It may seem that, by forty, Siesbye had lived a full life by most standards. She was born in Istanbul, in 1938, to an intellectual, cosmopolitan family. Her mother’s family were district governors in present-day Azerbaijan, and fled to Istanbul during the Bolshevik takeover. Her father, Ziyad Ebüzziya, was a politician, journalist, and art collector, and the grandson of Ebüzziya Mehmed Tevfik, a publisher, polymath, and key figure in the reformist Young Ottomans movement. Siesbye grew up among the élite writers, poets, and artists of the early Turkish Republic. After attending boarding school in England, she worked as an assistant at the workshop of the pioneering Turkish ceramic artist Füreya Koral, who was a friend of the Ebüzziya family.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter