Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnesse
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Language: English
Pages: 225
ISBN: 2:00336672
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Mani, at the tip of Greece's--and Europe's--southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people's daily lives.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene," bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language's finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore.
Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.
St. Demetrius, 30, 177, 202 St. Dionysios the Areopagite, 264; Letter to Dorotheus the Deacon, 264 St. George of Yanina, 277 St. Gerasimos, 269 St. Gideon of Tyrnavos, 277 St. Gregory Nazianzen, 244 St. Gregory of Nyssa, 244 St. Ignatius Loyola, 313; Spiritual Exercises, 313 St. Jerome, 207, 312 St. John the Baptist, 42, 204, 243 St. John Chrysostom, 220, 244 St. John Damascene, 200, 213 St. Luke, 269 St. Nicholas of Karditza, 277 St. Nikon, xi, 10, 18–19, 58 St. Paul, 201, 219,
bore no resemblance to it. For all its uncouthness, the design—the haloes, the arrangement of wings and claws and tail—echoed the sophistication and formalism of latter-day western heraldry. I wondered if it could have been copied, quite arbitrarily, from the arms on a Maria Theresa thaler as pure decoration; but except for the fesses (or stripes) in the dexter chief which faintly resemble part of the Hungarian arms there is no similarity. Could they be inspired by the arms of Russia? It was
remember), the Biblical date of the Creation—which must be subtracted from the date inscribed—and the reader will have some idea of the difficulties of deciphering the dates for someone as bad at any kind of figures as I am. I often get it wrong, even after ten minutes with pencil and paper, and I plainly did so in this case, as my notebook says the Taxiarch was founded in 1211, and a reference book says 1373; or rather, it was founded in 6881 as opposed to 6719; not ,ςφιθ′ but ,ςωπα′[3] during
hear the reader murmuring). A section of the floor creaked open as my host’s head appeared through the trap door. He sat down with a sigh, laying aside his sickle to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He had a kind and friendly face with all the recesses of its bone structure scooped hollow by past illnesses. “How is the work going?” he asked me. “It’s going well,” I answered; untruthfully, for I had mooned the morning away pleasantly without writing a word. The conversation drifted inevitably
tree, these branches dangling with horny locust beans, was the right asylum from the afternoon sun for this Maniot pastoral. As the oven-like heat began to languish, the beckoning figure of our old host appeared below. Joining him, we made our way along a lane that circled like a contour-line the flank of two tower-crowned hills and led away to a cleft in the limestone mountain-side unexpectedly filled with green plane trees and figs and sycamores and a sudden insurrection of pink and white