The Valleys of the Assassins by Freya Stark

In 1934, Stark published an account of her wanderings in the classic book, The Valleys of the Assassins. The region was the Assassin’s impregnable home-a hotbed of conspiratorial plotting-and at the height of their power, more than 50 heavily fortified castles provided refuge to the sect. In the 1930s, British travel writer and explorer Freya Stark travelled through this fabled valley in search of ancient castles built by the Assassins, an almost mythical cult of fanatics who’d descend from mountaintop strongholds on murderous missions targeting political and religious adversaries during the Middle Ages.

What brought me to the Alamut Valley was the name of a book.

After all, when you’ve lived your whole life in a region historically linked to one of the world’s most feared militant sects, danger literally comes with the territory. Valley Assassins Persian Travels by Freya Stark: Books (107 results) You searched for: Author: freya stark, Title: valley assassins persian travels. I recoil as Rasoul, my guide, removes a snarling viper from the path. The Valleys of the Assassins : And Other Persian Travels by Stark, Freya and a great selection of related books. It will be argued that while Stark adopts an ambivalent attitude toward the encountered differences in Persia and her travel book is informed with self-exoticism and self-fashioning rhetoric, Byron deploys an authoritative Orientalist lens and his travel account is permeated with instances of feminizing the country he is travelling in and the men he encounters.This article was originally published on .uk and inside National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine in June 2018 PDF Inspired by Freya Stark’s classic travelogue, Shaun Busuttil sets off into the depths of this fabled and fearsome valley in search of the old castles that once provided refuge for a notorious band of killers.įear grips its frigid fingers on the back of my neck. Further, it aims to offer a nuanced reading of the role of a traveller’s gender on the textual construction of the self and the other and his/her relationship to the hegemonic Orientalist tradition. Drawing on Orientalism, travel and gender theories, this article aims to offer a comparative look at Byron’s and Stark’s travel books in unravelling the ways they are informed by Orientalist attitudes in representing Persia and the Persians. Although these two travel accounts have been the subject of a few studies, the focus has been mostly on their architectural and stylistic aspects. This paper explores representations of Persia and the Persians in Freya Stark’s The Valley of Assassins (1934) and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937).

The Valleys of the Assassins by Freya Stark