Roumeli

Travels In Northern Greece

By Patrick Leigh Fermor
Introduction by Patricia Storace

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.

Reviews

If all Europe were laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.
— Ben Downing, The Paris Review

Here it all is once again: brilliance, the felicitous profusion, the exuberance of learning and information.... Roumeli deals with secluded ways and people.... These pictures of Greece are things that a coming generation will look for in vain among the realities of their day. Already they are windows onto a world practically unknown.
— Freya Stark

Patrick Leigh Fermor has written great travel books besides Roumeli and Mani, but I like to think that his extraordinary style is especially well suited to the subject of Greece, that the beautiful cragginess and almost blinding brilliance of his prose correspond particularly to that country's rugged, dazzled landscapes. Here Fermor establishes an ideal of travel writing: no one responds to a people and a place with more erudition and sensitivity.
— Benjamin Kunkel

Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century.
— The Financial Times

A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again.
— Geographical

...Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase...and partly thanks to his capacity to weave a compelling story out of sometimes unpromising material. One of the best tales of all is the hilarious digression in Roumeli on the attempted recovery of a pair of Byron's slippers from a man in Missolonghi, on behalf of Byron's very odd great-granddaughter Lady Wentworth...When you see through all the nonsense about Hellenic continuity, there is, underneath, a much more nuanced account of the ambivalences of modern Greece, its people and its myths (its own myths about itself and us, as much as our myths about it).
— Mary Beard, The London Review of Books

Also see:

A Time of Gifts By Patrick Leigh Fermor Introduction by Jan Morris At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.

Between the Woods and the Water By Patrick Leigh Fermor Introduction by Jan Morris Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts.

Mani By Patrick Leigh Fermor Introduction by Michael Gorra Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys amongst the peoples of the southernmost parts of Greece, exploring their history and time-honored lore.

A Time to Keep Silence By Patrick Leigh Fermor Introduction by Karen Armstrong Patrick Leigh Fermor, considered by many to be the greatest living travel writer, chronicles his sojourns at some of Europe's oldest and most celebrated monasteries in this meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude in modern life.

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