Roumeli
Authors: Patrick Leigh Fermor
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915â2011) was born of Anglo-Irish descent and raised in Northamptonshire and London. 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 until the end of his life in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to BritishâGreek relations.
PATRICIA STORACE is the author of
Heredity
, a book of poems;
Dinner with Persephone
, a travel memoir about Greece; and
Sugar Cane
, a children's book. She lives in New York.
ROUMELI
Travels in Northern Greece
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
Introduction by
PATRICIA STORACE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
3 The Helleno-Romaic Dilemma and Sidetrack to Crete
Appendix I:
Derivations of Sarakatsán
Appendix II:
Glossary of Boliaric Vocabulary
Copyright and More Information
“C
AN YOU
speak Greek?” an officer of the occupation interrogated a suspected Egyptian insurrectionist in the year 57. As recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, 26:37, a swift and fluent response in Greek saved Saint Paul and secured him his release from prison. A language and the civilization it embodied became a ransom for a man's life. For Paul, Greek was not only the language of civilization, but also the language of salvation, the speech of immortal life embodied in the Gospels.
Close to two millennia later, in 1941, knowledge of Greek was once again a matter of life and death, this time for the young Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British officer in the Second World War. He and a circle of fellow philhellene soldiers had made an “obsolete choice of Greek at school,” in Leigh Fermor's words, which, as a bizarre consequence, had placed them in the thick of the Cretan resistance. Disguised as a shepherd, Leigh Fermor found himself living out of caves in the mountains of Crete, spying on the Nazi occupation forces and helping to organize and equip the local resistance bands. The story of his audacious kidnapping of the German General Kreipe, a division commander quartered in the Villa Ariadne, alongside the site of the Palace of Knossos, the central symbol of Minoan culture, lives in the form of song as well as in history books; it is commemorated in at least one Cretan heroic ballad, like some fragment of ancient epic adapted to modern décor and manners.
These two stories, of the saint and of the soldier, illustrate a kind of alchemy that Greece practices on lived experience. One of the characteristic gifts the Hellenic world bestows is a sense of an unobstructed passage through time, as if time had grown uncannily permeable, fluid, and transparent, as if one could dive through time like water. In Greece, encounters between the living and the immortal are a quotidian reality.
Even the icon stores in every neighborhood provide opportunities for this heightened perception. It is perhaps best represented by the popular icon known as the Metamorphosis, which records the scene of Christ's transfiguration, when he reveals himself to his disciples as both God and man, present equally in time and in eternity. It is impossible to travel inside Greece without traveling beyond it, through memory, scholarship, and dream.
Patrick Leigh Fermor's
Roumeli
is just such an account of travel, for it takes him to a region of Greece that, as he writes, “is not to be found on maps....Its extent has varied and its position has wandered rather imprecisely.”
Roumeli
, first published in 1966, was the second of Leigh Fermor's two books about Greece, a country that has been his part-time home since his war years. The earlier book,
Mani
, described the people and culture of the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, an area geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of Greece by the Taygetos mountains.
Roumeli
, by contrast, moves well to the north, to the land of the “Rumis,” the Greco-Roman empire that eventually fell to the Turks.
For Leigh Fermor, however, Roumeli is not so much a geographic designation as a metaphor for Hellenism. The book is a journey through landscapes and, above all, among people, in which the author explores aspects of what it means or has meant to be Greek. It is also a delicately elegiac record of ways of life that were vanishing even as Leigh Fermor encountered them, peoples and places that we now know about chiefly
through his accounts of them. In this way, Patrick Leigh Fermor's writings on Greece have themselves become an in-dispensable part of the Greek world and its lore.
The communities Leigh Fermor describes in
Roumeli
are labyrinthine; they have the atmosphere of secret societies. Over the centuries Greeks have perfected the art of living without getting caught at it. This skill is celebrated in the Klephtic songs of heroes of the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire, and practiced in the famous and still savored Klephtic cooking, a technique in which food is cooked sealed so as to produce no smoke that might alert enemies to an encampment. The Greek gift for camouflage has made the country, and especially its mountain fastnesses, a refuge for clans, customs, idioms, and ways of living that seem neither to flourish fully nor to disappear irrevocably. In
Roumeli,
Patrick Leigh Fermor holds these vestiges to the light, as if they were encased in crystal globes.
In the course of his journeys through and about the ever-elusive Roumeli, Leigh Fermor introduces us to the monasteries of Meteora, where a dwindling population of monks celebrate the liturgy in churches perched on mountain pinnaclesâan architecture of the miraculous. Here, clouds can be so thick at the summit that two monks will collide while singing the office.
