Meander

Product Description

The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the rivers 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 & turn of his journey from the Meanders source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural historical & personal asides. It is a journey that takes him from Turkeys steppe interior
- the stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes Alexander the Great & 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 & West into contact
- & conflict
- with one another its banks littered with the spoil of empires the marks of war & the detritus of recent industrialisation. At once epic intimate & insightful Meander" is a brilliant evocation of a land between two worlds."