Roumeli: Travels In Northern Greece

Description

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.

Promotion info

Now in John Murray B-format, the famous exploration of Northern Greece by the great twentieth century travel writer known to generations for A Time of Gifts

Author description

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. His writing career, spanning over fifty years, includes six other titles available in John Murray paperback. He lives in Greece, in a house he designed and built.