Freya Stark | Books on Turkey

Many famous writers throughout history have traveled extensively around Turkey. Mark Twain and Evliya Çelebi are two examples. 

The third most prolific example is Freya Stark[1] who was a British woman with a burning passion and love for the Middle East.

Freya Stark discovered a new interest in Asia Minor in the 1950s. This soon led to her learning Turkish and setting out on a series of difficult journeys, often on horseback, to the far corners of Anatolia. Ionia: A Quest (1954), The Lycian Shore (1956), Alexander's Path (1958), Riding on the Tigris (1959), and Rome on the Euphrates (1966) were published as a result.

FROM 1998 Freya Stark | John C. Hawley Santa Clara Univeristy, jhawley(at)scu(dot)edu

This pause in her travel writing also offered Stark the occasion to reassess her position in the world in such a way that she was able to accept Stewart Perowne's offer of marriage when it arrived by telegram. They were married in London in October 194 7. Her reasons for marrying Perowne, a rather dull civil servant who was eight years her junior and apparently a homosexual, seem to have involved some desire for domesticity. By summer 1951 they had decided to divorce. Later that year she dropped his name and from then on called herself "Mrs. Stark." … Her divorce from Perowne freed Stark to begin a new phase of her career, which focused on Asia Minor. 

In 1952 she set out for Smyrna (Izmir) on the west coast of Turkey, hoping to retrace the journey described by Herodotus. Typically, she prepared for this new adventure by learning Turkish. She dedicated the resulting book, Ionia: A Quest (1954), to Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In autumn 1952 Stark traveled about the western coast of Asia Minor, visiting fifty-five ruined sites. In only one of them did she meet another tourist. Her letters from this period reveal the sense of loneliness that resulted from her failed marriage, but Ionia shows her customary energy and fascination for cultures that were new to her and perhaps to all, or most, of her readers. Some of her observations along the way-such as "the art of government is in the management of people's feelings"-may have arisen from her internal struggle, but she was usually more grandiose in her musing, more inspirational in her imagining: Some of these vanished cities were buried in the earth, or had sunk away in swamp, so that only a few places of wall, a cornice or shaft of column, remained, neglected or forgotten: in many, the steps of their theatres were split by the roots of trees or hidden, hardly accessible, in thorns. Here, like a manuscript of which most of the words are rubbed away, lay the record of our story, of what-trickling down slopes of time towards us by devious runnels-has made us what we are today. A great longing came to me to know more, and to bring a living image out of these dots and dashes of the past. More particularly, to discover what elements in that breeding ground of civilization can still be planted to grow among us now. The picture she painted of Asia Minor as she moved away from Ionia and followed the Maeander (Menderes) upstream is of a formless, vast, human dwarfing geography that was historically humanized by the Greeks and conquered by Rome. Having suffered in her personal life and having seen the vast devastation of World War II, she was prompted by the remains of past civilizations to consider the purpose of so much creation and destruction, so much similarity in the midst of diversity. 

Stark was so interested in what she saw in Turkey that she spent more time learning Turkish in Crete in 1954 and then undertook a lighter travel book, The Lycian Shore (1956), which includes such observations as the following: The life of insecurity is the nomad's achievement. He does not try, like our building world, to believe in a stability which is non-existent; and in his constant movement with the seasons, in the lightness of his hold, puts something right, about which we are constantly wrong. His is in fact the reality, to which the most solid of our structures are illusion.

Stark's next book was the heavily researched and well-received Alexander's Path (1958), which focuses on the western and southern coasts of Turkey. Stark had intended to follow the route of Alexander the Great as it had been described by Arrian, but she began to suspect that Arrian had left out some details, including the "whole route between Xanthus and Phaselis, and the campaign against the hillmen." She decided to live along that route for several months, coming in closer contact with country people than she had on her previous visit. She also decided to include more information than former writers had on the geography of Anatolia, the site of the first and most formative year or so of Alexander's adventure, and on the area of Caria and its queen, Ada, who had made Alexander her adopted son when he was only a nineteen-year-old Macedonian prince who had decided to marry her niece . Stark tried to learn what Alexander did between Xanthus and Sagalassus, but she went in the opposite direction from that taken by Alexander. Although critics at the time appreciated her account, it seems speculative and a bit narrowly focused . Stark's Riding to the Tigris (1959), an account of her travels in the interior of Turkey, includes some of her finest reflection on the enterprise of travel to which she had devoted her life. Asking the same fundamental questions that she had raised early in her career, she now had more-pointed responses. I began to wonder again why I, and so many others like me, should find ourselves in these recondite places. We like our life intensified, perhaps. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of every day, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art: and unless it succeeds in doing this, its effect on the human being is not, I believe, very great .. . . Most people anyway try to avoid having their feelings intensified: for indeed one must be strong to place oneself alone against the impact of the unknown world.

