Meander: East to West along a Turkish River

by Jeremy Seal

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.

Genres: Travel, History, Nonfiction, Middle East

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 5, 2012

About the author

Jeremy Seal is a writer and broadcaster. His first book, A Fez of the Heart, was shortlisted for the 1995 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He is also the author of The Snakebite Survivors' Club and The Wreck at Sharpnose Point, and presenter of Channel 4's ‘Wreck Detectives’. He lives in Bath with his wife and daughters.

Reviews

[Sportyrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

A travel journal of a British man canoeing down the Meander River in Anatolia, Türkiye.

The book has three themes:

1. Comparing the historical element of the places visited, particularly focussing on their heyday. The history is rich in detail. I learned so much about Türkiye’s history. The history alone is worth five stars.

2. Interacting with the locals he encounters for their insights on the river and their views. This aspect was quite enjoyable. The interactions were mostly brief so you don’t get the full perspective that you would from a traveler who billets.

3. The traveler’s impression on the river, it’s people and surrounds. This is the part that I craved most and made me pick up the book. I think the author may have tried to make the book more about the experience itself and less about himself. The people he encountered seemed exceptionally kind offering him rides and accommodation. Other than two or three lines at the end, there does not appear to be much gratification expressed. Hopefully this was an oversight. The author’s experience of the journey came across as disappointed and negative. I wonder how much of this is due to the author appearing not to have researched or planned much for the trip or if it really was that awful.

I would like to have seen more photos and more colour photos especially seeing as it is a travel journal.

Overall, I loved the history, I loved the comparison from then to now, I loved the encounters. A positive spin would have increased my rating.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes Türkiye, history and canoeing/kayaking.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turkey is at the very top of my “most-desired places to visit” list. I honestly feel it is the heart of the world with the most history and culture of anywhere on earth. I devour books about Turkey whenever I can.

That being said, Meander is a very good book. It’s classified as travelogue but I’m leaning more toward “history-ogue.” The author really helps with a pronunciation guide on the first page (thank you!) and does a fabulous job of transporting his readers along his own journey with beautiful language. That language can be quite verbose at times, though, and tangents are numerous. Like the Meander river itself, the direction of the book is all over the place with only the initial premise to anchor it. The author also does a nice job of using language to differentiate the mood along the river as it winds through sunny orchards and mountainous rapids and eventually through industrialized, polluted mires and on to the Aegean Sea.

Overall, I loved this book and the time it took me to properly read it. The complexities of Turkey, its history, and its people will always amaze me.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

well written and tidy history of meander river valley and anatolia from 8000 bc to present, plus pithy and fairly interesting account of trying to float a modern river, in drought, without first checking on conditions beforehand. so as to the latter, you get all the warm fuzzies of the renowned turkish hospitality, xenophobia, mean ass big dogs, tea drinking, olive eating, alcohol sneaking, attaturk gazing, dust, filth, fecundity, down-home tourist free fun, tourist-ridden broken marble weed patches, and the trials of eating on the road while being surrounded by the bread basket of the bread basket of the cradle of civilizations etc etc...
so a combination of history telling flipping forward to floating down a shallow, polluted river in the 21st century. but author seal amazingly hits lots and lots of high spots in the history bit, so with no further ado, the time-line: 6000 bc neolithic cave paitings at mt. latmus ; 2700 bc minoans, cybele/artemis of the 1000 breasts ; 2000 bc the arzawa civilization (but nobody is sure about this, just SOMEBODY's civilization (but the turks are pretty leery of archeaos now as the "antiquaries" of old ripped off most of their stuff and that has put a real damper on modern research into this area) ; 1800 bc hittites (yeah yeah, definitely the end of whoever came before, as they were mean mofo's) ; 1300 bc trojans, greeks, all THOSE warmongers, and apollo won the open mic contest and flayed marsyas alive (ie symbolically showed how the "west" was superior to the "east") ; 800bc phrygian empire (midas was their dude, but it didn't work out) ; 600 bc city of miletus at mouth of meander was the IT place, thales was from there and thought about rationalism a lot ; 580 bc lydian empire, king croesus was their dude, but it didn't work out ; 546 bc persian rule, this one lasts quite a while ; 480 bc xerxes goes west, spartans turn him back around ; 401 bc persians still rule, but cyrus the younger goes EAST, baghdad kicks HIS ass ; 334 bc alexander heads east so anatolia is turned hellenistic (seleucids) and eventually that turns into a rome client ; 47 AD you know who shows up and starts writing letters to antioch, pisidia, iconium, lystra, derbe ; 100 AD meander silts up the big bay at miletus, priene, and myus, area starts turning hill billy, er christian, er hill billy ; 312 AD rome officially adopts christianity ; 650 AD saracens show up, with you know who (or his religion anyway, and all hell breaks loose sort-to-speak) and also the "turks" start heading west from their mountain and plains homeland in western china/eastern Kirghistan (sp?) ; 1071 ad turks defeat byzatines then crusaders show up.......ohhhh you get the point. the author does a good good job of going through all of the above and all the way to 2008.

