William Lewis Sachtleben
1891, 24 February
Serope Gurdjian standing at the Library of Hadrian, Athens

Photographic b&w nitrate negative, Kodak, reversed
University of California (UCLA) - Library
Collection: Sachtleben (William Lewis) Papers. Collection 1841, Local identifier: uclamss_1841_0205
 
Serope Armenag Gurdjian was an Armenian from Turkey who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and earned a college degree from Bowdoin College in 1877. Having been detained in Istanbul in October 1890 on suspicion of participating in a revolutionary committee, he was released based on his U.S. citizenship and then traveled to Athens, where he met and befriended William Sachtleben and Thomas Allen.
 
View of Serope Gurdjian standing on Roman mosaic pavement at the Library of Hadrian. William Sachtleben's bicycle is parked next to him.
 
Photograph taken during William Lewis Sachtleben's stay in Athens before embarking on a bicycle journey across Asia with Thomas Gaskell Allen Jr.
 
William Lewis Sachtleben was an American long-distance cyclist who rode across Asia from Istanbul to Peking in 1891 to 1892 with Thomas Gaskell Allen Jr., his classmate from Washington University. Their journey had actually begun the day after they graduated from college, when they travelled to New York and on to Liverpool. In all they travelled 15,044 miles by bicycle, “the longest continuous land journey ever made around the world” as reported in their book Across Asia on a bicycle (1895). This collection consists of photographs taken in 1891 covering their winter stay in Athens and part of the journey that followed from Istanbul to Tashkent. The circular format photographs were taken with a Kodak box camera which was one of the first cameras available to amateur photographers (the Kodak, the No. 1, or the No. 2).
 
LL/131275