The summer after his first year of university, Bernard O’Kane boarded a train from Ireland to Istanbul, emerging in a world of brightly colored tiles. The next year, he took the same train to Istanbul and boarded a boat to Alexandria to see the architecture of Egypt. He continued this habit a third summer, venturing further east from Turkey into Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The colorful art and architecture of the Islamic world captured O’Kane in a way he wasn’t able to shake then.