Walk the Turkish Embassy Letters, Belgrade to Adrianople

An ambassador's wife on the road

In 1717, the wife of the new British ambassador to the Sublime Porte journeys deep into Ottoman territory. Writing home to her friends, she trades the drawing rooms of London for the mountains of the Balkans—recording everything from the miseries of war to the interior of a women's bathhouse with a famously unapologetic eye.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went east with her husband, the new British ambassador to the Ottoman court. In the spring of 1717 the embassy crossed from Belgrade through the Serbian forests to Niš, on to Sofia, over the Balkan mountains and across the Thracian plain by Plovdiv to Adrianople, today's Edirne, where the Sultan's court then was.

Her letters home are sharp, funny and unlike anything else written by a European traveller at the time. She visited the women's bathhouse in Sofia, studied Turkish, and saw smallpox inoculation practised in Adrianople, then brought it back to England. The letters were published in 1763, after her death. She gives no distances, so the 448 miles follow the historic road.