Obituaries

John Freely

John Freely (1926 – 2017): Personal Recollections of a Friend and Colleague

by Professor Süheyla Artemel, Professor of English Literature (retired), Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

John will be an unforgettable person who has left his mark and legacy both on Boğaziçi University as an iconic figure and on the minds of many people across the world through his life, publications, and teaching.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926 of Irish-American parents of very modest circumstances, John Freely dropped out of school and at the age of 17 enlisted in the US Navy during the Second World War.

When the war was over he attended Iona College on a G.I. Bill, majoring in physics with minors in philosophy and mathematics. He went on to do his Masters and PhD in physics at New York University while at the same time working as a research physicist, first at the US Army Signal Corps Laboratory in Camp Evans and afterwards in Forrestal Research Centre at Princeton University. While working in the Single Corps Laboratory, he made a discovery in electron physics, on which he wrote a paper with two of his colleagues, which was published in the Physical Review. This was followed by two more collaborative papers published in the same prestigious journal. It was as a result of these labours that he was offered a job at the Forrestal Research Centre, where he worked on ‘Project Matterhorn’ – a project on thermonuclear fusion, at the time classified as top secret.

After receiving his PhD in 1960 he was offered a permanent research position at Princeton, but chose instead a life of travel and “exile” (J. Freely, A Life of Exile: A Vagabond Life, 2016). In keeping with a bond that he and his wife Dolores had made that when they married they would travel the world together.

The job that he applied for and obtained was at Robert College (founded in 1863 in the Ottoman Empire, as the first American college of higher education outside the United States, later transformed in to present day Boğaziçi University). The city where the College was situated – Istanbul – was a place he had always dreamed of ever since reading about it in his great grandfather’s book, A Pictorial Journey Around the World, which he had discovered in the attic of his mother’s house in Ireland. John had been fascinated most by the chapter on ‘Constantinople’ showing the mosques and minarets on the Seven Hills and the Bosphorus (The Art of Exile, p. 14).

At Robert College, he taught physics and collaborated in redesigning the curriculum together with the then Department Head Professor Robert McMickle. He continued to teach at Robert College / Boğaziçi University until in his late eighties, with intermittent sabbatical leaves and one long and some short breaks abroad. On one occasion, he went back to New York and joined the Physics Department of the City College of New York for a year as a visiting full professor.

John had an amazing academic career which brought together the natural and social sciences. In fact, it may be said of him what Sir Thomas Browne said of ‘man’; he was like the “great amphibium living simultaneously in divided and distinguished worlds” (Religio Medici, 1643; quoted in Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, 1950, p. 41).

While teaching physics he also authored more than 60 books on diverse social subjects: Ottoman history, the architecture of Byzantium and Istanbul as well as travel-guide books on Istanbul and the prominent historical and natural sites of the Mediterranean and the Balkans such as Athens, Venice, the Cyclades archipelago, and the Aegean costs of Turkey – in short, wherever his footsteps led him and Dolores. His books are remarkable for the way they unite accuracy and erudition with first-hand observation, imaginative depth and a great narrative power – books for each of which he spent immense time studying and reading all sources available to him. His two volumes on A History of Robert College in 2000 and A Bridge of Culture: Robert College – Boğaziçi University, How an American College in Istanbul Became a Turkish University in 2009, reflect the research conducted during a leave of absence for a term in the archives of Robert College at their New York Office as well as in all available sources.