A visit to Lord Byron's temperamental and imperious great-granddaughter inspires an attempt to recover a pair of the poet's shoes that are rumored still to be at the provincial town of Missolonghi, where that secular saint of Hellenism met his death. Leigh Fermor undertakes the quest, much as in the world of antiquity travelers would set out seeking the very oars that propelled Jason and the Argonauts toward the Golden Fleece and Medea. Arriving in Missolonghi, Leigh Fermor finds that the shoes have become a Greek family treasure, a talismanic element of a local bride's dowry. Byron would have loved the
thought of his slippers poised in an immortal proximity to a wedding bed.
The villagers of the Kravara region are renowned for their cunning, and Leigh Fermor is the ideal audience for their tales of trickery. Without betraying a flicker of incredulity, he listens as they regale him with the tale of Panos, a traveling grifter who had mastered the art of appearing dead:
“It was the custom of Charis,” he said, “to arrive in a Russian village carrying Panos on his backâPanos was the lighter of the twoâthen he set him down under a tree and knelt beside him wringing his hands and weeping bitterly. A crowd would gather and ask what was wrong. Then Charis said: âMy poor brother is dying!'âand Panos really looked like it, all grey in the face, with hollow cheeks and glazed eyesâlike this.” Uncle Elias's own features for a second mimicked a moribund rictus of alarming verisimilitude and then sprang as abruptly back to normalâ“âHere we are,' he would moanââ
Grtzki! Pravoslavnik!
âthousands of miles from home!' All their hearts melted. They would be taken into someone's house and that night, Panos would die.”
“Die?”
“Die. Some of the old ones had the secret. He could stop his breathing, turn white and cold: everyone would have said a corpse. They laid him out, put a clean suit of clothes on him, covered him with flowers, dug the grave and, as the custom is, all the village would contribute to a collection for the family; that is to say, for Charis; they filled his hat with roubles as he wept and mourned beside the bier. Charis explained that, in Greece, only the family must attend the vigil. So, the night before the funeral, they left him alone there lamenting. When the village was asleep, he gave the dead man a shake, and Panos sat
up scattering the flowers and stepped from the candles. Then, hop! they were out of the window and away over the steppe with a new suit and a hat full of cash to the good! After a hundred versts or so, on the outskirts of a new village, Panos climbed on Charis's back again and they headed for the market place...They were very fond of Russia.”
Our response was noisy. When it had died down, the tavern-keeper said, “Travel broadens the mind.”
Leigh Fermor is no less graceful as a guest at nuptials, full of archaic beauty and terror, celebrated by nomadic shepherds, through which a bride becomes “a slave to her husband” and to her husband's family.
Roumeli
tells the story of communities and customs poised between life and death; it might be described as a sequence of still lives:
nature morte.
One of the most powerful of the book's still life scenes is of lambs roasting for an Easter meal; no one who has turned a spit at a Greek Easter feast will fail to relive what Leigh Fermor describes here:
Whole lambs were being flourished sizzling and smoking on their spits....Helpings of brain are delved from heads which have been bisected lengthwise and opened like a casket....The sheep's eyes...are highly prized by mountaineers but for all but the most assimilated travellers the message they flash from the prongs is one of harrowing reproach.
It is less and less common to read prose with a Ruskinian flourish and flavor, but Leigh Fermor's work glistens like silver stamped in the same atelier. Like Ruskin, too, Leigh Fermor is a master of the tableau, and relishes a love of costume. The nineteenth-century prose stylist who wrote of the transforming
authority of the velvet of his Oxford academic gown would himself have relished Leigh Fermor's appreciation of traditional Cretan dress, of high boots, baggy trousers, eight-foot-long sash, dagger, slung gun, bandoliers, and walking stick, “a garb in which, as I well know, it is impossible not to swagger.”
Ruskin recalled in his autobiography,
Praeterita
, that his writing was formed by hearing books read aloud; it seems likely that Patrick Leigh Fermor's prose was nurtured in much the same way. The grandeur and nuance of his language, its coloratura-like ornament, its relish of eccentricity and digression, the quality of attention unabashedly asked of the reader, make us realize we have yet to grasp how profoundly television and movies have altered the way books are written.
Patrick Leigh Fermor remains a craftsman for whom the world begins with words. He writes with the consciousness that words are themselves symbols, creating images, not accompanying or captioning them. This is speech which in itself is a form of experience, fit to communicate and to shape a full encounter with existence, which, he writes, is “a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims.”
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