Category Archives: Paddy in the News

From Hellenic Voice: Reflections on the life of Sir Patrick

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By Alexander Billinis.

First published in The Hellenic Voice, 15 June 2011

I never had the honor of meeting Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in person, though I know he often spent time in Hydra, my ancestral island, and I imagine that I must have raced by him some summer, a kid on the way to the rocks we called a beach there. Gone is Greece’s greatest biographer, perhaps the greatest travel writer in history, but his beautiful prose provides him with immortality.

Sir Patrick was born in 1915, in the thick of the First World War. He spent his first years in the English countryside, developing an independent, noble spirit that is the hallmark of the best of English eccentrics. Not for the structure of school, he had his own higher education on foot, traveling at 18 from the London docks via barge to the Dutch coast, and then traveling, mostly on foot, from the Netherlands to Constantinople. He stayed in haystacks, houseboats, small inns, and as his charm, good looks, exceptional facility for languages, and genuine intellect became better known, in palaces and castles.

He chronicled these travels in three books: “A Time of Gifts,” chronicles his travels from the Dutch coast to the Danubian frontiers of Slovakia and Hungary. His second, “Between the Woods and the Water,” describes his journeys and adventures through Hungary and Romania, ending, again, at the Danube bridge at Ruse, thence into Bulgaria. His third volume, about Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace, is currently in manuscript form and we can hope that it will be released as a posthumous tribute to Sir Patrick. I have had the benefit of visiting many of the places Sir Patrick describes, and his books are the perfect companion.

After successfully completing this journey to Constantinople, Sir Patrick went to Greece, the start of his lifelong association with the country. After spending some time in 1930s Greece, he went to Romania with his first great love, the Phanariot-Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene. With the coming of war in 1939, Sir Patrick returned to Britain to serve his country.

Sir Patrick’s knowledge of the Balkans resulted in a liaison posting to Greece, where he witnessed firsthand the heroism of the Greek counterattack of the Italian invasion. After the fall of Greece to the Germans, Sir Patrick worked with the Resistance in Crete, spending the greater part of two years as “one of them” and earning the lasting affection of the Cretans, which was mutual. Here “Patrick” became “Michali” as he was affectionately known thereafter in Greece.

It was in Crete that Sir Patrick/Kyrios Michalis, with the help of a small band of British and Greek commandos, and the general constant support of the heroic Cretan people that he pulled off his greatest coup – the capture of the German commandant of Crete, Gen. Kriepe. After a roadside carjacking near Iraklion, on Crete’s north shore, Sir Patrick and company hauled their quarry across Crete’s sheer and beautiful mountain spine to the southern shores where a British ship whisked him to British headquartersin Egypt. Sir Patrick recalls one morning, high in the Cretan mountains, when the general quoted passages from the Roman poet Horace, in Latin. Sir Patrick finished the verse, and the general and he, in the chaos of war, suddenly realized they once, as Sir Patrick said, drank from “the same fountains long before.” Years later, when meeting Sir Patrick again, Gen. Kriepe said that Sir Patrick treated him “wie ein Ritter– like a knight.”

Postwar, Sir Patrick knocked about in various places, including the Caribbean, but by the mid 1950s his center of gravity became Greece. He wrote two books, “Mani: Travels in Southern Greece,” and “Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece,” which are exceptional biographies of a land he came to love as his own. Many consider them the finest travel books ever written. He and his wife, Joan, an accomplished photographer, eventually chose the Mani for their home, and designed and built a house by themselves in Kardamyli.

Sir Patrick wrote prolifically in a prose from another time. His is an era outside the digital, soundbyte age – an era steeped in the Classics and elegance. It is easy to picture him as a youth in an Austrian schloss, charming his Triestine Greek hostess, dancing in a prewar club in Budapest, or composing

mantinades over raki and cracking walnuts with a pistol butt on some cliff off Mount Ida in Crete. He was at home in all these circumstances, and we have the privilege of vicarious attendance via his rich prose. He remained, as we say in Greek, a

gero potiri,a “tough glass,” and writer Anthony Lane wrote, in 2006, “If you think that you can match him ouzo for ouzo, on a back street in downtown Athens, you better think again.”

