Reading "Roumeli" in Zagori

Patrick Leigh Fermor's book "Roumeli, Travels in Northern Greece" (John Murray, 1966) has followed me around, or rather accompanied me, in several different editions, hardback and softback, for as long as I've known Northern Greece, and it never fails to deliver, as one rediscovers, as if with fresh eyes for the very first time, some life-enhancing passage, nugget of wisdom or new insight. It came out the year before I arrived in Greece. I'm particularly attached to the first chapter, "The Black Departers", on Sarakatsan shepherds amongst other topics, but the author's thoughts on the Romios and the Hellene, and on Romiosyne, are also enlightening.

Today's text is from page 53, What Wondrous Life is This? 
I won't quote it here, but let me suggest you read the passage beginning "I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece..." and ending "Miraculous lightness takes their place".

That's even more life-enhancing and inspiring than Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. It's on a par with the first page of Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell.


OK, here's just a short extract from "Roumeli", p.53, on the subject of making direct links with other human beings in Greece, without all the baggage, masks, hang-ups and unwitting varieties of condescension we usually all bring with us:

"Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims.  A stranger begins to realize that the armour which has been irking him and the arsenal he has been lugging about for half a life-time are no longer needed..."

Let's hope we can get back to that happy state of human contact and interaction (without any of those limiting barriers or elements of social hierarchy, self-consciousness or forced egalitarianism), that Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about with such truth and conviction.

On checking, I find that other bloggers have quoted this passage in full, so please feel free to leave this posting!

Another blogger quotes it too.