Turkish Tales

Summary

We hope you will enjoy these fine, old-fashioned stories that Lord Byron wrote in an old-fashioned way. He tells these tales in rhyming verse and heroic couplets, and he makes them dashing, romantic, and even melodramatic in a way that has become foreign to us with the passing of time.

These are tales of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish empire that, in Lord Byron's day, encompassed what we now know as the Middle East from Iran to Morocco, the modern nation of Turkey, and the Balkans as well--modern Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and the other Balkan nations. Byron traveled extensively in the Empire and learned about its history and customs. He then passed what he learned through his own romantic temperament and imagination, and through his fascination with men with darkly troubled souls and the women they love and who love them. In these five stories we find love and honor lost and won, hearts and cities conquered and broken, and a constant struggle to find something higher, deeper and finer in life than what comes to the common lot of humanity.

The first story, The Giaour, is about a Christian knight living in Ottoman Greece. The word "giaour" was the Ottoman term for any Christian. He falls in love with a woman from the Pacha's harem--a love unlikely to succeed.

The second story, The Bride of Abydos, is about the love of a man with a secret past for the daughter of a powerful local ruler. He reveals his secret to her, but only at the moment when war erupts between him and her father.

The Corsair, the third story, picks up on an idea that appears in The Bride of Abydos--the theme of pirates and piracy, an age-old reality of the Mediterranean Sea. An Ottoman ruler decides to destroy a famous corsair, who strikes first. The corsair loses the battle, but gains the love of the ruler's daughter, who frees him--only to encounter a great tragedy.

The fourth story, Lara, both is and is not a sequel to The Corsair. Characters and themes are carried over, but with many changes, and the feeling of the story is remarkably different. Lara is a nobleman who returns to his home after many years of mysterious absence, attended only by an equally mysterious person who acts as his page. He runs afoul of another mysterious knight who seems to know too much about Lara's past. The matter comes to a trial--but the knight disappears. Was murder done? The affair breaks out in war between Lara and the local ruler, and in the end, some of the mystery is lifted--and much of it remains.

The last story, The Siege of Corinth, is about a Christian knight who turns traitor to his people and his faith when the father of the woman he loves refuses to give him her hand. A mysterious midnight encounter leads to a final confrontation between the knight and the father--a confrontation that ends in a spectacular blow for honor.

As you listen, let Lord Byron guide your mind back into an old and rich kind of storytelling and an old and rich form of poetry. Let yourself get used to what happens when a long story is told in verse--an experience not to be found in today's literature.

A Freshwater Seas production.