His love and knowledge of Greece was profound and profuse, and while his love did not make him blind to her darker sides, his ability to express Greece so beautifully and fundamentally, together with his plethora of friends and admirers in all places, no doubt enhanced Greece’s tourist appeal in the initial stages of the tourism boom. It is a pity that Greece of today, again in profound need, lacks such an erudite, elegant advocate. We could use one.

When writing about the passing of Georgos Katsimbalis, his dear friend, an intellectual giant, and a champion of Greek letters, Fermor wrote, “These pages are filled with landmarks that have vanished, but George, in a very special sense, is not one of them.” The same can be said for Sir Patrick.

Alexander Billinis is a Greek American writer living in Serbia. For readers unfamiliar with Sir Patrick’s writing, he recommends “Words of Mercury,” edited by Artemis Cooper.

The man who fell for Mani’s charms

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Patrick Leigh Fermor in Greece in 2001. (Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press)

Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, called this Peloponnese peninsula home. Andrew Eames makes a pilgrimage.

By Andrew Eames

First published in The Independent, 18 June 2011

Somewhere about 100km beyond ancient Olympia I chucked my navigator out of the window; figuratively speaking, of course. She’d long since lost touch with reality, telling me to do U-turns and take sharp lefts where such things would only have ended in motorway carnage. Underneath me, the A7 unrolled its great tongue of Tarmac imperturbably towards Kalamata and yet she would have had me off the road and into the goat tracks among the prickly pears, so I gave up on her, imagining her left behind, sitting on a rock, still insisting that I recalculate my route.

I had another reason for wanting to enter the Mani peninsula, that middle finger of the southern Peloponnese, without the insistent voice of an out-of-date GPS. I was following the trail of a British writer who had been inspired and nourished by this once-wildest and most isolated region of Greece for well-nigh 50 years. Patrick Leigh Fermor hated wirelesses. He wrote in his book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, that he “dreaded the day when the metalled highway would appear through the hills blocked by a column of motorlorries each of them loaded with a howling menagerie of wireless sets for the silent Mani.”

That’ll be me, then. So the silencing of my (wireless) navigator was a tribute, in a way, even though Leigh Fermor himself had just left.

I have long been an admirer of Leigh Fermor, who until his death last week at 96 was, in my opinion, Britain’s greatest living travel writer. My most recent book, Blue River Black Sea, was a journey made partly in his footsteps down the length of the Danube, and it had always been in my plans to make a trip to the Mani sooner or later, with the hope that I might get to meet the great man in his “perfect writer’s house” down by the sea beside Kardamyli. Tragically, I was a couple of days too late, so my journey became something of a pilgrimage instead, a celebration and a comparison between the Mani that Leigh Fermor wrote about in 1958, and the Mani of today.

When Leigh Fermor, with his wife Joan, first crossed into the Mani, he had done so on foot led by his navigator, a taciturn goat-herder called Yorgo, who took him up over the barrier of the Taiyetos mountains, through a “dead, planetary place, a habitat for dragons”, an inferno of rocks whose only living organisms survived “on a memory of water”.

Historically, the Mani’s very inaccessibility had made it an enclave of refugees, feudal villages, vendettas and turf wars. Its rugged infertility meant agriculture was virtually impossible, so its inhabitants tried their hand at everything from piracy to slave trading in order to survive.

For Leigh Fermor, that isolation translated into what he called “an Elysian confine” from the moment he first arrived in Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea “whose quiet charm grew with each passing hour”, which became his home. He believed he had found a place “too inaccessible, with too little to do, for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism”. I would have liked to have asked him if he ever regretted that sentence.

