Mani
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa. Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.
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The chapter on ikons is some of the most wonderful writings I have ever read and stirred a memory. Many years ago I went to a church in the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus called St Nicholas of the Roof. There was a curator who was keen to explain, in very broken English, the significance of the painting and the ikons that were like nothing I had ever seen prior. Though not part of the Mani this superb book reminded me of that great big adventure on my first and only island of any Greek significance. The fact Patrick Leigh Fermor could refresh my distant memory of that visit to Cyprus has me hankering to visit mainland Greece and the Mani and all other places in that ancient land. Will there be old Greek curators with only broken English when I go? I hope so.