book has nice maps, photos, bibliography.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seal has a thing about Turkey, and in this book he he's decided to follow the entire length of the River Meander for source to mouth in a canoe and on foot. This is a gently winding river is the origin of the word.

He takes a gentle and relaxed approach to the journey down this river valley, taking time to meet the people and characters along the route. It is a place that is rich in history as well, from people such as Alexander the Great to the knights on the crusades.

In parts this book is fascinating, when he is meeting and interacting with the people of the valley. He writes about the the state of the river and the problems that are caused by pollution and extraction of the water, which has brought the river down to a trickle in parts.

There are one or two amusing bits in the book, but i felt that there was too much history in the book, rather than the travel, and for that reason it doesn't sparkle as a good travel book should.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read about this book in an issue of Booklist that I picked up earlier this year: in a brief review, Gilbert Taylor calls this book, which is about Seal's canoe trip along the length of the Meander River in 2008, a "charmingly mordant, twisting travelogue," which was enough to make me want to pick it up from the library, despite not having heard of Seal and having no special interest in Turkey. The book is a stylistic mix: it's part first-person travelogue, with Seal telling about the trip he took and what he saw and how, in fact, the river didn't actually turn out to be navigable the whole way from source to sea, but it's also part history—partly as background to current-day Turkey, but partly for its own sake, because the Meander Valley was long a point where different civilizations met (and/or tried to conquer one another in various Eastern-heading or Western-heading land grabs). While I appreciated getting to understand a bit of the bigger historical picture, I found the contemporary scenes more interesting and better-written. Seal is really good at describing his experience of a place, whether he's talking about a bucolic country scene or a river that gets increasingly polluted as it travels westward from its rural source. His historical descriptions, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit clunky.

I like that even when the dryness of the river forces Seal to make arrangements to have his canoe transported downstream, while he proceeds on foot, he still finds plenty of interest near the river. He explores ancient ruins and slightly less ancient ones, climbing a still-sturdy minaret next to an abandoned and crumbling mosque in a totally abandoned village, finding a remaining older block in the mostly-modern city of Aydın, and exploring an old hamam that later was used as a winery, and which seemed to have been left untouched since it closed in the mid 1970s. I like how Seal interweaves the descriptions of historic travellers with his own: when talking about Aydın, he quotes Richard Chandler, an antiquary who travelled to Turkey in 1765:

I wandered through Aydın, recalling the 'trees, lofty domes and minarees of mosques interspersed' that had once greeted Richard Chandler, a place of 'innumerable tame turtle-doves, sitting in the branches of trees, on the walls, and roofs of houses, cooing unceasingly'.
[…]
In this modern city of numbered streets there was not the least reminder, however, of the doves and embroidered trousers, the camel trains and the zeybeks' floral turbans. The streets were lined by apartment blocks painted in institutional shades. Lines of washing, children's tricycles, dead pot plants, rusting air-conditioning units, and the placarded details of lawyers', dentists' and gynaecologists' premises, showed among the flag-draped concrete of the balconies. (280-281)

[Jouni Virtaharju · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and entertaining at times. Good mix of historical facts and the river travel. Minuses for the naive yearning of the 'good old days' of decades past agricultural life and the blatant pro-Turkishness in historical interpretations.

