The team at Frome Nursing Home no longer bat an eyelid when they hear a resident suddenly speaking Turkish during conversations.

Robert Darley-Doran's life has taken him from a house above Seneca Lake in Upstate New York to the streets of Istanbul, across Turkey and deep into the Middle East - cataloguing Islamic coins.

A chance purchase of a first silver coin the size of a British crown covered in Arabic inscriptions bought in Erzurum, a city in the east of Turkey, started a lifelong passion for coins that hasn’t diminished to this day.

The coin was minted in Kostantiniyya, Constantinople, bearing the insignia of the ruling Ottoman sultan on one side and the date of striking on the other. At that exact moment Robert was hooked.

For more than half a century, Robert built his life around the study of Islamic coins, travelling with his wife and two children, Kathy and George. Even though he sadly now lives with vascular dementia, his eye for a coin remains.

Robert, a resident of the home since 2025, grew up in Geneva, Upstate New York, in a house overlooking Seneca Lake. A railway line ran at the end of the garden, and Robert traces his lifelong love of trains back to the sound of them passing at night.

Robert has spent more than half a century cataloguing Islamic coins and continues that work in Frome.
Robert has spent more than half a century cataloguing Islamic coins and continues that work in Frome. (Frome Nursing Home)

After university he lived in Ankara, the capital of Turkey before returning to New York. The pull of Turkey soon became too strong to ignore; he bought a one-way ticket on a steamship and didn't look back.

After meeting Liz and spending years travelling, the family of four settled in England with Robert becoming a British citizen in the 1990s.

With Robert’s knowledge of coins and Liz’s experience as a writer and editor, they made a good team, and over the years their work took them well beyond England. His first book recorded a collection of gold coins belonging to a Lebanese banker and was published in Switzerland in both English and Arabic.

They prepared Islamic coin auction catalogues for Spink and Sotheby’s in London, before their work took them to the middle east. In Oman, they wrote a book on the country’s coinage and helped set up a coin and banknote museum for the Central Bank.

Not every trip went quite to plan. In Casablanca, they arrived to value a collection belonging to a man who had recently died, only to discover he had already sold everything of value and spent the money.

His family weren’t best pleased, although the trip wasn’t a complete loss; his widow cooked them bistilla, a Moroccan dish that Robert and Liz remembered as one of the most delicious things they had ever eaten.

Their latest book, on Byzantine and early Islamic copper coins, was finished just before Robert moved to Frome Nursing Home in 2025 but he and Liz completed three more cataloguing jobs together at the start of 2026 and hope there is still more work ahead.

More than half a century on from that first coin in Turkey, the knowledge is still there.