Marc Dubin obituary | Journey guides

My good friend Marc Dubin, who has died aged 70, was one of many main English-language journey writers on Greece, Turkey and the japanese Mediterranean. For greater than 4 many years he wrote and edited guidebooks for Rough Guides, Insight Guides, Berlitz, DK Eyewitness and Lonely Planet, combining meticulous scholarship with an infectious enthusiasm for the locations he liked.

In the late Seventies, Marc left his dwelling in California to journey via Central America earlier than settling in Europe. To finance his travels he labored as a photographer, producing lots of the postcard photographs that launched holidaymakers to the Mediterranean lengthy earlier than the digital age.

By the early 80s he was contributing guidebooks to Lonely Planet. Soon afterwards I met him when, as co-founder of Rough Guides, I joined the crew interviewing candidates for the second, much-expanded, version of The Rough Guide to Greece. Asked how he would cut price for rooms in Athens’ Plaka district, Marc replied in what sounded to me like faultless Greek. The interview was successfully over.

Marc turned one in all Rough Guides’ most reliable writers, producing guides to Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the Balkans. His prose was knowledgeable, elegant and quietly humorous, underpinned by an insistence on accuracy. If a resort, taverna or archaeological web site appeared in one in all his books, it had earned its place.

His pursuits prolonged past guidebooks. He might discuss with equal authority about Byzantine church buildings, Ottoman structure, rebetika (a type of city, in style Greek music) and modern Greek politics.

For all his achievements, Marc remained detached to worldly success. Material possessions him lower than one other journey, obscure church or a meal with buddies.

Born in Los Angeles, Marc grew up in Beverly Hills, and attended University highschool in west LA. His father, Louis, was a medical bioanalyst who served in navy intelligence throughout the second world struggle, and his mom, Lee (nee Lieblich), certified as a nurse later in life, after Louis’ untimely dying. Marc would recall delivering wine to his household’s neighbour, Groucho Marx, sharing his aunt’s swimming pool with Dustin Hoffman throughout the filming of The Graduate, and the shadow forged by the Sharon Tate murders. After graduating in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977, he launched into his travels.

During the 90s he purchased a derelict property on Samos, a lot of which he restored himself. This turned his base on the Greek islands, whereas he stored a flat in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.

As properly as Rough Guides, Marc wrote quite a few guidebooks, and his work was translated into French, German, Polish and Spanish. For a few years he was the Daily Telegraph’s Greek islands vacation spot professional.

Diagnosed with a mind tumour 12 years in the past, he refused to let sickness outline him. At the time of his dying he had been updating Berlitz’s Greek Islands information.

Marc is survived by his spouse, Zdravka Mihaylova, a Bulgarian diplomat whom he met on the Hydra rebetiko convention in 2003 and married in 2024, and his sisters, Vivian and Gail.