[Jenna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable! As with his earlier Turkish travelogue, the equally despicable "A Fez of the Heart," Seal's patronizing, parochial treatment of the local "characters" he encounters through his - yes, meandering - travels across Anatolia make this book too frustrating to finish. The main offender here is Seal's habit of translating Turkish surnames into English, rendering his subjects into good old-fashioned colonialist caricatures: Mehmet Truehero and Turgay Darkeye (then Mrs. Darkeye) are just a couple of the many egregious examples of this. The subject matter, region, and mission of the account are tantalizing, but I just can't stomach the attitude.

[Elisabeth Bibbings · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful account of a journey along the river which has so many meanders it gave its name to them! This is one of the great rivers of classical times, flowing from the depths of Asia Minor to the port of Miletus, past Pisidian Antioch (see Acts of the Apostles in the Bible), and other well-known Greek cities.
Unfortunately no-one thought of that, or of the farmers and fishermen downstream, when they decided to build a dam in the Meander's upper reaches . . .
This is an account of a river that was great, and its communities along the way. Jeremy Seal set out with an inflatable canoe to travel from source to estuary, but the canoe seems for most of the journey to be a hindrance rather than a help.
I have learned so much about Turkish history, (now I understand why Greeks and Turks don't get on, to put it mildly) and also about modern Turks - not wild Islamists or hostile rebels, but friendly, hospitable and caring people. Thank you Jeremy Seal, for opening my eyes to modern Turkey.

[Stamatis Zogaris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a good and informative. For me being of Rum descent and having visited and actually researched the Buyuk Menderes river itself (as an ichthyologist) it was not that satisfying. I expected deeper thought for natural history and also some greater care in the narrative of the modern history. The black-white account of strife between Greeks and Turks was also not helpful (during the greco-turkish war the Greeks are made out to be colonizers and stereotyped bad-guys...if anyone reads this lightly). However, despite this; it is a good read. And especially if you are interested in this region - I gleened a lot of good local history knowledge. This is no easy book to write - from the exploration and historic angle taken by Jeremy Seal. I congratulate him for doing his best. And also for bringing out some so much of the good in modern traveling in Turkey.

[Beth Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent account of the author's journey by canoe from the source to the mouth of the river Meander. There is a mix of history, myth, geography and current affairs, together with Jeremy Seal's encounters with local people and the natural world of the river. A book to be read in small doses, as in that way the reader can join the author as he paddles, drags his canoe, overturns, or desperately avoids rapids, and other perils; all this while observing the wildlife and vegetation he paints so clearly.

[timv · Rating 4 out of 5]

even though I gave this book 4 stars, I found the history in this book tedious to read at times, just due to the complexity of the history of the Meander River valley. The Meander River and its valley seemed to have been despoiled by previous and recent inhabitants. Well researched and written by an author with a fine knowledge of his subject.

[Kristopher Larsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good example of the travelogue that serves as a framework for a historical discussion. Using the path of the river, and the author's occasional time spent canoeing on it, it is more a reflection of Turkey's position between East and West for the last 3000 years and, sadly, a constant reminder of how our 'progress' has destroyed so much.

[Rob Sedgwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those annoying travel books that waffles on about everything but the subject it's nominally about, the travelling. It meanders. Some chapters merit barely a sentence about the journey along the river. Lots about Turkish history, but that's not what I read it for :)

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captures the atmosphere of his trip along the Meander, but the writing is often rather ponderous.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeremy Seal, at one point in this book distinguishes between those past travel authors who were good travelers and those who were good writers, emphasising the rarity of authors who were both. This is borne out by Meander itself: Seal is a great traveler, and his command of Turkish language and culture is in no small part what made the book possible, but he is a middling writer at best. This does not ruin the book by any means, but in combination with its other flaws it does shuffle Meander from what could have been a triumphant addition to the travel canon à la the superb Mongol Journeys toward being a merely adequate, occasionally enjoyable, read.

