The Lycian Shore by Freya Stark

The Lycian Shore by Freya Stark

The Lycian Shore is the second stage of Miss Stark's Turkish travels. It is the account of a single journey by sea along the Asia Minor coast in the five-ton 'Elfin,' landing as the tides and winds allowed. Thus in following the voyages of the Greeks and Persians, and the men who prepared the scene for Alexander the Great, she does so with a much stronger and more definite thread of her own travel than was possible in Ionia. The plan of these unique original travel books is more developed in The Lycian Shore than in Ionia, and the exciting, imaginative quality of the writing gives, while moving in the present, a reconstruction of a past civilization and way of life with quite extraordinary brilliance and intensity. But Miss Stark has best explained her intentions at the beginning of the new book: "In our age, when even Cinerama can seem to reproduce physical features of the known lands, the art of words may well attempt a rather deeper penetration and—in travel books particularly—fill out the meaning of space with something of its substance in tine. In Turkey particularly, and in all the Levant and the Aegean, a journey without history is like the portrait of an old face without its wrinkles. Every bay or headland of these shores, every mountain top round whose classic name the legends and clouds are floating, carries visible and invisible signs of its past. The spell of the landscapes is that their names and their stories are familiar, though many of the sites have been forgotten, so that one wanders as if through an inherited estate, discovering it anew.'

Details

• Hardcover with dust jacket (price clipped, light wear and tear on the spine, dust jacket has ripples) 
• First Edition, 1956
• Condition: Good, name trough the title on title page, no notes/stamps 
  
• Publisher: John Murray