Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece - Couverture souple

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.

[Mani and Roumeli are] two of the 20th Century's most celebrated travel books (Independent on Sunday)

He is in the first flight of writers on Greece. (The Times)

A masterpiece softened by warm, human understanding. (Sunday Telegraph)

[U]nlike the celebrated travellers of the past he has become part of the country he describes. (Sunday Times)

'Leigh Fermor is a writer's writer, a man whose prose is frequently and justifiably likened to poetry. He writes like an angel in other words -- and angels don't date' (Justin Marozzi, Financial Times)

A Book For... The Greek islands (Justin Marozzi, Financial Times)