Freya Stark was a British travel writer. Born in 1893, she lived until the age of 100. Throughout her life, she wrote many books documenting her travels.

(1934) The Valley of the Assassins: This article details Elise Wortley following Stark’s path in Iran

(1936) Southern Gates of Arabia, (1938) Seen in the Hadramaut, (1940) Winter in Arabia – Yemen

(1942) Letters from Syria – Syria

(1937) Baghdad Sketches – Iraq & Kuwait

Originally published in 1932, the book largely focuses on her travels in Iraq, but she also visits Kuwait. In her chapter The Kuwait Journey she writes, “we are in the little buffer state of Kuwait which is nothing but desert and sea. And in the evening, as we climb the low sulphur cliffs in our car, the Persian Gulf lies beyond white dunes of sand. It is green in the twilight, with a salty smell: it is genuine sea. It lies in an immense and happy loneliness. On three sides the town of Kuwait is surrounded by walls and towers… the walls of Kuwait are meant for business and enclose empty spaces where Budins may camp in times of trouble. The streets are solitary and windowless.” (172-73)

Freya visited again in 1937. Describing this trip, she writes, “the wall as a matter of fact is not old. It was built in 1916, hastily in three months against Wahabi raiders. In the springtime most of Kuwait picnics in the desert and parties of women trail their back gowns and hidden faces under the gateway.”

One site she describes is the diwan of Sheikh Khazal. On page 188, she writes, “another [place]… stands in this empty space–the square palace of the dead Shaikh of Muhammarah, isolated, with corner towers. It crumbles away in the sun, while a young Persian widow lives inside it. The girl widow lives here like a princess in a fairy tale, still young but so poor that she will scarce marry again, with a fat mother upstairs and a huge old doorkeeper below to guard the pillared court and empty rooms, ‘with mothed and dropping arras hung’–the fading fineries and crumbling ceilings carved and panelled, the bathrooms and underground chambers where winds are carried down in shafts for summer coolness, and the wide roof terrace that overlooks the sea. The palace was built as a rich man’s fantasy and a monument of friendship, to enable the Shaikh of Muhammarah to spend some time with the Shaikh of Kuwait whom he loved; and here and there in the empty rooms some trace can still be seen of former bustle, an old barouche in the entrance, glass ornaments and painful coloured fancies, mattresses piled high for guests, and brass-bound coffers… the young window sits in black with high-heeled shoes on a stiff chair, and feeds her guests with sherbert, pistachios and melon seeds, sweets and oranges, and Persian tea, her pretty little whimsical face smiling.” Here is a photo I took of that building in November of 2021:

She visits the island of Failaka. She writes, “at the head of the Persian Gulf, opposite the Bay of Kuwait, is an island called Failichah or Failikah. Even its syllables there is a sound of peace, left by sea-wanderers who rested here long enough for the print of their foreign tongue to remain when they were forgotten. And the island itself carries in its atmosphere the same remote elusive felicity, a feeling of Echo, of something that has vanished not by violence but imperceptibly, so that an intangible essence still hangs upon the air. The island, low and sandy, is born like Aphrodite of the waters and runs to shallow headlands half submerged. The people’s fish-traps, screens of reed built into heart-shaped enclosures… stand far out… Fishing boats pass by in open water… the lines [here] are horizontal or gently undulating like the sea around them, and the small town on the western side lies with its one-storied flat-roofed houses, the sun-whitened mud of their walls… almost as flat as the rest of the island. Here… a temporary peace may yet be enjoyed… the land is free to any who wish to build upon it; and the fishermen… will call “Peace” upon the stranger who saunters on the sand between the houses and the sea. We decided to make a grand tour of the island on donkeys… and to look for potsherds by the way… We did not sit, but tried to do so, jogging about on seven small donkeys with that irresponsible feeling of happiness which comes in a roadless land. Perhaps it is some far Paleolithic or Eolithic memory that makes the world so much more attractive when one’s way across it is not marked by paths. We were told of… an inscription discovered years ago and carried off by the Royal Navy… but the day was far too lovely for these dim antiquities. In the late afternoon the donkeys were collected, such of them as had not escaped already to their homes. We jogged back. An old man came out of a gate in the mud wall and asked us to his garden; secluded from the winds… ‘The spring is pleasant in Failichah,’ we said. He replied, ‘And your coming is pleasant– you are the spring.'” Here is a photo I took of Failaka in December of 2025:

These photos come from an article by Stark in Volume 5, Issue 6 of The Geographical Magazine

(1954) Ioania: A Quest – Turkey

Freya begins this work by writing, “the authors thanks are fast due to Herodotus, horn in the early years of the 5th century B.C. in the Dorian city of Halicarnassus in Caria, traveller in the Levant and maker of History, and the constant companion of this journey. Of his life little but its work is known: except that he was the son of Lyxes, and ended his days In the South Italian colony ofThurii: and Sophocles at the age of fifty-five wrote for him a song.” She also includes a “Synopsis of History (May be omitted by the well-informed.)”

In her final chapter, she describes a visit to Hierapolis. She writes, “Hierapolis, near ancient Fliera (now Enjeli), where the kings of Pergamum built in the shadow of Rome. Here the huge solidity of the Roman ruins spreads itself along a ledge, with hollow arches, and piers of cement, and ceilings cut into curves, and rafters entirely of stone. The baths meet one first, and later churches are away to the north and the theatre is held in the lap of the hill above: all look out across the plain to the lands of Maeander and with their blind eyes dominate the Ionian world. However impressive, one feels a deadness in the heart of this stone : the secret of life is not vivid inside it, as it is in the poorest remnant of an Hellenic wall. For the Romans, I have read somewhere, flattened their ground before they built on it and incidentally that is how Augustus bull-dozed away the site of Priam’s Troy when he constructed his temple. But the Greeks, out of poverty perhaps but perhaps also by choice, often fitted their fine blocks to the ups and downs of nature, and so with this piety acquired a share in her enduring and changing life: and though the Roman system has produced every later magnificence, using the world as if it were a clay tablet to write on it the vestiges of men, the very humanity of all our ruins makes them dead when their day is over.” Here are images of the theatre of Hieropolis, built around 129 CE for a visit by the emperor Hadrian. You can see how it has been restored since Freya’s visit in the 1950s.

She describes the natural site of Pamukkale, which is why most tourists vists the area today. She writes, “there was this sadness under the vaults of Hierapolis… but the strange warm water spilled down the slope as it did in Strabo’s day, green-white, light and gay, and full of bubbles, with a trail of steam in the cold air building a swift incrustation ot lime, delicate and dazzling as snowflakes, and solidifying rapidly. The peasants enclose their fields by guiding a little stream that grows and rises on a deposit of its own making, till a wall exists with the water running along the top. Down 300 feet of the steep hillside it has congealed in white cascades, huge heads of barbarian columns from below but flat above with shallow edges, like the growth of giant water-lily leaves out of a pond.“

(1958) Alexander’s Path: From Caria to Cilicia – Turkey

In this work, Stark focuses on Alexander’s campaign across southwestern Asia Minor. On this blog post, I have written about sites associated with Alexander the Great. In her work, Stark begins in the region of Caria (Halicarnassus/modern Bodrum), goes to Lycia and Pamphylia, and ends in Cilicia (where the Battle of Issus was fought in 333 BCE).

Here is her corrected manuscript for the work, valued at $12,500 on abebooks