Victor Fontanier - Voyages en Orient, entrepris par ordre du gouvernement français. (Turquie d´Asie) - 1829

FONTANIER, Victor. Voyages en Orient, entrepris par ordre du gouvernement français. de l´année 1821 a l´année 1829, Ornés de Figures et d´une Carte; par V. Fontanier. . . Turquie d´Asie. Paris: Librairie Universelle de P. Mongie Ainé, 1829. 8vo (21 x 14 cm.) . XIII, 332 p. One folded map. Frontispiece engraving and six full-page plans. First edition. A second volume (Constantinople and Greece) was also published in the same year. Half-leather binding (preserves the original soft covers) . Slight foxing spots throughout the text, some pages with a tan color (especially the map) . Monsieur Fontanier, consul in Trebizond, gives us successively accurate and living portraits of the less explored parts of the Ottoman Empire" (Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient, t. I, Warning, p. VII) . First trip to the East carried out by order of the French government. Victor Fontanier (1796-1857) , a naturalist by training, attached to the French Embassy in Constantinople. Having left France in 1821, Victor Fontanier went to Constantinople, Odessa, then to the Russian provinces of the Caucasus. He visited Baku as well as the shores of the Caspian Sea, entered Persia through Yerevan, Nakhitchevan, Tabriz; reached Baghdad through Hamadan, descended the Tigris to Basra. By the south of Persia, the author went to Georgia, traversed the Guriel and the Mingrelie before returning to Constantinople by skirting the Lazique or Lazistan coast (coasts of the Black Sea) .