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The Road to Oxiana

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The Road to Oxiana

By: Robert Byron
Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
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About this listen

In 1933, Robert Byron set off from Venice with his friend Christopher Sykes to explore the architecture of the Middle East. Their long and arduous journey took them from Cyprus and Jerusalem to Syria, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan, and finally, Oxiana, a tiny country around the river Oxus, the Greek name for the river Amu Darya, which snakes down from Russia into Afghanistan. They travel by any means necessary (truck, camel, horses, and foot), and encounter several setbacks, but their risks are rewarded as they encounter some of the greatest examples of Eastern art and architecture, many of which have now vanished forever.

Funny and erudite, The Road to Oxiana's combination of exquisite lyricism, detail, and humor gave birth to a new kind of travel literature, serving as inspiration for later writers such as Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiesson, and Jan Morris.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©1937 Robert Byron (P)2019 Naxos AudioBooks Middle East Travel Writing & Commentary Ancient History Funny Witty Crusade

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A truly inspiring and luscious descriptive journey of the travels of Robert Byron through Persia and Afghanistan detailing remarkable architectural , historic and religious sites

The Road to Oxiana - Excellent Excellent Excellent

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A wonderfully evocative account, written with pleasingly unexpected dry humour. Brilliantly read too. I will definitely re-listen!

Brilliant!

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Loved it from start to finish. Byron is every travel writer's literary ancestor. Essential reading for all travel writers.

Every travel writer needs to read this

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A wonderful book, which I would love to have In print so I could more easily dip in and out of it. The narrator has an excellent reading voice, a real pleasure to listen to, and articulates each sentence so its structure and meaning are instantly clear. But I award him only 4 stars on account of the very many distracting and often grotesque mispronunciations of personal and place names and titles. He appears to have a dislike of the letter H, so that Tehran becomes Tayran , mihrab becomes meerab, and Gauhar becomes Goa. Furthermore, in names such as Mazar-e Sharif, which occur countless times, he precedes the light "-e" by an unnatural pause and overstresses it so it comes out as it "ee", which becomes increasingly annoying. On the other hand, he correctly pronounces Kabul and Peshawar, both commonly mispronounced by newsreaders. For this, much can be forgiven.

Erudite and entertaining

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A fascinating travel story from the 1930s, such that could not be written nowadays.
The ways of life and the lands through which the travellers made their way fully deserve to be recorded for future generations

Knowledgeable and amusing

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An exceptional account of Persia in the 1930s. Well transported to the spoken word. The colours and atmosphere are captured perfectly. Worthy of multiple listens.

Brilliant tales of an educated traveller.

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By the time the main event came to be, the Road to Oxiana (Afghanistan), I was already a little done with his hypocritical, snobby, bullying nature and had to increase speed to 1.2 so I could just be done with it. It’s a ‘fairly’ entertaining read when the focus is on the (despite being very brief) descriptions of the scenery, food, details of the architectural features, etc., in the 1930s in all the stops he made, but you’ve got to be open-minded when he encounters people. It felt to me he went through phases. You could read a paragraph written with love, amusement and kindness, and suddenly there’s a u-turn, and you read words of a grumpy, pretentious, frustrated man. Makes it worse when Byron then lectures others on growing up and dealing with matters professionally. One rule applies to Byron and another to everyone else!! >_<

Itinerary of the trip and architectural details :)

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