Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar poet novelist and critic was a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. His Five Cities was first published in Turkish as Be ehir in 1946 and revised in 1960. It consists of five lyrical essays each focused on a city significant in Anatolian history and in Tanpinars emotional life. Part history part autobiography part poetic meditation on time and memory Five Cities is Proustian in style with a tension between a backwardlooking melancholy and a concern for the unpredictable future of his country. Comparable to Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuks Istanbul Memories of a City Five Cities emphasizes personal attitudes and reactions but has a wider scope of geography history and culture. Ruth Christies translation of Be ehir makes the essays which are as aesthetically appealing as a novel available to readers of English for the first time. show more