Meander
East to West along a Turkish River
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal is duty-bound to accept while travelling the length of it in a one-man canoe. At every twist and turn of his journey, from the Meander's source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea, Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural, historical and personal asides.
It is a journey that takes him from Turkey's steppe interior - the stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes, Alexander the Great and the Crusader Kings - to the great port city of Miletus, home of the earliest Western philosophers. Along the way Seal unpicks the history of this remarkable region, but he also encounters a rich assortment of contemporary characters who reveal a rural Turkey on the cusp of change. Above all, this is the story of a river that first brought the cultures of East and West into contact - and conflict - with one another, its banks littered with the spoil of empires, the marks of war, and the detritus of recent industrialisation.
At once epic, intimate and insightful, Meander is a brilliant evocation of a land between two worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I had never been up a minaret the question was whether it was wise that I should begin with a derelict one." Seal (A Fez of the Heart), who has long rambled the highways and byways of Anatolia, ponders this and a thousand other timeless queries as he travels the length of the river that gives his book its name. The Menderes, as it is now known, once boasted the world's most fabulous cities along its windy banks, and caravans passed by carrying the treasures, and warriors, of Rome, Persia, Byzantium, and Egypt. The ravages of time, earthquakes and deliberate erasures have conspired to leave a forgotten region of dusty provincial backwaters, full of menacing dogs and peculiar personalities. Seal takes advantage of his circuitous route to meditate on the joy of the open road in the style of Paul Theroux or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Along the way, he interweaves his river's history, from the march of Xerxes to the spread of Christianity to the atrocities of the Greco-Turkish wars, with his own observations on rural Turkey and the societal convulsions since, he muses to himself, "eople like you began to arrive." Lively and richly detailed, this will appeal to all those who love reading about epic travelogues of arduous journeys. Photos.
