Back to Byzantium: Travels through a Balkan Conspiracy - Paperback

by Anthony Grutchfield (Author)

During his travels across Central Europe, the Balkans and Russia during the Cold War and shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the author discovers a conspiracy to change the course of history. Meeting everywhere he goes the animosity of Eastern Orthodox peoples for both Western Catholicism and Turkish Islam, he is intrigued by the enduring nostalgia for their lost Constantinople, the Second Rome. Across different countries he notices signs, cryptic at first, gradually becoming explicit, which point to a conspiracy to reverse the course of history that began with the Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders and was consummated by its fall to the Turks. Back to Byzantium is the resolution of an enigma across the countries of the former Soviet bloc, which is unraveled to its sinister but comic conclusion.

Author Biography

Antonin Grook is an Englishman who has spent his adult life in France. He travelled extensively during the Cold War in countries of the East Bloc, including totalitarian Albania, and was laid up in a Bulgarian hospital. He lived and worked in Hungary and in Russia in the challenging conditions that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where he witnessed an attempted coup d'état. He has a good understanding of the Orthodox world and what makes it different and antagonistic to the West. He is married, with two daughters and a grand-daughter, retired and living in Toulouse.