The Swede Jacob Jonas Bjinstahl, who stayed in Istanbul in about 1778 during his travels in the Ottoman empire, saw the great religious feasts which make the city even more colourful. He also had the horrifying experience of being present during a plague epidemic and was unfortunate enough to die on his return Journey in Salonika without ever seeing his homeland again. Towards the end of that century an art academy was founded with the efforts of the French ambassador, Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier: this academy was a research centre where men of the arts and sciences engaged in recording the beauties and treasures of the city gathered. A topographer named Kauffer drew the very first plan of the city that was of any scientific value and artists produced a number of large paintings. In 1786, an Englishwoman who had observed all this work, Lady Elizabeth Craven, remarked about it and expressed her own views about Istanbul in the following sentence: "The Turks revere the beauty of nature so much that they do not cut down trees in the places where they build their houses. On the contrary, they set aside a place for the tree inside their home and the branches of the tree are considered to be the finish adornment for the roof." She then remarks about the narrowness of the streets, saying that "as the houses become higher the people living on either side of the street could reach across and hold the hands of their neighbours on the other side." With this sentence she stresses a feature that many other travellers had noticed as well. However, the thing that angered the young Englishwoman most was the laziness of the people of Istanbul. "I have even seen people who sit on the seashore watching the kites in the sky or children getting into boats and taking trips for a whole day, from morning to. evening," The English traveller Jacques Dallaway, who filled his work with pedantic observations, states that according to records,in 1795 there were 88,185 houses and 130 Turkish baths in the city and that its population was at least 400,000. He comments that a great deal of natural beauty was destroyed because of the interest in making gardens like the ones in Europe and states quite openly that an excessive love of luxury and display had spoiled Turkish tastes, which were based on tradition. European fashions and tastes were now quite openly dominant in Istanbul. According to Dallaway the streets were narrow and dirty and all this filth could be only partially cleared away by the large number of stray dogs in the city.The houses were made of wood and appeared to unsound. The streets, however, were safe and shops remained open all day, even if their owners were nowhere to be seen. "Offences such as theft are entirely foreign to the Turks," he concludes.

A number of pictures were produced that depicted the Istanbul of the 18th century in a far more realistic manner than the panorama of Merian, which was filled with imaginary details, One of these was painted by an officer names Loos who accompanied King Karl XII of Sweden on his visit to Istanbul at the beginning of the 18th century. His pictures, which depicted the city and its monuments, were only discovered in recent years and are just like photographs of Istanbul taken three hundred years ago. The Austrian Baron von Gudenus drew a general view of Istanbul from the heights of Beyo~lu with Tophane and Galata in the foreground, and the city divided into sections. Etchings of these different sections and published. Their most interesting feature is the houses in traditional Turkish architectural style with broad eaves and windows decorated with plaster

ornaments. In later years, when Galata assumed a more cosmopolitan character, these houses disappeared. Apart from these persons, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, two European artists, Antoine Louis Castellan and lgnaz Melling, were at work trying to record all the beauty of Istanbul. Castellan painted the New Mosque (Yeni Cami), the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Sarayburnu, the Shrine of SOleymaniye, mciii Kbsk (the Pearl Summerhouse) and other suchplaces, thus having something by which to remember his journey to Istanbul, which he described as "a ravishing dream". Melling, who was rightly known as "the unrivalled painter of the Bosphorus", produced forty large paintings, each of which could be described as a work of art, of Istanbul and the Bosphorus. These pictures were obviously published, for, as stated in an anonymous travelogue written in about 1817, "Sometimes these pictures contain an excessive amount of detail in an endeavour to reflect the reality but they depict the modern buildings and landscapes of this city, every view of which is attractive, in a manner more successful than that achieved in the most sensitive written descriptions."