At the end of the 2018-19 season in the English Premier League, Liverpool Football Club had a total of 97 points, a higher points total than at any other time in the club’s history. It also finished with an enormous 25-point gap between it and Chelsea, the team immediately below. Most amazingly perhaps, in the whole season, it had lost only one match, having won 30 of them and drawing seven. Yet, this historic season was not a cause of celebration for the Liverpool fans. That is because topping the league table one point above them was Manchester City, the league champions of that year.

This example demonstrates that for those who aim for success, either collectively or individually, the level of achievement is not as important as being the best. Freya Stark (1893-1993), the latest of the travelers in the Famous Travellers to Türkiye series, felt this keenly, as one of the two preeminent modern British women travelers in the Near East, the other being Gertrude Bell. It is also the case that they had quite similar characters. One of Stark’s biographers Caroline Moorehead notes Stark in comparison with Bell that "both were full of contradictions" and "both had characters of steel" and that Stark shared with Bell "her drive, her strength" and "her enduring curiosity."

Nevertheless, with Bell just having died the year before Stark commenced her travels, she felt herself to be in Bell’s shadow. In Baghdad in 1929, which turned out to be the second chapter for Stark in a long life of traveling, Stark, finding Bell was still the talk of the city, privately, as Moorehead notes, "was a little scornful of" her. Jane Fletcher Geniesse reveals that in the late 1930s, Stark turned down a chance to write a biography of Bell, claiming that she was "not very fascinated" by her life. Stark’s viewpoints on Bell betray a mean sense of bitterness, and this is unsurprising. Stark felt as if the late Bell was her rival, and she did what many people do when they feel threatened by a rival, whether alive or dead, and that is to belittle their achievements in the hope of reducing the threat posed by them.

If this were all that Stark was capable of, she would not be worthy of her reputation. However, it is precisely because she also challenged Bell’s legacy in a significant way – that of proving her own ability as a traveler and as a writer – that she made herself into such a great figure. For myself, I am a great admirer of Bell as a traveler and a writer, but I regard Stark as surpassing her; indeed, she is my favorite travel writer in the Near East.

In fact, Stark is such a great traveler that her travels in Türkiye alone, which mainly comprise the period of the 1950s and which themselves are only a part of her even greater travels, are simply too extensive to be covered by one piece alone, and I have already promised that the piece on Ibn Battuta will be the only multipart one in this series. Hence, I have decided here to focus on a single one of her travel books, the 1959 "Riding to the Tigris," which details her trip from Van through Hakkari to Diyarbakır. There are three reasons for this. The first is that the fascinating region of the southeast of Türkiye is not an area that has been focused upon in this series so far, whereas the locations of Stark’s other travel books have been. The second is that her other travel books deal a lot with pre-Turkish Anatolian history. This is not in my view a fault at all, but I prefer to keep the focus here on Stark and the people of modern Türkiye. The third is that it is simply brilliantly written, although this last point can also apply to her other work, so maybe it is not really a point at all. Also, by the time of this book, it may be the case that Stark herself is aware of her own abilities, as in it, with over 30 years having passed since Baghdad, Stark even draws upon Bell, whose work she now calls "excellent," implying that any threat she once felt from her is now well and truly over.

Life of Freya Stark

Freya Stark was born in Paris in 1893 to English parents. Although Stark herself spent brief parts of her life in England, her base for most of her life was in the north of Italy. She commenced her travels with a trip to Lebanon at the end of 1927. She subsequently traveled further in the Arab world and Iran and produced books on her travels. She is marked by what Moorhead calls "her intense curiosity and strong sense of the romantic."

Türkiye became the object of her travels in the 1950s. Her first two books on Türkiye are about its coastal areas – Ionia, "A Quest" of 1954 and "The Lycian Shore" of 1956. "Alexander’s Path" of 1958 is what Moorehead calls an "ambitious" work, which is the result of Stark’s attempt to trace part of the route of Alexander the Great through Anatolia on the ground. Another work that mixes history with her own experience of the land is her large history book "Rome of the Euphrates." In 1971 she also published a sketch of Turkish history in the coffee table book "Turkey," which is illustrated with photographs by Fulvio Roiter.

