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Author Edda Renker Weissenbacher was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1938 of German-speaking parents. She spent her childhood in Yesilköy, at that time a green village, as its name suggests. It used to be a small seaside resort inhabited by many Greeks, so she learned Greek while playing with her friends and neighbors' children, and grew up among gay operetta songs and romantic Greek melodies. After Turkish primary school, she studied English at the English High School for Girls in Beyoglu, and French at Notre Dame de Sion in Harbiye.
Edda married and spent five years in Lausanne, Switzerland, where her two children were born, then returned to find that the Istanbul she loved so much was changing rapidly. So she made it her mission to discover as much as possible about its past, and to recapture the feeling of "Old Istanbul" in order to share it with her children.
Edda's previous book, a step-by-step guide to the CHORA-CHURCH (Kariye Camii), was published in 1999 in English, French, German, and Turkish. Copies are now in Istanbul shops, bookstores, and private libraries as well as New York University Institute of Fine Arts (Lehman Collection), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks, Research Library, Washington, DC. Bibliothèque d'Art et d'Archéologie, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Bibliothèque Byzantine (Fonds Thomas Whittemore), Paris Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, Paris Université de Paris Sorbonne, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Münchner Stadtbibliothek, Munich Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Fachbibliothek für Kunstgeschichte, Vienna.
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