The statement is emblematic of Stark's life . Riding to the Tigris is also one of the best demonstrations of her complex relationship with her native country and with the lands to which she came as a visitor. At one moment she could yearn almost palpably to be an Arab: "It was many years since I had spent a night among the tents; the sight of them, seventy or so in the hollow of the mountain, filled me as it always does with delight and pity; for they seem to me to show what our houses forget or disguise-a security based not on strength but on fragility, at rest on the surface of the world like a seagull on a wave." Yet she could also sound as patriotic as anyone in the Home Office might have hoped, as in this incredible paean to her native country : 

With a nostalgia that hurt like a pain I thought of England; perhaps it was the singing of the waters in the night that brought her so poignantly before me. But it was of her people that I thought: a modest people, where this terrible nationalism is rare and one is not always being told about virtues that one likes to discover for oneself: where, almost alone in the world today, the variety of tastes and opinions, the entrancing variety of the world is still encouraged and respected. People, I thought longingly, who when they go about are able here and there to care for other and different people as much as for their own. Perhaps it is only the best of any nation that can do this, and when we owned much of the world we often sent our best: but I was not thinking of being fair in the darkness of the night. The flint, I thought, is fire and the pebble mere stone: and people are civilized when ideas, however foreign, will strike a spark inside them: and England is now perhaps among those rare and happy nations where the fierce intellectual qualities of Greece have been toned down to a native goodness like the Turkish-a mixture that could produce civilisation. If that is so, it is the treasure of treasures-and better to be conquered having it than to lack it among the threatening barbarians of our day. 


At this point in her life Stark, who was in her early seventies, began to slow her pace. After writing a fourth volume of autobiography, Dust in the Lion’s Paw (1961), she produced Rome on the Euphrates (1966), an account of the Romans' activities along one of the frontiers of their empire over a period of eight hundred years-from 200 B.C. to the Age of Justinian. Her last major travel account, the book is overly derivative and a cumbersome read, but it was an interesting topic for a woman who had lived so long as a bold adventurer on an amazing series of fronti ers. Stark admitted that she was only an amateur historian and that she could read little Greek. Why, she wondered, did the Romans fight along this rich Euphrates frontier ? Every impartial reading of the evidence suggested that it was a great blunder for two trading communities to fight over this lengthy period rather than seek mutual gain through commerce and traffic. The perennially recurring pattern in the history of northwest Asia, she wrote, is an east-west horizontal of trade cut at recurring intervals by a north-south vertical of war. Though interested in the vast movements of history, Stark seems to have been most interested in the common people. In Riding to the Tigris she had written that "the sheep, plodding through the ages, nose the ground and bury their eyes each in the coat of the one before it, kicking up their own troubles from their own soil, patient, unquestioning, and like mankind resolute to hide their faces from the goal of their marching, trusting to a shepherd that only their leader can see ." Rome on the Euphrates was inspired by a visit to a group of old women in chadors: "nothing but the hands and the eyes were left to see, but in those outstretched hands and longing eyes such love and sorrow, such timid uncomplaining hope, that I have never forgotten, and think of them, and see them as Euripides saw the Trojan Women, a background or chorus for the quarrelsome nature of man." Feted by diplomats and the powerful in many countries of the West and the East, Stark seems increasingly to have identified with the anonymous individuals who appear outside the flow of political history and completely at home in the larger flow of time.

Mavi Boncuk |

Ionia: A Quest
Published in 1954, this book was one of Freya’s first about Turkey. She describes her journey to explore history through ancient sites while observing local people deal with the after effects of the Greek population exchange 30 years earlier.

During her tour of ancient sites, she met just one tourist, which is a big difference to the hundreds of tourists that now descended on the ruins of Ephesus daily.

The Lycian Shore: A Turkish odyssey
Published in 1956, the emphasis of this book is purely on the history of the Lycian kingdom and the remains they left behind in Turkey.

