Islam has shrouded me with a magic that I will never be freed from," Julien Viaud alias Pierre Loti wrote in his 1892 novel Fantômes de l`Orient ("Phantoms of the Orient"), thereby describing his lifelong fascination with the Orient as he saw it: as inscrutable, sensual, and unchanging.

An eccentric personality

Under the pen name Pierre Loti, Frenchman Julien Viaud brought us the zeitgeist of Orientalism in literary form. His autobiographically inspired novels paint a romantic picture of the "mysterious" Orient and manifest a longing for the exotic.

His heart was attached in particular to one city, which became the muse to whom he devoted many of his literary works and where his fame still lives on as the namesake of a hotel, a café, and a school: Istanbul.

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