Panait Istrati

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was born in Romania six years after it separated from the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman culture continued to permeate the newly established nation throughout the author's boyhood, however, and he later lived in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople, which would play a central role in his noveil KYRA KYRALINA. Deeply influenced by life in the Middle East and its distinctive narrative traditions, he set KYRA KYRALINA in the 1850s, the waning years of the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz I, when the empire still retained much of its tradition.