John Freely
Irish-American physics professor who became better known as a travel writer, historian and aficionado of Istanbul
JOHN FREELY, who has died aged 90 a week after returning from the New York launch of his autobiographical memoir, The House of Memory, was an Irish-American historian, physicist and author of popular travel books; he was based for most of his working life in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Bebek, overlooking the fast-flowing waters of the Bosphorus.
Of his 50 or so publications, including dozens of guidebooks to provinces, cities and islands in Greece and Turkey, two achieved cult status as travel books — the discursive Strolling Through Istanbul (written with Hilary Sumner-Boyd, 1972) and Stamboul Sketches (1974). He also wrote with enthusiasm about the history of science — in books such as Aladdin’s Lamp, (2009), Light from the East (2010), and Before Galileo (2012) — as well as about the Ottoman Empire.
But these were pleasurable diversions; his salaried job was as Professor of Physics at Robert College, an old American Protestant school which was nationalised and renamed Bosphorus University.
Freely had a renowned capacity for befriending his students, talking to strangers, hosting parties (the family bath would be turned into a giant ice-filled cocktail basin), dancing, walking his way to a full knowledge of a landscape, and for squashing an incipient hangover with a dawn swim. He relished his outsider status as a free-speaking, free-thinking Irishman, free of political, ethnic, sexual or religious prejudice. He was a charismatic presence at any bar in Venice, Athens, Beirut — the holy fool, the scholar gypsy and the pied piper.
The historian Philip Mansel said that “no one knew Istanbul better”; the Turkish painter Omer Uluc described Freely as “the memory of the city”; and the writer Jason Goodwin recalled: “John Freely has made me laugh harder than any man I know.”
Not all his drinking friends were so reputable. In Athens, Freely befriended Gust Avrakotos, the CIA officer who had told the Colonels that “my official instructions are to tell you to free Andreas Papandreou. My personal advice is to shoot the bastard”.
Freely’s writing was refreshingly free from nationalist slant. This was also reflected in the subjects of his biographies: Jem, the Ottoman Sultan who spent most of his life as a prisoner-guest in Christendom; Sabbati Sevi, the charismatic Jewish mystic who was believed to be the Messiah but ended up a Muslim; and Evliya Celebi, the 17th-century Ottoman travel writer who has been compared to Pepys. He also wrote a perceptive biography of the multi-cultural influences that shaped Mehmet the Conqueror.
Freely crossed the Atlantic 14 times by ship and could make a cat’s cradle of any chart of the Mediterranean, having taken every conceivable ferry across the inner sea in the past 50 years. These cultural expeditions doubled as family holidays for his three children, who also accompanied him on his Saturday walks through the streets, history and bars of Istanbul. In most other ways, his children were left to range freely, for the children of lovers can be orphans. Freely’s beloved wife “Toots” shared his lifelong wanderlust, while acting as his agent, manager and enabler.
John Freely was born on June 26, 1926 in Brooklyn into an Irish-American family with a childhood divided between lodging houses there and the peat-scented cottages of his ancestors in Kerry’s Dingle peninsula. His mother, Peg Murphy, twice took John to live with her parents in Ireland.
In one typically funny but painful aside, John remembered asking her if the family was working-class, to be told that “they could be” if his father, also John, could only stay sober enough to hold down a job. (He was by turns a tram driver, gardener and gravedigger.)
John was expelled from his Brooklyn high school (scoring 0pc in all subjects, so it was said, except for the humanities in which he scored 100pc) and seem destined to become cannon fodder. He enlisted in the US Navy and served in their Commando unit. On his 19th birthday, he was in a gun nest in the South Pacific, shooting up at Japanese aeroplanes. From there he sailed across the Indian Ocean to Calcutta and then journeyed up through the Burmese mountains, arriving in southwest China as World War II ended and the Chinese civil war began. Fortunately, the Catholic priest on board his US warship introduced him to a list of 100 classic books of the world, from Homer to Joyce, as recommended by St John’s College, Annapolis. He read them all.
Once ignited, his intellect was never dampened, and on the GI Bill he chose to study Physics (first at Iona college, New York, run by the Christian Brothers), then undertook a doctorate at New York University, from where he was recruited to work at the Forrestal nuclear research centre at Princeton. In 1951 he married “Toots”, Dolores Stanley, his college sweetheart, who had made him promise to take her travelling. They experimented by living on a rat-infested riverboat at Red Bank, New Jersey, but in 1960, they achieved their shared dream when Freely got a post to teach theoretical physics at Robert College. She died in Istanbul in 2015.
Freely continues to cavort as the central male character in two novels by his daughter, Maureen Freely, Sailing Through Byzantium and The Life of the Party. He was always that.
His last recorded words were: “I am going to find where the words come from.”
John Freely, who died on April 20, is survived by his daughters, Maureen and Eileen, and son Brendan.