Stark Dame Freya

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Biografie:
Dame Freya Stark (1893-1993)
Freya Stark was famous for her adventurous travels in the Middle East, Arabia and Persia, and for the splendid books she wrote about them; these achievements were fully described in other obituaries. But years before she made her name as traveller and writer, she had proved herself as a mountaineer, and of the many honours she received in a long life she was particularly proud and happy to be an Honorary Member of the Alpine Club. It is this side of her life that it is appropriate to remember here.
Freya started to climb before the 1914-18 war, with her adopted godfather (who was also mine), the scholar W. P. Ker, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford and a member of the Alpine Club. In 1913 he took her to the Gran Paradiso range; in 1919 they were again on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, climbing from Courmayeur and walking over the passes between the valleys that radiate from Monte Rosa, ending at Macugnaga in the Val Anzasca. In 1923 they returned to Macugnaga, and as they were climbing towards a minor summit, the Pizzo Bianco, 'W.P. gave a sudden cry and died'. His heart had stopped. He was buried in the old church at Macugnaga, under the great east face of Monte Rosa. A few days later Freya, with the Macugnaga guide Tofi, traversed the Matterhorn - up the Swiss side, down the Italian, back to Zermatt over the Theodul, a 17-hour day.
Back in Macugnaga the following year she decided to attack that formidable east face of Monte Rosa which, so W.P. had told her, had seldom been climbed, and only once by a woman. She recalled her climb – again with Tofi - in the LAC Journal of 1964. The crux was the Marinelli couloir that runs right up the face - 'the highway for the avalanches of Monte Rosa, which pour down with a dull soft sound as if they were milk' which they traversed at midnight when the surface was frozen. Then up the Loccie glacier, in places so steep that 'when now and then we took a few minutes rest, we would sit by merely leaning slightly towards the gigantic wall'. (When, to the packed congregation at her memorial sevice, Colin Thubron said she had learnt to 'overcome fear', I reflected that this day on Monte Rosa must have given her an early lesson.) With Tofi, she had ambitions to make a new route up the south edge of the Loccie glacier next season. Illness prevented this, and Monte Rosa by the Marinelli remained 'the only really big climb of my life'.
In 1931, when travelling in Persia, she had hopes of climbing Takht-i-Suleiman, but was foiled by a Hungarian climber who bribed her shikari to lead her to the unclimbable side of the mountain. After she settled at Asolo, she often went walking in the Dolomites, crossing passes and staying in huts. Her delight in just being in the mountains endured. 'Nothing will ever hold me like the mountains,' she wrote me in 1975; and in her eighties she went 'creeping round Annapurna - on a very peaceful pony'. In a letter of May 1979 she confessed to me that she was 'not up to much (86)' and old age meant 'one has to be treated like luggage', yet she had 'an unreasonable but happy wish to look once more on the Himalaya', and especially 'to ride from Indus source to Oxus across Pamirs'. Would she need a Russian visa, she asked me; and would her heart hold out? I think she half hoped it would not, and that, like her beloved W.P., she would end her life suddenly, among high mountains.
On her election as an Honorary Member of the LAC in 1935, Freya wrote to the President, Miss MacAndrew, that no honour could have given her greater pleasure 'since it is associated with mountains which have always meant so very much to me'. And after the merger with the Alpine Club in 1975she told me 'I am so proud and happy to be with you in the Noble Club'.
In 1982 the province of Treviso organised an Omaggio a Freya Stark at Asolo - a splendid affair, with a banquet, concert, films of her travels, and the band of the Blues and Royals, flown out at the expense of a local bank. The crowning ceremony was the presentation to her of the Keys of Asolo; and as the 89-year-old Freya appeared at the top of the steps of the piazza, the tune the band struck up was 'The Maid of the Mountains'.
Janet Adam Smith
(Janet Carleton)
Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 99, 1994, Seite 326-327


Geboren am:
1893
Gestorben am:
1993