Letters, Memoirs, Travelogs, Mountaineering, Exploration

Andrews, Kevin. The Flight of Ikaros. New York: Penguin Books, 1984 (reissue of London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1959). Conceivably the best book written about Greece in English. Whether breaking bread with a royalist death-squad member, officiating as a godfather, or laid up in a sanitarium, Andrews as “Ikaros” is shattering, unsentimental and unforgettable. Generous hiking accounts, including a harrowing ascent of Olymbos.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Mani and Roumeli. New York: Penguin, 1984 (reissues of New York: Harper, 1958 and London: John Murray, 1966 respectively). This comrade-in-arms of Fielding’s (see below) is an aficionado of the vanishing minorities, relict communities and disappearing customs of rural Greece. Good scholarship interspersed with strange yarns.

I lelding, Xan. The Stronghold. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1953. O P. British ex- commando revisits World War II haunts in Sfakia, Crete; hearty reunions and some hikes retraced in the Crete section of this book.

(Ireenhalgh, Peter, and Edward Eliopoulos. Deep into Mani. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Two wartime resistance members return to the Mani 25 years after Fermor’s research and find village life, as well as many monuments, disin­tegrating.

I lunt, Sir John, and D. E. Sugden. A Journey Through the Pindus Mountains in 1963. Journal of the Royal (British) Geographical Society, 130 (1964) 3:355-364. A veteran of Arctic and Everest expeditions leads one from Amfissa to Grevena in spring conditions and finds it’s no picnic—not surprising to anyone with Greek hiking experience. Sugden contributes a technical section on the geomorphology of the Agrafa.

Κιι/antzakis, Nikos. Travels in the Morea. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965. The people and antiquities of the Peloponnisos speak through a gifted inter­mediary chronicling his wanderings there in the 1930s.

Kltto, H. D. F. In the Mountains of Greece. London: Methuen, 1933. O.P.; rare. Jolly little jaunt through Oiti, Vardhoiissia, Karpenissi, Proussos and central and southern Peloponnisos. Quaint but neither terribly insightful nor practical.

Kulukundis, Elias. Journey to a Greek Island. London: Cassell, 1968. O.P. And a journey back through time and genealogy by a Greek-American two genera­tions removed from Kassos, poorest of the Dhodhekanisos. A delightful exploration that reads like nonfiction Garcia Marquez.

I ovi, Peter. The Hill of Kronos. New York: Penguin, 1984 (reissue of original New York: Dutton, 1981). A Jesuit priest comes to Greece in 1963 as an archaeologist and translator of Pausanias and is transformed by the people, the landscape, marriage and ultimately resistance to the junta. He’s also an indefatigable walker who made it to the Nedhas gorge, Parnitha and Lissos, among other places.

Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 1958. The famous expatriate moves from Paris to Greece in 1939 and finds his true element. A bohemian, occasionally irreverent counterpoise to Levi.

1 rovor-Battye, Aubyn. Camping in Crete. London: Witherby & Co., 1913. O.P.; rare. Plus tramping, monasterying, collecting, etc. Though much of the landscape has been rendered unrecognizable by roads, the book is still valuable for its outstanding natural-history appendices. Speaking of which .. .

 

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