172 - Henry Tozer: Researches in the Highlands of Turkey including visits to Mounts Ida, Athos, Olympus and Pelion… London, 1869

Henry Tozer: Researches in the Highlands of Turkey including visits to Mounts Ida, Athos, Olympus and Pelion… London, 1869 First edition, in 8vo, contemporary burgundy blinded cloth slightly trimmed, spines sunned, text clean and bright, complete with 7 lithographs, including a map and fine views, overall in very good condition. Tozer was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and his mission represents the peak of Academic Mountaineering in the 19th century. Tozer traveled through the most rugged and inaccessible parts of the Ottoman Empire in the summer of 1853 and again in 1861. He focused on the mountainous interior of the Pindus range, Mount Olympus and all the Highlands of Macedonia and Thessaly. Later he visited Mount Ida in the Troad. Tozer provides some of the most detailed 19th-century accounts of the Meteora monasteries and Mount Athos. He viewed these as time capsules where Byzantine life and Greek identity were preserved. He was deeply interested in the nomadic Vlach shepherds of the Pindus, describing their migrations and customs with a degree of respect and detail that was rare for the time. As a classical scholar, Tozer was constantly looking for the physical reality behind the myths. He sought to identify the exact locations of ancient cities and battles within the Highlands of the Ottoman world.