Turkish Mirror takes the reader on an adventurous journey back in time to 16th century Hungary, when the country was still a new suzerainty of the victorious Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. The novel describes an unstable borderland situated between two great empires, a colorful cavalcade of calendars, taxation systems, languages, sacred writings, kings and emperors, mighty sultans, Hungarian nobles and Ottoman Beys, merchants, city burghers, village magistrates, and - from time to time - even angels, djinns and peculiar flying machines.
In the book, we see the city of Pécs gradually giving way to the world of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, where camels walk the streets, apricots and dates hang from the trees in abundance, thieves roam the woods, and the first mosque and Turkish bath are built. Indeed, the great charm of Turkish Mirror lies in its uninhibited flair for storytelling, while its ingenuity lies in showing us the world of Hungary through the eyes of the occupying Ottoman Turks. This is presented as a complex, puzzling, multicultural land, fraught with danger and ruled by complex power relations, as opposed to the Padishah’s civilized and refined empire. Thanks to this surprising point of view, the reader visits a terrain where everything that was familiar is now foreign and exotic.