Trip in southeastern part

As must now already be obvious, Türkiye is a country that fascinates Stark. She describes it as "the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world." The trip covered in her 1959 book is to its "remotest" area, what Stark calls the "Hakkiari," which is its extreme southeastern corner. This is an area of mountains which, as Stark puts it, "lie, a deep wedge with strong gorges, between the Tigris and Lake Van." As technological change has so dramatically altered the world by the mid-20th century, Stark is drawn to this area "as one of those dwindling regions where a four-footed animal is still the only help to locomotion" and the fact that it has only occasionally been visited by outsiders.

There is a degree of tension over her intended trip from the outset. In the late 1950s, there were anti-British demonstrations over Cyprus in Türkiye, and the region that she was hoping to travel to was a sensitive one. However, once the authorities are assured that she "had no political axe to grind" and travels purely for "eccentricity," she is granted permission for her journey. Later in the book, she touches on the question of "the suspicion" surrounding western travelers in the east of Türkiye. She feels that "this is perfectly natural from the Turkish point of view, for there have been extremely few visitors of late years and the books that were written in the past," especially in the 19th century, about this area "are nearly always outspoken in defense of some minority and loud in criticism of the Turks." In addition, she notes "the zealous Victorians" were constantly seeking to divide up Turkish lands. As for herself, Stark affirms that, in contrast, "I made up my mind that here in this wild land, being as it were a guest, I would behave as a guest should do when writing afterwards about it." Thus, Stark is clearly sympathetic and accommodating to Turkish concerns, even though they come to affect her own trip as will be seen.

For her trip flies to Van, and the plane first makes a temporary stop in Diyarbakır. In Van she visits the rock of Van, noting the "marks or inscriptions" left on it by various civilizations. She had planned to stay longer to visit Akdamar Island, but a car is arranged and instead, she begins her trip proper. This car is driven by a Turkish doctor on a vaccination drive, who is accompanied by his wife and young son. They take the road south through Güzelsu, where she is shown around the Hoşap Castle by the mukhtar. From there, she reaches the headwaters of the Great Zab, passing through Başkale. As for the Great Zab, she notes that it "flows in a flatbed scattered with silver willows." The road then passes between towering heights, she finds the atmosphere ominous. Reaching Hakkari, she is put up in a hospital there as it is the place with the most available beds in the city. It is perhaps ironic then, that she later comes down with dysentery and now has to remain in the hospital for a more conventional reason. This illness affects not only her body but also her spirit. She feels isolated and her situation even causes her to once again doubt her continuing her career as a traveler. However, her sense of the local people is undiminished. She notes that "I was probably the first Western woman, or Eastern one either, to travel alone in this country for pleasure, and nowhere could anything so peculiar have been accepted more naturally or with greater kindness."

Once she has recovered physically and psychologically, she leaves by jeep, which climbs out of the city entering a very empty region through which "the Zab defile wound, a river of mists with crags emerging, fathomless as dreams whose roots are out of sight." She travels up to a height of 3,000 meters (9,843 feet), which marks the gap between the headwaters of "the great rivers" of the Great Zab and the Habur Çayı. On the other side, she is taken on an exhilarating off-road ride in the jeep in order to reach the yayla of the mayor of Beytüşşebap.

On reaching this nomadic Kurdish encampment, she, as a "strange phenomenon – the first Western woman they had seen" is treated with great hospitably. From this yayla, she heads now mounted on a horse down into Beytüşşebap. From there she passes through Bolağaç to Uzungeçit. Uzungeçit turns out to be a busy place as it is also hosting a small party of German anthropologists, who had reached it from the opposite direction the previous day. After the isolated land she has passed through, this place seems positively crowded in contrast. The foreigners reside together on the roof of the mukhtar’s house.

