Letters from Turkey

First published in 2000. Letters from Turkey, considered the best Hungarian prose of the eighteenth century, is written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rakoczi II, the Prince of Transylvania, after the War of Independence in 1704 - 1711 in which the Prince fought to preserve independent Transylvania. The Prince and his entourage spent some years in France, and were then invited to Turkey by Sultan Ahmed III, going there in 1717. Some of the party eventually left, but, like Rakoczi, Mikes spent the rest of life in exile in Turkey. This memoir had a considerable vogue in Transylvania at the time, and Mikes writes in a well-established tradition. The 207 letters, never before translated from Hungarian, were addressed over some forty years to an aunt in Constantinople. In them, Mikes speaks of the Hungarians' daily life, their hopes and disappointments, and of current events in Turkey and beyond; he describes the deaths of some of the party including that of the Prince himself. He also gives an account of a military campaign along the Danube and an embassy to Moldova, ranging over religious, historical and philosophical topics and recounting numerous anecdotes. All the while his patriotic feelings never leave him, nor does his affection, not unblinkered, for his Prince. The last letter, written four years before his death, sees him become head of the Hungarian community in Turkey, last survivor of the original band of Transylvanian nobles exiled to a far country.