçuk), translating Arabic inscriptions and discussing its interior’s illumination. Unlike fellow travellers who lamented this building’s dilapidated state, Falkener showered it with praise: ‘The ornaments of this mosque are of the most exquisite character and delicate workmanship. The writing over the east door is exceedingly beautiful.’ Illustrating the building with a series of lithographs, he celebrates the ‘consummate science of the Mahomeddan architect’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The original watercolour of the interior of the mosque on which one lithograph is based can be found in fig 7. Overall, it remains difficult to comprehend Falkener’s interest in ‘Islamic’ architecture beyond these assertions of ‘beauty’; notably he never bestowed it the abstract qualities of ‘excellence’ and ‘ideality of beauty’ he afforded to classical architecture elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁵ The most that can be said is that Falkener sometimes saw Anatolia as a place where the categories of ‘classical’ and ‘Oriental’ blur: in Ephesus he describes the ancient city in ambiguous language as a place of ‘Asiatic grandeur [and] opulence’, while the İsa Bey Mosque is a ‘very elegant and chaste building’, terms often granted to classical architecture.Footnote ⁵⁶

Fig 7. Edward Falkener, ‘Mosque at Aiaslik [İsa Bey Mosque]’, exhibited 1867, watercolour. Image: Reproduced courtesy of Cheffins Auction House.

From Falkener’s wider published work it would be easy to pigeon-hole him as an antiquarian with a classical bias, but his archive reveals a multiform profusion of illustrations of Anatolian architecture and material culture. Back in Britain, Falkener struggled to be identified as a professional scholar. Though he was active in London learned societies such as the RIBA and the British Archaeological Association, he lacked a university education and never held an institutional post.Footnote ⁵⁷ Though of a piece with the intellectual culture of the 1840s and 1850s, his eclectic antiquarian interests were gradually superseded by narrower academic specialisms towards the end of the century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Given that the multifarious array of visual records in Falkener’s portfolios lack an overarching cultural narrative, it seems less accurate to describe his interest in Anatolian heritage as a relationship of intellectual mastery than part of a magpie curiosity that pulled him in different directions.Footnote ⁵⁹ Though he searched for what he imagined to be pure Greek, time and again he was clearly drawn to Seljuk and Ottoman architecture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the limited understanding of Ottoman culture among British travellers in the mid-nineteenth century, Falkener never felt confident to publish any of this material. Yet it is conceivable that his familiarity with classical archaeology paved the way for his interest in Anatolia’s later heritage. As much as he might have considered his records of ancient, medieval and early modern Anatolian architecture as discrete, all clearly captivated him in their cultural and historical distance from Victorian Britain.

COMPANIONS AND CHALLENGES

Beyond the diverse records of Anatolian heritage that Falkener produced, his archive is also a rich resource for understanding the day-to-day experience of travel. We have already seen his admiration of sites, comments on ‘manners and customs’, anxiety about the originality of what he was recording and occasional geographical confusion. On top of this his diary and ‘Preface’ lay bare the physical struggle of the trip. Falkener had contracted malaria a year previously at Paestum and had been afflicted by attacks of fever at Alexandretta and Adalia. This was why he struck inland from the latter town towards Isparta to get away from the coastal lowlands, but around Lakes Eğirdir and Beyşehir and in the marshes around Karaman he experienced further relapses, and his diary entries become infrequent. In Konya he suffered from diarrhoea and writes that his health declined sharply following the loss of his tent and hammock, which meant he was obliged to sleep on damp ground; ‘this reduced my strength so much’, he wrote in the ‘Preface’, ‘that I frequently passed by ruins without sufficient examination’. Falkener was lucky to have survived his fever, travelling in the dangerous summer months; in the same decade the watercolourist Edward Thomas Daniell and many of the crew of Charles Fellows’s first expedition to remove ruins from Xanthus were not so fortunate.Footnote ⁶⁰