He was a truly dedicated reader as well as a prolific writer with an amazing memory. I should like to relate an incident that he mentions in his autobiography: In his sixties, he had a light transient stroke in Venice. When told by the doctor at the hospital that this could have been due to “usual atrophy”, he was alarmed at the prospect of losing his memory and in order to test his recollective powers, John’s immediate reaction was, in his own words, “I began solving complex mathematical problems in my head, such as computing the Fibonacci numbers, after which I silently recited the names of all the Byzantine emperors, Ottoman sultans and Venetian doges…But my memory seemed as good as ever which greatly relieved me, since my brain was my only resource, the machine that powered my cottage industry of writing books.” (The Art of Exile, p. 202)

The same assiduity and the same anxiety for correctness and depth may be seen in his preparation for his lectures. For his course on the history of science, for instance, he spent a year at Oxford University to work with Alistair Crombie, who was an expert in the field of the intellectual history of medieval European science. The outcome of these studies not only led to an extremely popular History of Science course at first at Robert College, then at Boğaziçi University, but also paved the way for the publication of no less than 6 books on the development of medieval and modern science in Europe and the contribution of the learning of the East on Western science such as his Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World.

John departed from Istanbul after the death of his beloved wife Dolores in 2015, to be together with his daughter Maureen (novelist and translator) and his grandchildren in England. He passed away on 20 April 2017, shortly after his visit to the Unites States for the launching of his book, The House of Memory: Reflections on Youth and War (March 7, 2017). During his last days he was still working on a book on Byzantine architecture. His ashes were brought to Istanbul and placed in the same grave as that of Dolores.

John was a very close and dear friend of my husband and me. We, not only shared our living quarters in Tower House on campus for 5 years but also our mutual joys and anxieties. We always considered ourselves as an extension of John’s family, as the tastes and outlook of our two families on life closely resembled each other. John and my late husband Âli both loved Greek music but both seemed to enjoy its melodies best on the shores of the Bosphorus. The warm and enjoyable parties and lively entertaining evenings that brought together the relatively small population of instructors and their families at that time at Robert College was only one facet of our shared inclinations. What brought us even closer together and bonded the ties between our families was a deep concern and ardent dedication to ‘greater’ causes and ideals which - though we might have not have been able to achieve some as desired at the end of our long and relentless struggles - for the welfare and future prospects of the University and its vicinity. Among some of these, I recall our efforts to preserve and protect the historic cemetery and the hill above Robert College where a Bektashi tekke of Nafi Baba that dates back to the 15th century was situated. John also took an active part in starting a campaign that I led and coordinated in the early 1970s for initiating an environmental preservation project that aimed at conserving the natural and historic sites and buildings of the Bosphorus. These efforts and struggles bear testimony to John's unwavering dedication to the conservation of historic and cultural heritage.

His efforts to save the values and traditions of Robert College and Boğaziçi University, his painstaking work together with Keith Greenwood, David Garwood and Hilary Sumner-Boyd, who were professors at Robert College / Boğaziçi University, to preserve the Boğaziçi University library collection intact, once reputed to be the richest and the best in the Middle East and Southern Mediterranean, can of course not be mentioned without gratitude.

John won the love and admiration of everyone on the Boğaziçi campus and the Hisar village (the favourite ‘Can Baba’ of the locals). He was admired by the librarians for the assiduous research he carried out particularly in the Rare Book section. The library to John was, as he put it, his sanctuary. Following publication of his books, he had a habit of giving as a present a signed copy to the library staff to whom he felt grateful and indebted. John was a prolific and erudite writer who penned, as has been mentioned above, each of his enlightening and captivating books on Turkey and other parts of the Mediterranean after conducting extensive research as well as drawing upon his personal incisive observations.

There is so much to write about him and his late wife Dolores whom he affectionately addressed as ‘Toots’. But, I should like to add as a last note, that if one learns from the lives and achievements of inspiring people, John and Dolores have left their mark as genuine and living examples of how to be human, how to connect with people of different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds - examples that we so much need in these times when the ills of alienation and segregation seem to prevail all over the world.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eulogy for service at Feriköy Protestant Cemetery, read by his daughter Maureen, 11.5.17

All of you assembled here know my father’s story. From his books, if not from the man himself..

There is his childhood in Ireland and Brooklyn.

There are his adventures during World War II.

There is my mother, with whom he signed a pact in blood to travel the world, as soon as he finished graduate school.

And the move to Istanbul, in 1960, with three children, aged 8, 5 and 1.

