Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece

Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece--stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past.

Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor's wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron's slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance--the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination--along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast.

Roumeli is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 06/06/2006
ISBN: 9781590171875
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.04w x 0.60d

Review Citations: Library Journal 07/01/2006 pg. 122
New York Review of Books 01/17/2008 pg. 29