A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat

• Paperback - March, 1996 - Harcourt
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• By: Jeremy Seal
• ISBN: 0156003937

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About this book

Upon the orders of Kemal Ataturk, the fez replaced the turban as Turkey's national headdress. Outlawed completely in 1925, the turban is viewed as a symbol of Turkish backwardness. While living and teaching in Turkey for several years, Jeremy Seals developed an obsession for the fez, a hat he believes has come to symbolize the soul of the country. Through interviews with villagers and historical essays, Seals chronicles his journey through Turkey, to areas both metropolitan and remote, to find the heart of the country as embodied by its national head gear.

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Reviews by readers

Insanely good

Brilliant concept into trying to understand Turkey's bizarre obsession with headgear. And a great pretext into delving into the culture itself. Easily one of the best travel books ever written. Thoroughly enjoyable!

disappointing...

I found this book to be boring. I kept hoping for it to get more interesting, have more color, more humor, more detail, but it just didn't happen for me. I have travelled to India and parts of Africa, but not Turkey. Maybe if I'd been to Turkey, I would have appreciated the book more. I read almost three quarters of it, and then just put it down. Maybe I was too hopeful that it eventually would be more alluring.

misleading

Brits are much more tolerable when they are making fun of themselves. When I finished reading this book, I felt that the author's main objective was to make fun of Turkish people. The book is full of manipulated historical references and mistranslations. Either J. Seal doesn't know Turkish as much as he claims or he deliberately mistranslated words just to be funny. "Menemen" doesn't mean "Omelet" and "Antep" does not mean "Pistachio".

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