Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece - Hardcover

Leigh Fermor, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719504260 ISBN 13: 9780719504266

Publisher: John Murray, 1966

Synopsis

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:

After his famous walk across Europe - recounted in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania and fought in Greece and Crete - living disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years organising resistance activities. He was awarded the DSO and CBE, and a knighthood in the 2004 new Year Honours List.

Review:

'A Book For... The Greek islands' * Justin Marozzi, Financial Times * Leigh Fermor is a writer's writer, a man whose prose is frequently and justifiably likened to poetry. He writes like an angel in other words -- and angels don't date * Justin Marozzi, Financial Times * 'Extraordinarily engaging . . . thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase . . . a compelling story' * London Review of Books * Bringing the landscape alive as no other writer can, he uses his profound and eclectic understanding of cultures and peoples ... to paint vivid pictures - nobody has illuminated the geography of Europe better * Geographical Magazine * John Murray is doing the decent thing and reissuing all of Leigh Fermor's main books ... But what else would you expect from a publisher whose commitment to geography is such that for more than two centuries it has widened our understanding of the world? * Geographical Magazine * He is in the first flight of writers on Greece * The Times * A wandering scholar but with a difference: unlike the celebrated travellers of the past he has become part of the country he describes * Sunday Times * Marvellous... we are fortunate to have these unforgettable reports from the fields and the marshes, the peaks and the chasms, the taverns and the waterfronts of the Roumeli * Observer * A masterpiece softened by warm, human understanding * Sunday Times * Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century * Financial Times *

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 1966
• ISBN 10: 0719504260
• ISBN 13: 9780719504266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244