"Then we went to the other bath. Here I found I was being again
taken to the men's place, so I said, 'I'm not going in here'. But a
great outcry was raised and loud exclamations of invitation and
constant assurances that there was nobody naked, so when T said
fiercely, 'Come in and don't make a fuss. They all wish it', I
entered a large hall with the raised divans peopled by gentry in
cloaks and turbans of towels. There was fortunately no one in the
hot bath as it deserved a careful examination. The wide platform
round the tanks was inlaid with beautiful marbles and there were
recesses with pumps, etc., also inlaid..." (Bursa, February 1888)On
August 2nd 1877, the English explorer and archaeologist James
Theodore Bent married an extraordinary Irishwoman, Mabel Virginia
Anna Hall-Dare, the second of the four daughters born to Mr Robert
Westley Hall-Dare of Co. Wexford and Essex. Mabel was 31, Theodore
25, and within a few months they had embarked on their pattern of
annual travels that continued until his early death in 1897. Their
trips began fairly close to home, visiting northern Italy, but by
1883 they were in the Eastern Mediterranean (in modern Greece and
Turkey), searching out the antiquities, landscapes and lifestyles
of a region that was to captivate them for the next fifteen years.
Their researches led to a number of highly regarded monographs,
papers and articles (such as Theodore's 'The Cyclades, or Life
Among the Insular Greeks', 1885, and the many publications of their
various discoveries in locations such as 'Rugged Cilicia', the
island of Thassos, and elsewhere) that were to place the couple
securely amongst the foremost British travellers of the latter half
of the 19th century.The publication, therefore, of Mabel Bent's
personal notebooks from the archive of the Joint Library of the
Hellenic and Roman Societies, London, represents the discovery of a
lost and notable milestone for scholars and travel enthusiasts of
all kinds. This series of volumes begins with Mabel's account of
the couple's adventures around the Aegean and beyond, extracted
from her fifteen-year sequence of notebooks and presented
chronologically. Specifically, we follow Mabel and Theodore to the
Greek mainland and the islands known now as the Cyclades and the
Dodecanese, as well as the northern Aegean islands; their journeys
along the Turkish littoral lead them from bustling Istanbul to
provincial Mersin in the far south-west. Contents include: Chapter
1) 1883-1884: The Cyclades - Mabel's own accounts of the couple's
two tours of the Cyclades. Theodore relied on these Chronicles for
the writing up of his classic travelogue 'The Cyclades; or Life
Among the Insular Greeks' of 1885; Chapter 2) 1885: The Dodecanese
- including Rhodes, Tilos and Karpathos; Chapter 3) 1886: The
Eastern Aegean - including Samos, Patmos, Kalymnos and Astypalea;
Chapter 4) 1887: The Northern Aegean - including Meteora,
Thessaloniki, Thassos and Samothraki; Chapter 5) 1888: The Turkish
Coast - from Istanbul to Kastellorizo; Chapter 6) 1890: 'Rough
Cilicia' - extensive explorations around south-west Turkey.
General
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