Where Seal excels is as a storyteller. The lengthy, overwritten, frankly tiring episodes in which he alternately paddles, hauls, minibuses and trudges down the length of the titular river are interspersed with an impressive history of the Meander valley, which Seal uses to expose this southwestern corner of Anatolia as the site of a—indeed of the—self-conscious and ever-shifting frontier between East and West. His command of the history is admirable, and his artistry in binding together the chronology of the valley's past with his own progress down the river deserves applause. Regrettably, and perhaps unavoidably given the industrial destruction that Seal encounters in the text, the actual experience of reading about a slog down a rural nowhere river in the despoiled hinterland of modern Turkey is... less than engaging.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A travel book, nostalgia trip, history lesson and epic love letter to a country that has seeped into his soul, Jeremy Seal’s Meander is all of these and by the end, as his canoe bobs out of the rivers mouth, you feel like you have been sitting with him the entire way, just the sound of running water and the occasional splash of an oar.

It is fair to say that Seal’s history of the Meander, the land and the people is deeper than the river itself, indeed, by the end I can’t quite work out if he has actually walked more of the river than he has canoed on, so many times he is forced to beach the canoe and follow the river on foot.
But for all it’s depth, the book wears it’s history lightly, as each stretch reveals a fascinating or in some cases horrific past. From the earliest recordings of the river, we learn that Xerxes, Xenaphon and Alexander the great all passed through Dinar (then Celaenae) at the head of the Meander, to the more recent and there is just enough information to understand and interest, without bogging it down into tedium.
Back in the present, Seal’s respect and affection for the Turkish people is plain to see, he meets many people who help him out, offer hospitality, and of course a cup of tea, even if they don’t always understand what he is doing.

‘You’re going to Dinar on foot?’ he eventually asked. The man had survived flood and arrest, divorce, alcoholism and earthquake, but the prospect of a four-hour walk apparently floored him.

The Turk’s attitude to their own river is mixed along it’s entire course, the state water company exhorting people to keep the river clean while simultaneously polluting it and damming it to the point where it actually stops flowing or reduced to a pitiful trickle, the seasonal flooding has all but disappeared as the water is siphoned off to irrigate crops and fields along it’s length. Still Seal is undaunted, and the history is still there to dig up along the river bed, and the lack of an actual river doesn’t stop the pilgrimage along it’s course.

In contrast to Orhan Pamuk’s severely melancholic and serious Istanbul, Meander is shot through with Seal’s dry sense of humour, gently aimed at the people he meets as well as himself and it adds to the atmosphere of the book, a rolling saunter along a river that famously winds it’s course to the sea. It lacks drama, but is all the better for it, a simple idea that is evocatively narrated by Seal and serves as both a travelogue and a rich description of the Meander, Turkey and it’s people.
(blog review here)

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book I very much wanted to love. Having spent a good deal of time in or near the Meander Valley, and because I love the environment so deeply, I wanted to embrace this river and the viewpoint of the author, Jeremy Seal.
But this was not to be. I'm not saying there wasn't passages of fine writing or valuable information. I had always wanted to hear more about the conflict between Apollo and Marsyas. And sometimes there would be a passage I would very much enjoy like this:

What struck me was that rivers and humans covered the ground in oddly antithetical ways - the same steepening gradients that put twits and turns into men's mountain roads and path, that is, being precisely what led rivers to straighten. The converse was also true; where the ground levelled off, and the kins disappeared from their footpaths and road, was where rivers began to wander.

