Freya Stark's travel writing on Turkey and the Middle East remains some of the finest in the genre. Her accounts of travelling through the Lycian coast in the 1950s — before mass tourism, before paved roads, when the ancient cities sat in undisturbed forest — capture the region at its most luminous.
Her prose style is precise and unhurried, and her eye for what makes a place distinctive is unerring. Reading her alongside a visit to the ruins she described (Termessos, Phaselis, Olympos) creates an interesting double exposure of past and present.