Century travellers
7 total works
This is Dame Freya Stark's account of her third visit to Turkey. Her route was the one which had been taken 22 centuries earlier by Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, and the book aims to provide a bridge into that ancient world. It also offers insights into 20th-century Turkey, along little-used routes through lonely mountain passes, past remote ruins and along the pirate shore, where country people responded gladly to the author's informed curiosity. Dame Freya's other travel books include "Dust in the Lion's Paw", "Coast of Incense" and "A Winter in Arabia".
In 1939 when war broke out, Dame Freya Stark was already established as a traveller and writer. Her knowledge of the Middle East and her genius for friendship made her ideally suited to the task of influencing public opinion for the Allied cause. Interspersed with letters dealing with her private feelings and preoccupations - Freya Stark faced her share of danger during the siege of the British embassy at Bagdad. This book is a memoir of seven years spent in distant and dangerous lands. The author also wrote "The Southern Gates of Arabia" and "The Coast of Incense".
Freya Stark, along with Gertrude Bell, was the greatest woman traveller of the 20th century - she was also one of the finest travel writers and inspired a whole generation who followed her. Here, she combines her sense of adventure with a unique eye for history and landscape. The account narrates her journey by boat along the coasts of Turkey southward from Smyrna around the islands and headlands where the ruins of Greek cities and temples lie almost undisturbed beneath flowers and aromatic shrub: Halicarnassus, site of the Mausoleum; Cnidus, once the home of the famous statue of the naked love goddess; Patmos, refuge of St John the Divine - and so on and on over the stormy and crystalline summer seas.
This sequel to "Traveller's Prelude" describes the author's journeys to the East, embarked upon in 1928. Through the medium of letters and extracts from her diary, she describes her life in Baghdad, her experiences in a harem in Damascus, journeys to Persia and a treasure hunt in Luristan. Dame Freya Stark has also written "The Coat of Incense", "Dust in the Lion's Paw", "East is West" and "The Southern Gates of Arabia".
When Freya Stark travelled along the western coast of Turkey in 1952 she met only one other tourist. Today, this region is the most popular and well-travelled in the country, but to travel with Stark - whose aim was to 'create a guide-book in time' - is to experience Turkey in a richer and more inspiring way than any modern guide or history can provide. In the ruins and vanished cities of Ionia lay the record of human history - of what, Stark believed, made us what we are today. Her longing to know more, to unearth the living from the wreckage of the past and to discover the ingredients that shaped the ancient world drove her forward. With Herodotus as her travelling companion, she began her quest in Smyrna and traced a route through the ancient cities of Asia Minor, which were haunted by echoes of Odysseus and Alexander the Great and by the poets and philosophers, musicians and mathematicians who flourished in this world. Wandering beyond the boundaries of travel, Stark entered into the soul of ancient Ionia, examining the ever-present tension between East and West and the elements of religion, society and commerce that forged the culture of a civilisation.
A journey through the ancient world that resonates in the modern, Freya Stark's "Ionia" is travel writing at its most elegant and history at its most dynamic - a powerful and beautifully-rendered classic of twentieth-century literature.
A journey through the ancient world that resonates in the modern, Freya Stark's "Ionia" is travel writing at its most elegant and history at its most dynamic - a powerful and beautifully-rendered classic of twentieth-century literature.
This book is the story of the author's cosmopolitan upbringing that shaped her destiny as a travel writer. She was born in Paris and started travelling at an early age when she was carried over the Pelmo Pass at the age of two. By the time she was five she could speak three languages and had lived in several European countries. She became a nurse in the Frist World War and was caught up in the retreat from Caporetto. Afterwards she learned Arabic and mountaineering in Europe. Dame Freya Start has written a second volume of autobiography, "Beyond Euphrates", as well as many travel books including "The Coast of Incense", "Dust in the Lion's Paw", "East is West" and "The Southern Gates of Arabia".