Cornucopia 35

Istanbul Elegy

Cover story

Othmar's Dream: the photographs of Othmar Pferschy 1898-1981

After the grim years of the early 1920s, Turkey experienced a brief period of euphoria. A new Republic was born, and new faces appeared in this land of hope, among them the brilliant but now forgotten photographer Othmar Pferschy (1898°©1984), who turned up on the Orient Express in 1926 and stayed for forty years. In 2005 his daughter Astrid von Schell donated his archives to Istanbul Modern, who are now staging his first-ever retrospective. Cornucopia has selected some of his most poetic images.

Completing this tribute to a remarkable photographer, Norman Stone examines why it was that so many Central Europeans were drawn to Turkey.