![]() ![]() Throughout his account he judiciously twists the lens between the longer view and the close-up shot of a man lighting a cigarette, or a painting of Donald Duck on a slide in a playground. Through it all, Seal gropes for an Anatolian identity that has persisted though so many changes of language and deity. They in turn take an interest in the author's phocine connection. These included the introduction of western surnames, a process Turks embraced with gusto – Seal meets a Mr Flag, a Mr Trueblueyed and a Mr Fearless. The disintegration of Ottoman hegemony after five centuries ushered in the modernisations of Ataturk. Seal is good on the forced assimilation of Christian Byzantines and Muslim Turks that played itself out during the Crusades, when both sides had to make compromises, living alongside one another in an era of tumultuous change. "The pressing question," writes Seal, "was how far the west might extend its influence inland into Asia before running into the torpid oriental headwind that traditionally blew there." The question presses still, though the wind is no longer torpid.īy the Byzantine millennium the once-great trade route up the Meander valley had lost out to more northerly passages. Migrants from southern Greece began to colonise the coastlands around the mouth of the Meander from the 10th century BC, calling the region Ionia and extending Hellenising tentacles. More than half of this book is historical, and Seal purveys his material with an even hand. The book is diligently researched, and Seal makes good use of travellers who have gone before him. But he backs up these assertions with sound evidence. Anatolia was "the cradle of western civilization it was the birthplace of history and philosophy, of Homer, Heraclitus and Herodotus, of coinage and town planning, and defining advances in medicine, mathematics and architecture". ![]() Unafraid of cliché, Seal makes bold claims for his region. ![]()
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