John Freely (26 June 1926 – 20 April 2017 ) was an American physicist, teacher, and author of popular travel and history books on Istanbul, Athens, Venice, Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. He was the father of writer and Turko-English literary translator Maureen Freely.

Life

Freely was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up there and in Ireland. He dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17 for the last two years of World War II, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China. He did his undergraduate work at the traditional American Catholic college, Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, under the G.I. Bill. In 1947, Freely married Dolores "Toots" Stanley after they had agreed to devote their lives to travel. He died in the UK in 2015 and his remains were interred in Feriköy Protestant Cemetery in Istanbul.

Academic career

Freely received his PhD in physics at New York University, and later pursued his postdoctoral studies at Oxford University under Alistair Cameron Crombie, the pioneering researcher in the history of Medieval European science. The principal idea he inherited from Crombie was "the continuity of western European science from the Dark Ages through Copernicus, Galileo and Newton". Following his postdoctoral work, he went in 1960 to Istanbul, Turkey, and took up a post at Robert College (later Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University). He subsequently taught courses there in physics and the history of science and astronomy, including the course "The Emergence of Modern Science, East and West", with sojourns in New York City, Boston, London, Athens, Oxford, and Venice. He returned to Boğaziçi University in 1993.

Writing life

Freely was the author of more than 40 books, many of them either histories of Istanbul and Turkey, accounts of the lives of significant figures of the Ottoman Empire or travel guides, especially about Istanbul. Together with Hilary Sumner-Boyd, a colleague from Boğaziçi University, Freely published Strolling Through Istanbul: A Guide to the City in 1972. While sales were initially slow, they picked up as travel to Istanbul increased, and by the early 2000s it was regarded as a classic of the guidebook genre for its blending of the academically rigorous with an accessible, even lively, writing style. It continues in print fifty years after its initial publication. Among the more unusual topics he wrote about were the lives of Cem Sultan, the third son of Sultan Mehmet II who laid claim to the Ottoman throne but was defeated and ended his life in exile in Europe; and Sabbetai Zevi, the so-called Jewish Messiah from Smyrna (now İzmir), who eventually converted, at least on the surface, to Islam and whose followers became known as the Dönme.

Works

Travel guides: History and science books: Wrote foreword: