Freya Stark (1893–1993,) fully Freya Madeline Stark, was a British explorer, writer, and one of the best known of women travelers. This “Grand Old Lady” of travelers wrote more than thirty books describing local history and culture in addition to everyday life. She undertook many journeys to remote areas in Turkey and the Middle East, where few Europeans, especially women, had traveled before.
Born in Paris, France, Stark had no formal education as a child. She moved about with her artist- parents and learned French, German, and Italian before she entered the University of London in 1912. She worked as a nurse for the Red Cross in Italy during World War I and returned to attend the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London.
While living in Baghdad and working for the Baghdad Times, Stark mapped the Valley of the Assassins in Luristan and other uncharted areas of the Islamic world and wrote Baghdad Sketches (1933) and The Valleys of the Assassins (1934.) These books established her style, combining practical travel tips with entertaining commentary on the people, places, customs, and history of Persia (now Iran.) Subsequently, she traveled extensively in the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, where she made her home.
During World War II, Stark worked for the British Ministry of Information in Aden, Baghdad, and Cairo, where she founded the anti-Nazi Brotherhood of Freedom. The archaeology and history of the East continued to dominate Freya Stark’s interests. Stark’s other books include The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936,) Letters from Syria (1942,) Traveller’s Prelude (1950,) Beyond Euphrates (1951,) Alexander’s Path (1958,) and The Minaret of Djam (1970.)
In addition to four volumes of memoirs, Stark published her collected letters—Letters (1974–82) and Over the Rim of the World (1988.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Freya Stark
I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn’t got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don’t believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
—Freya Stark
Topics: America
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Travel
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Absence, Family
The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Change, Life and Living
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Curiosity
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Humanity
On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Aging
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Happiness
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, 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.
—Freya Stark
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Foresight, Sorrow, Sadness
Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Time Management
Christmas … is not an eternal event at all, but a piece of one’s home that one carries in one’s heart…
—Freya Stark
Topics: Christmas
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
—Freya Stark
Topics: Women
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