We are used to the texts of Western travellers who reach the East, observe the inhabitants, their habits, the cities and their culture, the environment and monuments and write about them. Nicander, however, follows a reverse course. He was born in Corfu in the early 16th century where he witnessed the sack of the Turks in 1537 and fled to Venice where he worked as a copyist-transciber. From there and as a member of a diplomatic mission he had the opportunity to travel to Europe, to the “Hesperia” and therefore to write about the rulers, people and political things, he saw, in his three books  Journey to Hesperia.

This is a rare record of the European countries of the Renaissance era through the eyes of an “Oriental”. Of “A Greek, a scholar, a refugee”.