[vc_row heading_color=”primary-1″ padding_bottom=”100″ margin_bottom=”0″][vc_column][grve_title title=”Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor” heading_tag=”h1″][vc_column_text text_style=”leader-text”]
“Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row heading_color=”light” bg_type=”image” bg_image=”11815″ bg_image_type=”fixed” pattern_overlay=”yes” column_gap=”5″ padding_top=”100″ padding_bottom=”100″ font_color=”#ffffff”][vc_column width=”1/2″ css=”.vc_custom_1526461068008{padding-top: 3% !important;padding-right: 3% !important;padding-bottom: 3% !important;padding-left: 3% !important;background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.8) !important;*background-color: rgb(0,0,0) !important;}”][vc_empty_space height=”20px”][grve_title title=”Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO, OBE”][vc_row_inner css=”.vc_custom_1526461137826{padding-right: 3% !important;}”][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][grve_single_image image_mode=”medium” image=”11809″ align=”left”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″ css=”.vc_custom_1533650875138{padding-right: 3% !important;padding-left: 2% !important;}”][vc_column_text]British author, scholar and soldier
Prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War. Regarded as Britain’s greatest living travel writer during his lifetime.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row heading_color=”primary-1″ padding_bottom=”100″ margin_bottom=”0″ padding_top=”100″][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Through another gap our host’s second daughter, wide-hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow – the first cow I had seen in the Mani – all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves.
The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a gold mist.
The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence through wreaths of laurel.
Another picture showed King Constantine’s entry into re-conquered Salonika at the end of the Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut-out from the cover of Romantzo and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script, Long live Uncle Truman was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there for ever.”
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row heading_color=”primary-1″ footer_feature=”yes” margin_bottom=”0″ padding_bottom=”32″][vc_column][grve_title title=”From Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1958″ heading=”h4″][vc_column_text]
Mani and Roumeli (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life in his house in Kardamyli with his wife Joan. Fermor became to know Greece during Cretan resistance during WW II, where he played an important role.
Mani of Messenia is located in the north west part of the middle finger of the Peloponnese, the southernmost part of Europe. It is isolated by the mount Taygetus and is both at the Aegean and Ionian seas, a rough domain that influences the people and their personalities. Patrick Leigh Fermor makes a very insightful journey into the mountains, villages, and history of the region. He unravels the ambiance of the 1950s and the above passage is an example of the author’s strong and at the same time realistic description of a small byzantine church.
“Ikons
We halted on the way out of the village to look into a small church. It was built of massive stone slabs, an empty oblong with a battered wooden iconostasis, pervaded by an atmosphere of dereliction and dust. The walls were covered with extraordinary frescoes.
Very often, wandering in the wilder parts of Greece, the traveller is astonished in semi-abandoned chapels where the liturgy is perhaps only sung on the yearly feast of the eponymous saint, by the beauty of the colouring of the wall-paintings and the subtlety with which the painter has availed himself of the sparse elbow-room for private inspiration that the formulae of Byzantine iconography allow him…”
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L. V. Paidoussi
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