Book about Odesa through the eyes of a captured Englishman presented at the Bookstore-Café

The Bookstore-Café continued to introduce visitors to the Odesa Through the Eyes of Strangers book series and on May 21 presented the book Odesa and Its People Through the Eyes of an English Prisoner in Russia by William Burkhardt Barker.

The book is the story of an Englishman with a difficult fate and, like other books in the series, reflects the author's view of nineteenth-century Odessans.

As for the author, the English-language Wikipedia says that he was born around 1810, when his father, John Barker, was the consul in Aleppo. He was brought to England in 1819, where he was educated. For some time he was a professor of Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hindustani at Eton College. During the Crimean War, William Barker provided his knowledge of oriental languages and character to the British government, in whose service he died of cholera in Sinop, on the Black Sea, on January 28, 1856, at the age of 45, while working as the chief of the land transport depot in that place.

The presented copy of the book had a special emphasis - a typo in the name of the aggressor country, which looked ironic in the context of today.

Earlier, the Bookstore-Café presented another book in the series "Odesa through the Eyes of Strangers" - a description of Odesa through the eyes of an early nineteenth-century American Robert Stevens, first published in Ukrainian. The author described the city, the port and the life of Odessans through the eyes of a person who saw Odesa 200 years ago. The book was written in 1819 and published in Newport (Rhode Island, USA).

As well as a brochure "From Mykolaiv to Odesa and from Odesa to the Inland Empire" by nineteenth-century professor Edward Clarke. This is a Ukrainian translation of fragments of the famous work of the English traveler, scholar, and professor at Cambridge University, Edward Daniel Clarke. The publication contains his observations during a trip to southern Ukraine, including descriptions of Odesa and the surrounding region in the late 1830s.

Кирило Бойко