Alexander's Path
Freya Stark
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 0879513403
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Magnificent...a brilliant and inspiring account of her journey along the coastline of Turkey and back into time.” (The Observer)
This is the story of back-country Turkey, an area that even in the 20th century remains stubbornly tied to antiquity. The author traveled through it by truck and horseback, often alone. She reached places little visited and never written about. The country people welcomed her with generosity unrelated to their meager resources. She was traveling in time as well, and found significance in recalling the life of Alexander the Great. Twenty-two centuries ago he was the first to dream of a united world.
self-conscious gesture; the sheep ran with their noses to the ground, hiding their faces, one against the other; and the women, wrapped in black above their baggy trousers, came riding behind them, with only one eye showing and the cloth held in their mouth to leave their hands free, looking like one of Dürer’s ideas of death. We left finally in a south-westerly direction for the Massicytus range, that separates the whole of the Xanthus valley from the Elmali plain. Somewhere the envoys from
produced it, and a narrow postern was visible only because an arrow of sunlight fell through. Within, over the dip of the ridge, the city lies half-buried, worn down to the huge stone arches on which its buildings stood. A pillared square overgrown with trees was perhaps a market with pedestals all round it, its space still flagged and smooth; and the theatre is scooped out of the hill beside a half-fallen arcade. Its stone seats too were latticed with sun or fresh under the shadows that moved
of twenty-two who comes for the first time to Asia. Romance reaches the romantic—and Alexander was passionately romantic; and human sympathies come to the warm-hearted, and the Alexander saga could never have existed if his heart had not been warm. Time too must be remembered—the fact that a year and a half or more was spent along the coast of Asia Minor before ever the battle of Issus was fought; and five years before he first adopted the Persian dress in Parthia.9 Aristander, his friend and
from Miletus—the one along the coast, by the ports of Iasus and Bargylia, by-passing Mylasa; and the other by what is now the lake of Bafa, under Heraclea whose stupendous walls were to be built within a generation, along a road where sixteen columns of a late Corinthian temple still stand at Euromus, near the present Selimiye.5 The road crosses an old Turkish bridge on eleven arches, to reach the neon-lighted avenue of Milas, which is a typical small country town in Turkey, and was numbered in
reconstruction is sound, there was only one direction for him to make for, and that was towards the important north road that came down from whatever then represented the later Laodicea, through Temisonium (Kara Hüyük) to what is now Tefenni, or a little farther south to Cibyra (Horzum), and on by Isinda (Korkuteli) to Pamphylia. This road was soon to be the chief means of communication between the later provinces of Asia and the southern coast, though there is, so far as I know, no notice of