4.5
Roumeli
ByPublisher Description
Get lost in northern Greece with one of the greatest travel writers of the 20th century as he travels to monasteries, among shepherds, and throughout the hills, mountains, and rugged coastline of this enchanted land.
Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past.
Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance—the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination—along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast.
Roumeli is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.
Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past.
Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance—the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination—along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast.
Roumeli is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.
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4.5
teacher.gabi.reads
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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“"The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know...insanity and genius vibrate in the air."
Why read a book about an Englishman's travels in Greece published in the 1960's, if you're going somewhere totally different? Why read of sun and sea when you're going to colder climes?
I have this theory... that it's akin to writing cursive exercises over and over again in school, or studying the periodic table and the solar system even though you have zero plans of being a chemist or astronaut. They're all preparation for something else, whether it's coordinated fine motor muscles, or a deeper understanding of the composition of the universe and our place in it.
In Paddy Fermor's case, to read him is to wonder at his powers of concentration and language, and to hopefully develop an eye and an attitude for seeking beauty wherever it may be. No wonder he is the patron saint of travel writing! But his works are so much more than to-do lists of how-to-get-here and what-to-do-there.
Fermor is obsessed with people and languages, and how history and geography shape both. The care with which he takes to describe the torn but proudly worn outfits of the fiercely independent nomadic Sarakatsánissas and their music, freedom personified, the poetry of his word paintings ("Olympus is the sky's echo, Parnassus the rush of an eagle's wing.")...
He keeps reflecting on his past readings and how his armchair travels inform his physical ones.
Fermor wrote of the two contrasting entities that reside in every Greek, calling it the Helleno-Romaic Dilemma. Half of his blood inheritance is the Hellene who speaks pure Katharévousa, "written by a few, spoken by none." This is the language of scholars, of noble ancestors like Plato and Aristotle... unreachable in their godlike dignity.
The other half is the Romaic who speaks Dimotiki, the tongue of the masses.
"Hellene is the glory of ancient Greece; Romaic the splendors and the sorrows of Byzantium," Fermor writes, and records an observation made by a guard they encountered on a boat:
"Greece is an idea... that's what keeps us together... and those old Greeks, our celebrated ancestors, are a nuisance... we can never be as great as they were, nobody can... if we weren't such fools and always quarreling among ourselves, if we could have no wars or revolutions for fifty years, you'd see what a country we'd become!"
He could be speaking of our own Motherland!
There's so much more to this book, and I can't wait to read its precursor, Mani! For Roumeli is the ancient name for northern Greece, and I have the pleasures of the South to look forward to, thanks to book mail!
To read Paddy Fermor is to celebrate life. ❤️”
Mohit Joshi
Created over 3 years agoShare
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TexasErin
Created over 9 years agoShare
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About Patrick Leigh Fermor
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was an intrepid traveler, a heroic soldier, and a writer with a unique prose style. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived partly in Greece—in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani—and partly in Worcestershire. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations.
Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece, Sugar Cane, a children’s book, and The Book of Heaven, a novel. She lives in New York.
Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece, Sugar Cane, a children’s book, and The Book of Heaven, a novel. She lives in New York.
Other books by Patrick Leigh Fermor
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