Crossing the Taiyetos today is still something of an ordeal – if you are a car. The A7 fizzles out at Kalamata and it falls to a nimble-footed minor road to try to avoid the worst the mountains can do. The reward for getting through is an eagle’s view of the Mani, across mountains that tumble to the sea, with villages as barely-tolerated ochre encrustations on their elongated toes.

The English have bought houses here, undoubtedly some of them partly due to Leigh Fermor’s book. Package tourism has been drawn inevitably to the village of Stoupa, 7km south of Kardamyli, by the presence of a perfect horseshoe-shaped beach, but it is package tourism in its more restrained manifestation, and very contained.

Just along the coast, tourism is more select and discreet at Agios Nikolaos, a fishing harbour bobbing with caique boats, where the morning recreation is watching the fishermen return and set out their catch beside the harbour wall, a wall that will be lined with fish-restaurant tables when the sunset comes.

Kardamyli itself is not that much changed, largely thanks to its lack of beach; the 17th-century fortress houses are still there, in a more or less tumbledown state and the rest of town is a peaceful web of cobbled lanes, vegetable gardens, and balconied stone houses whiskered with vines and bougainvillea.

Tavernas line the shore, including one run by Lela, Leigh Fermor’s veteran housekeeper. The great man’s property itself, down by the beach at Kalamitsi, 1km south of Kardamyli, is no longer alone, but newer buildings maintain a respectful distance.

There’s talk of turning it into a museum, because the writer was as much revered in local life as in the wider literary world. “We called him Kyr Michalis,” says George Giannakeas, Lela’s son, who grew up as a little boy in the writer’s house. “He used to walk into Kardamyli every day to get the papers, often completely lost in his thoughts.”

I catch up with George as he is readying himself for the journey to the UK for the funeral, so I put the question to him: would Leigh Fermor have regarded the modern Mani as spoilt?

“He didn’t like the changes, but he never criticised. He could understand that everyone needed to benefit. If he didn’t approve of something, he would make positive suggestions. Lots of people spend one or two years here then start complaining, but he would never do that. He could sit and talk to anyone about anything. One of his best friends here was the petrol pump attendant. Every year he invited the villagers to his house for his name day, as he did this year, too. He will be sadly missed.”

Even into his 90s Leigh Fermor remained a great walker, said George, so partly out of tribute to him I tackled a couple of the local trails. From Kardamyli up to Agia Sophia, on a well-made path up through cicada-rich olive terraces, with the shoreline opening up below. And then up the Nupati Gorge, a resinous, scented ravine where I had to walk bent double much of the time, scrambling through ankle-snapping rocks the size of elephant’s skulls, a quick reminder of just how tough it was to move about before the days of roads.

Plenty of early- and late- seasonvisitors do a lot of walking here; the views are magnificent, the landscape pungent with ancient sweat. At this time of year, however, the heat is oppressive, the going too tough to be anything but an ordeal. Far better to stay in the sea breezes and read a good book. If you do, there’s one author I’d recommend.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Personal Memoir

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One of the downsides of getting older – I am now 62 – is that one’s friends die. Friday, it was the turn of Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged ninety-six, and I am having trouble accepting that he is gone.

By Paul A. Rahe

First published in Ricochet on 12 June 2011.

I first met Paddy in the summer of 1983. I was working then – oddly enough, as I am working right now – on a book on classical Sparta, and I had a grant and a hunch. The Spartan way of life was based on something like slave labor. The Spartans ruled the southernmost two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and drew their livelihood from farms worked by their helots (the word in Greek means captives), who reportedly outnumbered them seven-to-one. In their realm, there were and are two river valleys – one in Laconia and the other in Messenia – divided by a mountain range named Taygetus, and there was and is mountainous terrain elsewhere in Messenia. I had read extensively about the history of slavery, and I was persuaded that there must have been gangs of runaway helots in the hills of Messenia, as there later were in early modern Jamaica and in other locales where servile labor was the norm and there was wilderness nearby. I knew that the Greek resistance during the Second World War had operated in the mountainous country of northern Greece, but I knew little about their operations in the Peloponnesus. A fellow ancient historian who had lived in Greece for some years and had tried to make it as a novelist said to me, when he heard of my hunch, “You ought to talk to Paddy Leigh Fermor. He lives down there, and he fought with the resistance on Crete. He lives in Kardamyle. You should look him up.”