But why steepening gradients? Surely there must be a clear way to say the grade becomes more steep. how about "the same steep grade of the incline. . ." Well, I'd have to think twice about that, but you get the idea. Though there are any number or word choices I wouldn't have made, the greatest problem I have is with the petulant tone. I know part of this is just the irritable style of writing that some British writers favor, but it is also the result of the author's decision to seemingly do no research on the modern river before setting out, and therefore being shocked and surprised when the river runs out of water, or the chemical mix it holds becomes unbearable.
I would have like extended observations of the river itself. He is obviously knowledgeable in history and he knows how to keep a journey, but in doing a survey of the ecological disaster that the Meander has become, it would have been even better if the author had done greater research on the ecosystem before starting out. If you're a Turkologist this is worth reading but these are the weaknesses I found.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word "meander" comes from a river in Turkey that looks like this:

It's easy to see why the ancient Greeks started using it's name to describe things winding or convoluted. Jeremy Seal, an Englishman with a passion for Turkey, had no idea that the river still existed. He thought of it as something like the mythical Styx or the Rubicon, a river whose course has changed so much over time that no one knows where it ran when Julius Caesar and his army crossed it. He happened to glance out the window one day while crossing a bridge in Turkey and noticed the sign - Menderes.

In that instant, and no doubt thanks to some random connections triggered by my wandering thoughts, I saw through the Turkish rendering (Menderes) and wondered that a disguise so thin could have have held for so long; the Meander still ran, as it had always done, and now ran directly beneath me.

He resolves to follow "every last winding to the sea." In a one-man inflatable canoe! Loved how he pulls his readers not only down the river with him, but also through history. I had no idea how many pivotal events occurred on its banks. Photos from the book can be seen here: Meander Slideshow This was the perfect armchair travel book to read while stuck under January's fog.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to like this book. I tried to get into it. It makes sense for the story to wander a might, as the river does quite famously. But this was pointless and I stopped reading. This is mainly suitable for readers who are already familiar with the area, at least in concept if not through actually visiting. There are maps at the beginning of a few chapters, but they are black and white and not very informative-- not all the places discussed in the chapters are listed, but places are listed which aren't discussed. It's difficult to refer back to the map to actually find what you're reading about.

The author talks about how he has written about Turkey for his career, but doesn't really establish his credentials-- has he lived there? what research has he done? why is his history with the area important? He seems to assume the reader already knows who he is.

Approaching a quarter of the way through the content (not counting the endnotes, etc.), the author hadn't even gotten into the river yet; he was still wandering around various springs in the area. We were going no where even as fast as the Meander.

Approved for the eARC from NetGalley but didn't get to it in time; read in print (much, *much* later) via ILL through my local public library.

[Print Teach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book. Part travel guide, part historical tome, part indulgent memoir. It merrily covers all the emotions, meandering (as the title suggests) from topic to topic, era to era, character to character with easy transitions. And on top of all that, it is a fascinating insight into a river that I must have crossed a hundred times, but didn't know was there! One word of warning: Jeremy Seal is a great writer, but his style takes some getting used to. This is definitely not rom-com-chick-lit!!

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not always an easy read - some very densely packed mythology/history at times, but I did find it interesting, especially the spread of religions and Greek/Turkish history in the area. Rather sad to read how much it has changed over the last 20 years, not really for the better. Feel lucky to have experienced some of these places before so much industrialisation/tourism took hold.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contains numerous facts of interest but detracts enormously in the early part of the journey to such a point it because more of a university submission not a novel
Persistence through does bring a great reward of detail of the meander valley

[Andreea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb travel book, what a history on the Meander Valley, a river that actually exists, not only in mythology!

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

It would have been a good essay...

[Simon Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, but not exceptional. Wasn't what I expected it to be, really: I had hoped to get more of a sense of the journey, but his trip seemed to misfire.

[Rick Hardy · Rating 3 out of 5]

More historical / cultural than travel as a setting for what happened over the ages along the banks

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Recognising the factual nature of this book it still felt very monotonous and bland. I'm confident there's an interesting history to be told, look forward to hearing the author present