THE PASSIONATE TRAVELLER: FREYA STARK'S SEARCH FOR ALEXANDER'S PATH IN SOUTHERN TURKEY

Introduced by Guy Whitmarsh, Member, on 16 March 1999

Freya Stark was fascinated by the life and achievements of Alexander the Great and thought that more importance ought to be attached to the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman achievement "for they were working through revolutions federations and monarchies towards unity …The notion flashed by with Alexander, like a wing in the sun." She wrote two books, The Lycian Shore (1956) and Alexander's Path (1958) about that early phase of his campaign against the Persia in the winter of 334 /333 BCE that took him along the southern shore of Turkey, from Halicarnassus to Perge. Freya Stark had noticed that historians tended to dismiss this phase in a few sentences and that none of the contemporary accounts has survived. She therefore set out to supply the missing detail of where he went and to convey to the reader her experience of the largely deserted ruins of ancient cities , Cnidos, Caunus, Xarithos, Olympos, Arycanda, Phaselis, Perge, and Termessos among others.

Freya Stark's texts were quoted, commented upon and illustrated by the speaker's own photographs. Her style was that of her day, as when she wrote of Alexander "In moonlit vagueness I saw that journey, horizon beyond mountain horizon....until after ten years the golden carriage so cunningly and richly constructed bore the dead Wonder back across the Syrian desert to Alexandria." Equally, style was an aspect of a degree of passionate engagement; for her "the proper traveller thinks it a waste of time if nothing happens inside him". She worked out for herself an appropriate method of composition whereby on-the-spot travel notes were sent home by post for later positioning with other material, including photographs.

It was pointed out that Freya Stark's reputation as a travel writer was fully established by her books on travel among the Arabs, particularly The Valley of Assassins (1934) and The Southern Gates of Arabia (1930). She was awarded a DBE in 1972 and died in 1993, aged 100.

Guy Whitmarsh