And that is precisely what I did. With the grant I had been given, I bought a plane ticket, and I spent some weeks in the company of a former student who hailed from Thessalonica, exploring the Peloponnesus – by boat, in a rental car, and on foot. Kardamyle was in the Mani – the southernmost prong of the Taygetus range, and it was one of the towns that Agamemnon had offered Achilles in an attempt to get him to take the girl back. When we got there, however, Paddy was away. So I mailed him a brief note and moved on. When we returned, I telephoned him – and he immediately invited the two of us to lunch.

Leyla, who had long been their cook, produced a sumptuous feast. We ate, and we drank, and then we drank some more – and the next thing we knew it was 5 p.m. Paddy and Joan, fearful that we were too intoxicated to successfully traverse the half-mile on foot back to Kardamyle, offered us beds. It was one of the most delightful afternoons that I have ever spent. The historian and journalist Max Hasting has observed that Paddy was “perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist of his time.” Never have I encountered anyone as entertaining.

Paddy was – there is no other word for it – a hero. He lived the strenuous life. There was in him an exuberance that could not be contained. Christopher Marlowe, who was of a similar temperament, managed to make it through the King’s School in Canterbury, but Paddy did not. There was some hanky-panky with the daughter of a greengrocer, but that cannot have been the whole story. “He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” his housemaster wrote in an official report, “which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.” I would have been anxious myself.

Not long thereafter, with the support of his mother, who mailed him a fiver from time to time, Paddy set out in December, 1933 by ship for the Hook of Holland – and walked from there to Constantinople and on to Mount Athos and its monasteries. It took him more a year, and you can read about his adventures in two of the books that he later published – A Time of Gifts (1978) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – which together constitute what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. In those volumes, you will encounter a world of peasants and aristocrats, of socialists and fascists that no longer exists.

Balasha Cantacuzene

On that journey, Paddy met an older woman. He was nineteen. She was married and thirty-one. You can find a description of the beginning their affair in the second of the two volumes mentioned above. Her name was Bălaşa Cantacuzino, and she was a Romanian princess descended from the Byzantine royal house. When his trip was over, they settled down together, oscillating between Athens and at her country house in Moldavia. Then came the Second World War, and he volunteered for the British army. The two would not meet again until after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

During the war, Paddy fought in Albania, Greece, and on Crete. After being evacuated to Cairo, he joined the Special Operations Executive and spent much of the remainder of the war running guerrilla operations in the mountains of Crete. He left the island in May, 1944 under truly exceptional circumstances. On 26 April 1944, on a bet made with friends back in Cairo, Paddy, W. Stanley Moss, and a group of Cretan shepherds kidnapped General Karl Heinrich Georg Ferdinand Kreipe, the German commander on the island.

The two Englishmen dressed up as German police corporals and stopped Kreipe’s car as he was making his way back one evening to his villa near Knossos. Having eliminated the chauffeur, Paddy put on the general’s hat, and Billy Moss drove the car. Kreipe was hidden beneath the back seat – on which three hefty Cretan andartes sat. They then bluffed their way through Heraklion and an addition twenty-two checkpoints before ditching the car and hiking into the mountains – where, for three weeks, they evaded German search parties before being picked up by a British motor launch on the south coast.

At one point, as they neared the top of Mount Ida at the break of dawn, Kreipe quoted the first line of Horace’s ode Ad Thaliarchum – “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte” (See how Soracte stands white with snow on high), and Paddy finished the poem to its end. “At least,” the general remarked, “I am in the hands of gentlemen.” In the days that followed, before they were evacuated to Cairo, the two discussed Greek tragedy and Latin poetry. In 1972, they would meet again in Athens to tape a television show. Afterwards, Paddy once told me, they went out to dinner and sang old German drinking songs. Well before that time, however, Billy Moss had published a book on the incident entitled Ill Met by Moonlight, and Michael Powell had made a movie with the same name in which Dirke Bogarde was cast as Paddy.