There are the travels along almost all the shores of the Mediterranean, always returning to Istanbul and the shores of the Bosphorus, where he and my mother made their home for most of the next 55 years.

There are the legendary parties, most especially the St Patricks Day parties.

And the books. 65 of them at the last count.

Those of you who worked with him or were taught by him will remember him also a man of science, and as a dedicated chronicler of the history of science.

But those of us who had the good fortune to accompany him on his travels either in person or in print will also remember that it was the poets, ancient and modern, who fired his imagination and shaped his life.

There were, first of all, the ballads of the West of Ireland, where Irish was still a spoken language when he lived there as a boy. There was Homer, whom he read as a young man, not long before he himself sailed through the Suez Canal during the last months of World War II, to enter a Mediterranean Sea he could not help but see as mythical. There was Shelley’s Ozymandias, which captured what he’d seen by then – an entire world in ruins – and what he saw in the beautiful, haunting remains of the classical world during his many travels thereafter.

And then there was William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet, with whom my father sailed to Byzantium in his imagination many years before he saw it with his own eyes:

Let me read that poem to you now.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

I have chosen to read this poem today not just because it brought him here, but because when I read it now, just weeks after losing him, I can see so much of him in it. Because John the scientist thought a great deal about eternity. All his life, he sang of what was past, or passing, or to come. And it was in Istanbul – Constantinople - Byzantium that he found his soul.

His first guide was Evliya Çelebi. During our first week in Istanbul, in September 1960, he found a century-old translation of Evliya’s Seyahatname in the Robert College library. Before another week was out, our father was leading us through the back streets of the Old City, and finding at every turn clear evidence that – four centuries on - Evliya’s spirit still lived as it is in Strolling through Istanbul, which he wrote with Hilary Sumner Boyd. And in Stamboul Sketches, Evliya Efendi is not just the ghost but the acknowledged co-author. For the aim of that book was, in my father’s words, to ‘bridge the gulf of years that separate Evliya’s time from ours, so as to reveal something of the continuity of human experience which seems to exist in this ancient city.’

It was a young man who wrote those words. The young girl I was then did not really understand them. But I do remember our father’s almost transcendent wonder, every time we found an old wooden house propped up by an ancient column, or walked through a fish market or a flower market or a cauldron market that dated back centuries and perhaps millennia, or happened onto a gang of street boys whose games and tricks and secret codes took him back not just to his own boyhood in Brooklyn, but also, perhaps, to the days when his own great grandfather had walked these same streets as a soldier during the Crimean War. It was in Evilya’s Istanbul that he found clear evidence that the past was always with us, but not just in what we saw. It was also in the stories, and in the beautiful voice telling it.

During the last years of his life, John set out to make sense of his own journeys in four memoirs. One of these, still to be published, was Stamboul Ghosts, which was, in his own words, an evocation of his departed friends. ‘They reappear to me from the night of time,’ he says, ‘in the lost city I once knew. Their shades still speak to me from beyond the grave, as did the comrades of Odysseus when he met them in the Underworld, the Country of Dreams.’

Many of those friends now rest in this very cemetery, alongside the plot that John will now be sharing with our beloved mother, Dolores. It was his final wish to be brought back here to rest alongside her. And though it will break our hearts to leave him there, we can take comfort in the fact that there could be no better place for him. We have brought him back the city where he found his soul. We shall place him next to his Dolores, his Toots, his Penelope, in the loveliest corner of this lovely cemetery, surrounded by the friends with whom he shared so many adventures and sparkling conversations, and so much fun.

To help us along the way, let me end with the poem that led him through his final writings, and wove itself in and our of so many of our conversations during his last months and days:

Ithaka, BY C. P. Cavafy, Translated by Edmund Keeley

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Thank you for sharing with us the last leg of John’s journey.

Author and professor John Freely who passed away on 20 April 2017 aged 90, an expert of Istanbul history and who attended our Istanbul conference as guest of honour in 2014 - external obituary: / from Cornucopia::