John Freely

John Freely was born in 1926 in New York and enlisted in the United States Navy at the age of seventeen. He served as a commando in Burma and China during the final years of World War II. In 1960, he completed his Ph.D. in physics at New York University and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies in the History of Science at Oxford. He first went to Istanbul in 1960 to teach physics at Robert College, now known as the University of Bosporus. He returned there in 1993 after working in New York, Boston, London, Athens, and Venice. He has published over forty travel books and guides, mostly focused on Greece and Turkey.