My friend Marc Dubin, who has died aged 70, was one of the leading English-language travel writers on Greece, Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. For more than four decades 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 places he loved.
In the late 1970s, Marc left his home in California to travel through Central America before settling in Europe. To finance his travels he worked as a photographer, producing many of the postcard images that introduced holidaymakers to the Mediterranean long before 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 team interviewing candidates for the second, much-expanded, edition of The Rough Guide to Greece. Asked how he would bargain for rooms in Athens’ Plaka district, Marc replied in what sounded to me like faultless Greek. The interview was effectively over.
Marc became one of Rough Guides’ most dependable writers, producing guides to Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the Balkans. His prose was informed, elegant and quietly funny, underpinned by an insistence on accuracy. If a hotel, taverna or archaeological site appeared in one of his books, it had earned its place.
His interests extended beyond guidebooks. He could talk with equal authority about Byzantine churches, Ottoman architecture, rebetika (a form of urban, popular Greek music) and contemporary Greek politics.
For all his achievements, Marc remained indifferent to worldly success. Material possessions interested him less than another journey, obscure church or a meal with friends.
Born in Los Angeles, Marc grew up in Beverly Hills, and attended University high school in west LA. His father, Louis, was a clinical bioanalyst who served in military intelligence during the second world war, and his mother, Lee (nee Lieblich), qualified as a nurse later in life, after Louis’ premature death. Marc would recall delivering wine to his family’s neighbour, Groucho Marx, sharing his aunt’s swimming pool with Dustin Hoffman during the filming of The Graduate, and the shadow cast by the Sharon Tate murders. After graduating in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977, he embarked on his travels.
During the 90s he bought a derelict property on Samos, much of which he restored himself. This became his base on the Greek islands, while he kept a flat in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.
As well as Rough Guides, Marc wrote numerous guidebooks, and his work was translated into French, German, Polish and Spanish. For many years he was the Daily Telegraph’s Greek islands destination expert.
Diagnosed with a brain tumour 12 years ago, he refused to let illness define him. At the time of his death he had been updating Berlitz’s Greek Islands guide.
Marc is survived by his wife, Zdravka Mihaylova, a Bulgarian diplomat whom he met at the Hydra rebetiko conference in 2003 and married in 2024, and his sisters, Vivian and Gail.