Even when not in this vulnerable state, Falkener was reliant on other people. These included officials for letters of protection, servants for cooking, portage and looking after his horses, dragomen or locals as guides and inhabitants of everywhere he went for hospitality and a place to sleep.Footnote ⁶¹ Somewhat unusually, Falkener’s interactions with these individuals can be charted not only by remarks in his journal, but in a series of contracts with servants and dragomen and letters of introduction. These show that he travelled with two to four horses, and either one or two servants. Initially Falkener hired a dragoman for each leg of his journey between cities, but by December 1844 he gave up on this, instead hiring a local guide for five piastres a day if necessary. Thus in Aleppo he began by hiring a dragoman named Luigi Fanchetta on 16 April for 250 piastres a month and a servant the next day for 100 piastres a month to act as groom and cook. A Cypriot named Giorgos Christopholi took over the latter role from Tarsus to Adalia and was paid 120 piastres a month starting 9 May. No individuals are named for his trip from Adalia to Izmir, but an Ottoman Turkish tezkire or ‘memorandum’ dated 23 July from Konya (fig 8) commands that ‘the English gentleman by the name of Mister Edavar Felkner’ who travelled with ‘one servant and one translator’ be given hospitality in the towns and villages, and ‘attention be given to adjoining a soldier to his person in dangerous places’.Footnote ⁶² This and other letters allude to Falkener’s firman, his imperial mandate to travel. On his return from Izmir to Adalia via Denizli, Falkener paid a dragoman named Tomaso Miletich of Belgrade (presumably ‘Miletić’) 200 piastres a month and a groom and servant he calls Solomon Towshan (presumably ‘Süleyman Tavşan’, the ‘Hare’) 130 piastres, crossed-out and increased to 200 piastres a month (fig 9). On 16 November 1844 Falkener agreed to pay one Constantino Cochifo (who signs indistinctly in Greek ‘κωνςαντινος [sic] βοιταλες’) 250 piastres a month, witnessed by the British Vice-Consul at Adalia, John Purdie. After dismissing this dragoman in December, a final contract in Italian survives between Falkener and Tavşan for travel from Izmir to Istanbul, dated 14 April 1845. In most cases Falkener’s companions sign with a cross, witnessed by a literate resident of the city.

Fig 8. Ottoman letter ordering that Falkner be granted hospitality while travelling between Aleppo and Izmir, dated 7 Rajab 1260 [23 July 1844]. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

Fig 9. Contract drawn up in Izmir in Italian between Edward Falkener, Tomaso Miletich and Solomon Towshan, 14 September 1844. Image: Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Edward Falkener. All rights reserved.

Besides the complaint of poor health, Falkener’s chief difficulty came from his interactions with people on his route. At Ayaş he laments being charged exorbitant prices for a local guide; at Yakacík he was allegedly forced to give up his horse for a fraction of its worth and overcharged for a camel driver (whom he soon lost contact with) to cover the terrain instead; at Bucak near the ruins of Cremna, he was followed around for hours, intimidated with pistols and narrowly escaped an attempt at extortion. Each time he records in his journal in detail the haggling, circular arguments and acute sense of discomfort at misunderstanding the situation and fear he is being cheated. Falkener’s anxiety about money and sense of frustration in these interactions finds parallel in his relationship with longer-term paid companions: his initial groom from Aleppo he calls incompetent, and he complains bitterly in the ‘Preface’ about dragomen who ‘often refused to interpret or gave me a different answer to my demand for antiquities, and if I succeeded in finding them often refused to accompany me where it was requisite to go on foot, cheating [what] they all paid to [do]’. Falkener claims he avoided this by being his own paymaster, but ‘the dragoman I took from Smyrna particularly objected to this as it deprived him of more than double the amount of wages’. This description of Falkener’s fall-out with Miletić matches the commonplace negative stereotypes of dragomen. As Rachel Mairs and Maya Muratov note, Europeans were constantly suspicious of these intermediaries’ motives, resenting the power translators and guides held over their tours.Footnote ⁶³

