Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (Penguin Travel Library)

by Patrick L Fermor (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $3.29

  Roumeli is not to be found on maps of present-day Greece. Seduced by the strangeness and beauty of the name, Patrick Leigh Fermor has taken the title formerly used to describe Northern Greece to cover his random wanderings through this exotic region. Sharing in the celebrations of a wedding among the Sarakatsan Nomads, sleeping in the monastery of St Barlaam high on the mountainside, sitting by the fireside sipping ouzo and devouring a succulent leg of lamb and retsina-soaked apples, he recalls his travels amid the people of Northern Greece and, delving into history, produces a blend of past and present.

• Used

  Paperback
  1983

  $3.29

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $12.37

  Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani compellingly revealed a hidden world of Southern Greece and its past. Its northern counterpart takes the reader among Sarakatsan shepherds, the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, among itinerant pedlars and beggars, and even tracks down at Missolonghi a pair of Byron's slippers. Roumeli is not on modern maps: it is the ancient name for the lands from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. But it is the perfect, evocative name for the Greece that Fermor captures in writing that carries throughout his trademark vividness of description. But what is more, the pictures of people, traditions and landscapes that he creates on the page are imbued with an intimate understanding of Greece and its history.