End of Winter Musings: Ionia

I have been reading Freya Stark's book Ionia, about her journeys and explorations on the Turkish coast of the Aegean.  She uses Herodotus as a guide and describes a landscape of abandoned cities and intense heat; herds of goats wander through buried streets, shepherds sit on carved friezes in the shade.  She sits on dry grass headlands next to ruined stumps of temples and gazes out to sea. Very appropriate for early spring reading, this evocation of heat, dust, the blue sea, Greek and Turkish history, lost and forgotten empires.  

But the book was written in the early 1950s and is itself now evocative of a vanished world. There are rumbles of present history in the book, the removal of Greek people from Turkey and the arrival of Muslim Macedonians to the towns.  And now much of this quiet pastoral landscape is buried again, beneath Turkey's holiday industry; I would like to overlay Stark's map of Ionian and Greek towns with a modern one of roads and holiday destinations.  This is the first book I have stopped halfway through and started again, so powerful are her evocations of small journeys to hot and abandoned cities.