Patrick Leigh Fermor

Weeks passed, and the flawless weather of late summer melted into a clear, dry autumn. I spent much of my limitless leisure walking in the country round the Abbey [of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle]. The forested hills of the demesne are cut up into long zig-zag rides, tunnels of beech that converse upon moss-covered urns supported by a single Doric pillar. Occasionally an archway appeared, carved with the Abbey's fleur-de-lis and, in one of the alley-ways, a shallow alcove had been hewn out of the rock, carved in segments and painted with the just-decipherable signs of the Zodiac, forming a sort of giant sundial. Fallen leaves now muffled every footfall, and the smoke of bonfires rose through the moulting branches. Lost in the higher woods, the oratory of St. Saturnine -- solid, stock and Carlovingian -- suddenly arose; and, as I looked out over the ascending tree-tops, I could see the Abbey buildings clustered like a city in the background of a tapestry. The rivulet of the Fontanelle flowed under bridges where the trout hovered motionless for hours in the cress-flowered stream which meandered away through water-meadows towards the Seine. Beyond, the grey buildings rose -- the tall Norman refectory, the Duke de Stacpoole's fanciful arches, the Gothic quadrangular well of the cloisters, the high stone girdle of the Abbey pierced by the Abe de Jarnete's great doorway, scalloped and rococo. Then came the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, enclosing graceful staircases and wrought-iron balusters, browned by triangular pediments when scrolls overflowed, and symbols and flourishes; mansard roofs and a regiment of tall chimneys with their slanting smoke-plumes. Above them rose a grey belfry that scattered a little flurried flood of jackdaws in the air with each initial chime. the ruins of the Abbey church dominated everything: clustered piers -- fifteen or twenty stalks of stone gathered in vast climbing sheaves -- branched into broken segments of aisle and chancel-arches, a few pillars of the triforium ending in mid-air, a pillar or two of the clerestory..... Beyond, I saw the timber and thatch of the village, and the vanishing wooded contours that, across the valley, corresponded to my vantage point. All these woods, though my footsteps never startled anything larger than a squirrel, still teem with wild boar. As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows -- oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery -- as the Abbey prepared itself for night. (From A Time to Keep Silence, pp. 39-40)

The winding osier-bed shared the valley with a road and a railway and every now and then the loose triple plait would unravel and then nonchalantly assemble again. Buffaloes floundered in the reeds, a breath of wind tilted the threads of the Gypsies' fires and their horses, ranging loose among the flocks, grazed to the edge of the forest. There were field of stubble and hundreds of sunflowers flaring yellow round their dark hearts; and the pale green sheaths of the Indian corn had withered long ago to a papery grey. Strings of waggons were returning empty upstream or labouring south loaded with tree-trunks to be lashed together and floated down the Danube; and when two of them crossed, ropes of dust lengthened in both directions and wrapped the road and its passengers in a cloud; it settled on the fruit trees that sometimes lined the road for furlongs on end, heavy with blue plums nobody picked that scattered the roadside in wasp-haunted rings. (From Between the Woods and the Water, pp. 215-16)

It is the same everywhere. The Athenians look on this constant change with a mixture of abstract pride and private bewilderment. Much of this architectural restlessness may spring from the sudden boom in tourism. One's first reaction to this new windfall is delight: Greek economy needs these revenues; one's second is sorrow. Economists rejoice, but many an old Athenian, aware of the havoc that tourism has spread in Spain and France and Italy, lament that this gregarious passion, which destroys the object of its love, should have chosen Greece as its most recent, most beautiful, perhaps its most fragile victim. They know that in a few years it has turned dignified islands and serene coasts into pullulating hells. In Athens itself, many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine. Docile flocks converge on them, herded by button-eyed guides, Mentors and Stentors too, with all Manchester, all Lyons, all Cologne and half the Middle-West at heel. The Athenians who ate there for generations have long since fled. (Fortunately, many inns survive unpolluted; but for how long? The works of writers mentioning these places by name should be publicly burnt by the common hangman.) Greece is suffering its most dangerous invasion since the time of Xerxes. (From Roumeli, pp. 117-18)

(I first met Patrick Leigh Fermor, although I did not know it at the time, in a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago. It was an account of an Irishman so adept at Greek that he served as a British spy in Crete during WWII, during which time he kidnapped a German general and spirited him across the rugged mountains towards an awaiting British submarine. Upon watching the rising sun strike the distant mountains, the general was reminded of an ode of Horace, a description of the sun striking the snow in the Alps, which he began to recite -- only to find Patrick Leigh Fermor joining him. They completed the ode in unison. Although they did not become friends, they were no longer enemies: they shared the same Latin classical education, the same past; they were rooted in the same soil. (These exploits have since been recounted in both a book and movie entitled Ill Met by Moonlight. [Those who recognize the line get a prize.])

But I met him again in England this past spring, while on a study abroad trip: every time I walked into a bookstore looking for Chatwin or Theroux, the booksellers asked me if I had read Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I finally got so tired of the question, that I picked up a cheap, used paperback of his called Mani, which is about his exploration of the southern tip of the Peloponesse, relentlessly connnecting the habits of its honor society to that of Homer. I fell in love with the English language all over again. It turns out that, faced with the opportunity to "do the right thing" and go to Oxford and Cambridge, at the age of 18 Fermor chucked it all for a long walk -- a walk from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930's. This journey has since been recounted in two lovely, fascinating books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which suggest much of his charm: counts and barons kept on running into him and putting him up for a week here, a month there, and then sending him south with letters in hand, so that he could find free lodging at a friend's or cousin's estate further to the south. Infinitely more than travel narratives, these works are accounts of a civilization crushed by the Nazi boot and devastated by Allied bombing -- you can hear the distant thump, the drumbeat of the war in the background. Part youthful exuberance, part architecture, part sociology, part anthropology, part linguistics -- they're lovely works, eloquent and elegant, mesmerizing accounts of the civilization that was, before things fell apart. Roumeli, on northern Greece, is a companion piece to Mani; and A Time to Keep Silence is a lyrical account of the time he spent in several monasteries, seeking for both his writing and his soul clean and quiet spaces.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, as it turns out, is widely regarded as Britain's greatest travel writer. Laurence Durrell, whom "Paddy" visited in Cyprus, captures his incandescent charm in a wonderful recollection:

"After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle ... I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. 'What is it?' I say, catching sight of Frangos. 'Never had I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!' Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes."

Born in 1915, Patrick Leigh Fermor spends part of each year, still, living and writing on the coast of the southern Peloponnese in a house of his own design.)