175 - Edwin John Davis: Life in Asiatic Turkey, a Journal of travels in Cilicia, Iauria and Lycaonia. London, 1879

Edwin John Davis: Life in Asiatic Turkey, a Journal of travels in Cilicia, Iauria and Lycaonia. London, 1879 First edition, tall Quarto, original publishers hard covers, brown spine relaid down and rebaked, complete 535p., 12 lithographs and 4 maps, text clean and bright, overall in very good condition. That is Davis second travel account, after the publication of his Anatolica, and is a detailed record of a journey through the southern provinces of Asia Minor during the spring and summer of 1875. While Anatolica (1874) focused on the ruined cities of the southwest, Life in Asiatic Turkey moves further east into Cilicia and the Taurus Mountains.He gives an intimate look at the major cities of the Cilician plain. As a chaplain, he was particularly interested in the Christian communities, Armenian and Greek, and their relationship with the Turkish authorities. He ventured into the high, arid plateaus of the interior, documenting the Seljuk ruins of Karaman and the biblical landscapes of Lycaonia full with Byzantine churches.This work is more than an archaeological survey; it is a deep dive into the human geography of the late Ottoman Empire. Davis provides a searing critique of the Ottoman tax system, which he saw as the primary cause of the region's poverty and depopulation. Writing just years before the massive civil unrest in the region, Davis captures the underlying tensions between the growing economic power of the Greeks and the Armenians and the traditional Ottoman administration.