The last straw for Falkener occurred on the Lycian coast, when the dragoman ‘Constantino’ who accompanied him from Adalia allegedly plotted to abandon him on the island of Kekova and steal his bag and horses during a storm. Fortunately for Falkener, he reports being able to intercept the man; interestingly he singles out for praise the resourcefulness and aid of his groom in this situation, Süleyman Tavşan, who had accompanied him from Izmir. Falkener praised Tavşan in his ‘Preface’ as ‘a great comrade, an excellent servant, constantly civil and contented’. Tavşan spoke no English, but Falkener notes that this ensured ‘the advantage of being compelled to apply myself to the Turkish language’. For the remainder of his travels, Falkener continued with Tavşan alone. Genuine as Falkener’s camaraderie with Tavşan may have been, it stands out as a rare example of praise for the inhabitants of Anatolia in his draft and journal.Footnote ⁶⁴ As the exception, it reinforces his narrative of individual labour.

Besides his acknowledgment of Tavşan in his draft, Falkener also expresses his great gratitude to the British consular agents at Aleppo, Tarsus, Adalia and Smyrna. One final instance at Lake Bafa is instructive in this respect, where Falkener was again robbed of a valuable sword he had purchased inscribed with the names of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, which he had deposited in a village storage room. In a draft letter to Richard Brant, the British consul at Izmir, Falkener recounts with palpable frustration how he was led on a wild goose chase by the villagers of Kapıkırı (‘Karpoo Gridi’) who went through his possessions while he visited the ruins of Heraclea at Latmus. After narrating much back and forth where he and Tavşan remonstrated in vain with officials and were reputedly followed about and spied on by villagers for two days, the sword was ‘found’ without its ornate scabbard and a large fee demanded on the spot. With Tavşan’s signature as a witness, Falkener appealed to Brant because Vice-Consul Demetrios Alexarchi at nearby Kuşadası (‘Gooshaddasi’) allegedly spoke little English or French. Complaining that his firman from the Sultan had been ignored, he demanded that the Pasha of Smyrna or the Mütesellim (civil governor) of the nearby town of Söke intervene.

Though the result of the plea is uncertain, the letter shows the strengths and weaknesses of Falkener’s position as a British traveller. On the one hand, his relative wealth – distributed as baksheesh – cushioned his experience, and his contact with British consuls granted privileged extrajudicial protection. Falkener travelled in a period of improving relations between Britain and the Ottoman state following Palmerston’s intervention against Muhammad Ali in the Egyptian–Ottoman War, and accordingly his letters of introduction required that he be treated courteously.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the other hand, he visited places where Europeans were a relatively rare sight. In context, Falkener’s experience comes across less as an indictment of Ottoman guides than evidence for his idiosyncrasy – travelling alone as a foreigner in little visited regions without external funding or a larger entourage. Falkener was insufficiently connected to have the sponsorship of a London society such as the Dilettanti, who enabled Cockerell to travel along the Ionian coast (1812), or the Royal Geographical Society, which supported William J Hamilton (1835). He was not part of a public–private venture on behalf of the British Museum, like the expeditions organised by Fellows,Footnote ⁶⁶ nor did he have the wealth of late aristocratic grand tourists such as Charles Somers-Cocks, the Viscount Eastnor, who had passed through Cilicia two months before him in 1844. He had neither the military–diplomatic sanction nor the authority of a naval surveying mission, like Leake (1800) or Beaufort (1811–12). Finally, he had no local knowledge or connection to professional contacts in the region like Francis Arundell, chaplain of the Levant Company at Smyrna, who toured Anatolia in 1826 and 1833. Given these circumstances, Falkener seems to have got by with the obliging Tavşan as a longstanding servant and interpreter, the guidance of his maligned dragomen and the ‘great kindness and assistance’ of a series of British consular agents.