The Iron Meridian

Constantinople, 1878. Kerem Öztürk is the most precise cartographer in the Imperial Survey Office — a man who has built his life on the certainty of lines. When a dying surveyor presses a rolled cylinder of paper into his hands and whispers a single word — *meridian* — Kerem's certainties begin to unravel.

The cylinder contains a map that does not match any official record. It shows water routes through territory the Empire insists is desert, border agreements signed in languages no living diplomat will acknowledge, and a fortress that appears nowhere in the Imperial archive. Someone powerful wants the map destroyed. Someone else wants it published. Kerem wants only to survive long enough to understand what it means.

Set against the final crackling years of Tanzimat reform, *The Iron Meridian* moves from the surveyor's workshops of Beyoğlu to the marble corridors of Yıldız Palace, from a Greek printing house operating in deliberate obscurity to the engine rooms of a Russian steamship on the Bosphorus. It is a novel about the violence of cartography, the weight of precision, and the question of what it means to draw a true line through an empire determined to lie.