Freya Stark in the Levant (The st Antony's College Middle East Archives)

Freya Stark's first experience of the Near East was in 1927, when she stayed in Beirut, taking lessons to improve her Arabic. Boarding at a mission in Broumana, she began to explore the surrounding countryside, then a tranquil and idyllic area of deep, wooded valleys. In 1928 she moved to Damascus and was then able to visit Baalbek.Throughout the interwar years she travelled extensively in the Levant. In Syria she explored the castles of the Assassins, the Jebel Druze and the deserted Byzantine cities of the Orontes Valley. In Palestine, Acre and Jerusalem gradually won her affections, and in Jordan she visited the new capital city of Amman, then scarcely more than a village, and the ancient Nabatean 'lost city' of Petra.She returned to the Levant frequently during the war, and also throughout the 1950s. Her final trip to the region was in 1977, when she travelled by raft down the Euphrates River. For Freya Stark the Levant was the foundation of her love for the Middle East and the starting point for many of her travels further afield. This volume contains many of her best photographs, spanning the fifty years of her love affair with the Levant.