Turkiye

A cycling tour through the history and landscape of a country as it reaches its first century - by a winner of the Stanford Dolman Award for Travel Writing

From Thracian borders with Bulgaria to a sparkling Aegean coast, Julian Sayarer cycles across Anatolian hills towards the Black Sea, Kurdish southeast and the Armenian frontiers.

Whereas books on Türkiye - renamed on the eve of its first century - often root themselves in history, romanticism, religion or civilizational terms, Sayarer brings to life this living, breathing community of peoples and place at the meeting point of Asia, Africa and Europe; a mid-point not only of East and West, but of all the unfurled globe. The result is a love letter to a country and its neighbours, but one that gives a clear-eyed view of Türkiye and its place in a changing world.

His own extensive time in the country and his roots there enable him to lift the reader out of old clichés of Türkiye as a 'bridge' between East and West, and Orientalist ideas that do more to obstruct than enlighten. Taking the large ideas of politics, strategy and history that govern so much of his writing, Sayarer uses the bicycle and its roadside encounters to bring everything back to the human level.

At the end of his journey the reader is left with a much clearer understanding of the country and the roles of religion, race, Islam, and the essential and universal nature of political power, both in Türkiye and elsewhere.