Brian Sewell visited Turkey regularly between 1976 and 1986, occasionally on commission from the Sunday Times. At first it was “a way to escape the tyranny of western art”, and later he found himself enraged “that I have spent so much of my time blinkered to Greece, Rome, and Byzantium”. In 1988 he published South from Ephesus: Travels in Aegean Turkey.
He “fell in love” with the ruin-rich land of south-west Turkey, from Ephesus to Side, and wrote with an awesome understanding of its archaeology, and its Lycian, Roman and Hellenistic history, including much invaluable material not found elsewhere. No ruined city appeared to deter him by seeming unreachable.
All this he stirred in with his own comic and frequently libidinous adventures in cheap hotels, hamams and Bodrum night-clubs. He comes across as a tolerant, witty and knowledgable companion, and refrains from indulging in the acerbic soundbites with which he liked to outrage his later readers in the popular press. Though he does find that “Ephesus has as much mystery as Oxford Street or the Champs-Elysées.”
