Winter '29

Istanbul winter - Erenköy, Asya.  6 February 1929.  My father, then a military cadet at Kuleli, had a large portfolio of this and similar photographs. I remember as a small boy in Bayswater looking through them with fascination, awed, I think, by the contrast of coal-fired black trains and still white snow veiled in darkening afternoon light. Big trains from before I was born, on their shuddering, steaming, clangorous way to Ankara and beyond, journeying the tracks of the old Chemins de Fer Ottoman d'Anatolie, hot iron, oil and smoke on the wind. No idea what happened to those pictures, left to rot or be dispersed in a shed in Dún Laoghaire I suspect, back in '51.*

25 January 2022

* Portrait of a Turkish Family, Afterword.