Running along the southwest coast, travellers today can explore the Lycian way on foot while Freya Stark did it traveling by boat along the coastline.

Her lasting words about the Lycian remains were “There are not so many places left where magic reigns without interruption and of all those I know, the coast of Lycia was the most magical.’

Alexander’s Path
Published in 1958, this book recalls her experiences as Freya travels alone on a horse following the footsteps of the brave conqueror Alexander the Great.

Once again, she did not encounter places succumbing to the trappings of mass tourism. Instead, this is a hard-core look at the normal lives of people in a time when a woman traveling alone was unheard of.

Riding to the Tigris
This book was published in 1959 and it tells about Freya’s travels through south eastern Turkey, an area which even today is not high on any list of touristic places. She travelled alone with help from muleteers provided by the Turkish government.

She talks about chance meetings with a schoolmaster and a police escort who were excited to see the first western woman in their area. While she normally focuses on history, her tales in this book are mainly of the local people, culture, and traditions.

Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier
Many have classed this book as one of Freya’s greatest works. Published in 1966, it is an exploration into history of the Roman Empire in the Euphrates area of Turkey

Turkey:A Sketch of Turkish History (1971)
This is a collection of Freya’s favourite places in Turkey including the diverse city of Istanbul. Written in her retirement years, she also collaborated with an Italian photographer to bring photographs to the inspiring tales of her travels.

FREYA STARK ARCHIVES Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

[1] Freya Madeline Stark was born in Paris on 31 January 1893 to Robert and Flora Stark. The elder Starks--the father of British birth, the mother born on the continent--were cousins and artists. After several years of living at Chagford, Devon and in northern Italy, Robert and Flora Stark separated, and Flora, with Freya and a younger sister Vera, remained in Italy, first at Dronero, and then at Asolo, near Venice.

Freya's fascination with exotic lands is said to have dated from her earliest reading of the British romantic poets, as well as FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat. The future travel writer and explorer developed a keen interest in the Middle East, and, aided by a remarkable skill with languages, quickly began a life-long program of self-education, mastering modern European tongues and eventually classical and Oriental languages. Her principal formal education was at Bedford College, University of London, in the years 1911 to 1914.
After service in World War One as a military nurse in Italy and a postwar period of commercial gardening, Freya decided upon travel in the Near East. This decision was supported by additional language preparation at the London School of Oriental Studies, as well as by her desire to escape from her domineering mother and various family obligations.

Freya Stark's first trip to the Levant began in November, 1927 and was eventually chronicled in Letters from Syria (1942). Her small frame hid a fierce will and a hardy constitution, and Freya refused the usual cosseting tours, preferring to eat, live, and travel as the local populations did. Many of her fellow Britons feared she had gone native, but she realized this was the only path to an authentic knowledge of the Middle East and its peoples.
Stark returned to Lebanon in 1929, and eventually found her way to Baghdad, where her first published work, Baghdad Sketches, appeared in 1932. Journeys into Iran during the years 1929 to 1931 resulted in The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), her first work to achieve wide recognition. Valleys was in fact reprinted three times within a year of its appearance.

At the end of 1934, Freya Stark's first expedition into Arabia was eventually terminated when she contracted measles and, upon relapse, had to be rescued by the British Royal Air Force. Another Arabian expedition was also ended by serious illness in 1938. Despite these hardships enough was accomplished for her to publish The Southern Gates of Arabia, Seen in the Hadhramaut, and A Winter in Arabia between 1936 and 1940.

During the Second World War Freya Stark placed her knowledge of the Middle East at the service of Britain's Ministry of Information. She worked to counter Axis propaganda among the populations of the region and helped found the Arab Brotherhood of Freedom, an anti-Nazi organization.

In 1947, Freya Stark married Stewart Perowne, a British diplomat she had known since the late 1930s, and with him she moved first to Barbados and then to Libya. The marriage did not prosper, and in 1952 they separated. Despite this setback and her absence from the Middle East, Stark was able to publish three volumes of autobiography in the years between 1950 and 1953, followed by a fourth in 1961.

After Freya Stark was, in 1972, created a Dame of the British Empire she continued her arduous regimen with travel by horseback in the Himalayas, as well as rafting down the Euphrates. Only as infirmity overcame her in her final decade did she slow down. Dame Freya died a centenarian at Asolo on 9 May 1993.