On a steep narrow path outside of Uzungeçit, "with a vertical face of rock and two waterfalls below," her horse misplaces a hoof off the side of the path. Stark notes that "it was luckily the hindleg" and that she acted instinctively to pull the horse inward. This experience makes her think about death and life: "I saw a small heap of myself, indistinguishable, on the slab near the waterfall at the bottom of the rocks, and turned my thought away, enjoying the sun on my back, and the mountain air, the depth of the blue sky and the wrinkled stone against it, and the simple delight of being alive, never, or probably never, to be repeated quite the same."

From here, she passes on to another watershed – that of the pass between the Habur Çayı and Hezil Çayı. She then passes through an enclosed fertile valley in which houses are perched on the side, a place like "some planet isolated and unfamiliar as the moon."

In this valley, she stops at Uludere, where she stays with a commandant and his wife, who has freshly arrived from Istanbul. Here Stark learns that she is to have her camera films confiscated. Her permit to travel had expressly forbidden photography but she had interpreted it to only mean a ban on photography of sensitive material. It distresses her so badly that she vows "never, never again would I travel in this difficult manner." As a reader of her book, I felt the deepest sympathy for her here. The reason is not that I believe she was in the right. Stark herself knows that her permit does not allow her to take pictures, and the Turkish authorities have every right to enforce it. Why I felt sympathy for her due to the enchanting nature of her writing. When reading Stark it is as if one travels alongside her. One becomes her friend with whom she shares and confides. Thus, a misfortune, even if not an undeserved one, that befalls her naturally affects her reader friend as well. Or at least that was the case with me.

As for Stark, she manages to regain her composure by thinking that in her whole trip so far "this was the first time I had met anything but help." She is also somewhat consoled by the emotional support she receives from the local people around her. She then sets off again down the valley which narrows as the water of the Hezil Çayı goes from being a "torrent" to "a green river." As the altitude decreases, the inverse is true of the heat. In Akduman, she finds that "the best of my photographs" are still with her, their films having been missed during the confiscation. This caused her to go "to sleep with a certain feeling of satisfaction which I hope the Turkish tourist office may share when they realize how beautiful and harmless these landscapes are."

From Akduman, she crosses the Hezil Çayı, and again, the environment is almost completely devoid of human beings or even animals. Atmospherically, she writes that "darkness fell at six-thirty, but the moon rose behind us, and trees and shrubs, distorted into strange sub-human shapes in the twilight, swam clear out into loveliness, as if their earth had crumbled into gold." Heading towards Balveren, "we could feel the vast slant of the earth towards the Tigris."

There she stays there with the garrison, who treat her with great hospitality. Then she travels on to Şırnak where she notices that its old buildings have fared better than the new ones and where the kaymakam "made me feel at home in a civilized world." From Şırnak she is given transportation in a pickup driven by an engineer. As she heads off, at one point, coming out of a blind turn, the Tigris is before her; "there it curved, not sprawling but compact, blue and starling as a kingfisher’s wing, with yellow grassland on its far bank." Cizre can also be seen further off on the river. She wants to continue her journey from there but is told that there is no way of doing so, and instead returns to Diyarbakır in the engineer’s pick-up, from where she flies back to Ankara.

Evaluation by, on Stark

She relates that this two-week-long journey "strengthened ... my love for the people of Turkey in general," and earlier she notes "how much kindness, how freely and generously offered, had brought me so far on my way." Stark in her book shows how she is able to establish a good rapport with all kinds of different people from various Turkish officials to the local Kurdish tribespeople, and with the assorted guides and escorts made up from both that travel alongside her.

As a final comment, Stark is the longest-living of the travelers to Türkiye in this series, having lived to the age of 100. She continued to travel well into extreme old age, even going on a trek around Annapurna at the age of 86, and devoting herself life to writing. Both her engagingly written work and the varied and fascinating journeys that it is based upon or inspired by must surely place her, unlike Liverpool Football Club, simply in a league of her own.