Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Leigh Fermor, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159017187X ISBN 13: 9781590171875

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159017187X
• ISBN 13: 9781590171875
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280