The Naked Orientalist

The Turkish Life of French Sailor and Writer Pierre Loti, a Novel

By: James Barrie

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Pierre Loti, a young French sailor, arrives in Salonika to witness the hangings of several Turks at the harbourside. He takes shore leave and behind the bars of a window by the mosque, he spies a young Turkish woman. He disguises himself as an Albanian and begins a love affair with this woman who he calls Aziyadé but whose real name was Hatijay. The romance continued in Constantinople that winter and ended when Loti got his orders to sail in March 1877. Loti wrote of his affair in his first book, also called Aziyadé. This was the beginning of his successful career as a writer and his lifelong love affair with Turkey.

Jonathan is an English language teacher in Istanbul in the late 1980s. When he discovers his flatmate Harry dead in the bath, the word ‘Loti’ written into the grime of the tiled wall and the book Aziyadé left open on his desk, his life takes an unexpected course.

A hundred years earlier, Orhan, a young tea boy, encounters a strange foreigner dressed like a Turkish pasha accompanying a carriage carried through the streets of Constantinople. The carriage contains his aging guardian Khadija. He follows the group to the cemeteries beyond the city’s ancient walls, their destination: his mother’s grave.

Did Loti’s first little book Aziyadé bring about the demise of his heroine? How is Harry’s death linked to Loti, a writer who has been dead for decades? What is Orhan’s relationship to the famous Frenchman? The answers lie in the Turkish cemeteries of Istanbul and a crumbling ancient house in Rochefort, France.

The Naked Orientalist combines both historical and contemporary chapters to explore Loti, his Turkish lover Hatijay and his first book Aziyadé.

‘A tale of love, death and cemeteries… for anyone with a taste for the exotic.’