Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leight Fermor

 

All travel books are nostalgic: They record memories of a trip that is past, and more than a few lament the way the place they are writing about has changed since an earlier generation of travelers visited, was continuing to change while they were there, and has changed even further since they started writing. The past is another country—one that is always elusive.

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his wanders in Northern Greece, was published in 1966, so the Greece he writes about from the years before 1966 is long gone for those of us reading Roumeli more than half a century after it appeared. And yet, the book lives. What brings it alive is Leigh obvious affection for the Greeks he writes about and for the landscape through which he moves. Add to that the pleasure of Leigh Fermor's prose. It's hard to think of a writer with a finer style. His beautifully written account will make you want to visit this remembered Northern Greece, to walk the trails he walked, to share ouzos with the locals at the village tavernas, and to reflect on all that we have learned about Greece and the Greeks from Leigh Fermor's books.

The book is rich in scholarship, and poor in many of the things that make some travel writers insufferable. I mean, of course, these jocular wanderers' attempts at humor, usually at the expense of some poor sap they meet in the course of their travels. 

I had the pleasure of reading Roumeli in a first edition published by John Murray. I'm glad, though, that NYRB Classics has made Roumeli, and its companion, Mani, available again. Travel writers, and the rest of us, can learn a lot from it.