We are delighted to have been contacted by the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative. Back in 1995, in volume 10 of Church Monuments, our vice-president Jean Wilson wrote a study of the monument to Thomas Baines (d.1680) and John Finch (d.1682) at Christs College, Cambridge. It was a pioneering study of the commemoration of a same-sex relationship, part of the genesis of gay art-history.

But Baines had another tomb, in what is now the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery. He had accompanied Finch to Istanbul, where Finch was ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and Baines died there. His viscera were buried there, and Finch had his body embalmed and brought back to Cambridge for burial. Finch was himself buried in the same tomb.

The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative https://www.ferikoycemetery.org/ was founded in 2018 by scholars affiliated with the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Netherlands Institute in Turkey and the Orient-Institut Istanbul, and joined in 2019 by the Hungarian Cultural Center, the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the British Institute at Ankara. The Initiative aims to preserve, document, and study Istanbul’s main Protestant cemetery as an important local historic landmark. The Cemetery has recently been admitted to the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe. For a report of the celebrations of this landmark event, see https://www.significantcemeteries.org/2022/12/ferikoy-protestant-cemetery-celebrates.html .

The Initiative has an online journal, The Ledger http://www.ferikoycemetery.org/bulletin/ , which will shortly be featuring an article on the Baines tomb.