Before the war, Paddy had begun his literary career with a translation of of CP Rodocanachi’s novel Forever Ulysses (1938). Afterwards, he began to write books of his own. The first of these was a travel book, focused on the West Indies and entitled The Traveller’s Tree (1950). It won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. Soon thereafter he published a novel set in Martinique entitled The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), which was turned into an opera by Malcolm Williamson; a meditation on monasticism entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957); and two travel books focused on two of the wilder regions of Greece: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). That all of these remain in print is no surprise. Five years ago, Paddy was described to me by an Oxford don as the greatest living master of English prose.

In 1984, I was offered by the Institute of Current World Affairs a fellowship two years in length, which would take me to Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, and I jumped at the chance to situate myself in Istanbul (where I lived in the neighborhood in which Claire Berlinski now resides) and to explore the landscape and experience the seasons in the world within which the ancient Greeks had made their home. I spent most of my time in Turkey, exploring its nooks and crannies and writing long newsletters about contemporary affairs. From time to time, however, I hopped a plane to Greece, interviewed various figures in Athens, and partied with some journalists I knew (Robert Kaplan was based in Athens in those days).

On those occasions, I always took a bus to Kardamyle and spent a few days with Paddy and Joan. Their house, which Paddy had designed himself, was built out of stone and situated on a bluff overlooking the sea. We rose when we chose, ate breakfast separately, and Paddy put pen to paper while Joan saw to the management of the establishment – and I read a novel, a travel book, or something pertinent to the composition of my first book Republics Ancient and Modern (which Paddy would later review for the Christmas books section of The Spectator).

After lunch, where we drank a considerable amount of wine, we would nap. Then, we would go back to work, and, at about 5 p.m., Paddy and I would head off for an extended walk in the mountains. He was about seventy at the time, but he was astonishingly vigorous. Every day he would go for a long swim, disappearing into the drink and reappearing a half hour later. On his seventieth birthday, he swam the Hellespont – something that very few men half that age could manage. (I know. I watched from a motor launch once while a thirty-something friend gave it a try).

Before dinner, there were drinks. “C’est le moment,” Paddy would say, quoting Victor Hugo, “quand les lions vont boire.” Dinner itself was a feast, and it often ended with the singing of songs. Paddy taught me The Foggy, Foggy Dew, and I taught him They Call the Wind Maria. After a week or so, I would take the bus back to Athens and head on to Greek Cyprus or back to Istanbul. On one such occasion, I carried to the British embassy the manuscript of Between the Woods and the Water. From there, I gather, it was sent on by diplomatic pouch to Paddy’s publisher in London. He had served his country well, and his compatriots took good care of him. He was offered a knighthood in 1991 and finally accepted one in 2004.

In the 1990s, when I came to Greece in the summer, I would fly in to the Athens international airport, and then I would generally take a bus across to the domestic airport, go up to the counter, look over the available flights, and book a ticket for an island that I had never visited. Then, after a week or so on, say, Paros, I would go down to the harbor and catch whatever boat there happened to be – for Lemnos or Andros or some other unfamiliar spot. Eventually, after having spent three or four weeks exploring, I would return to Athens and go down to the Mani to see Paddy and Joan. The routine in Kardamyle was the same – except that, towards the end of the millennium, Paddy was less able to hike in the mountains.

After I got married, there was less traveling. In 2003, however, I did manage to see Paddy in England at their country house in Gloucestershire (Joan was the daughter of a Viscount). Ours was a subdued lunch. Joan had died at the age of ninety-one in Kardamyle hardly more than a week before. I last saw him in Kardamyle in March, 2006. I had spent Michaelmas and Hilary Terms as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and I was about to take up a similar fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. There were, however, two weeks in which we had no place to call our own. So my wife, our daughters, and I flew to Greece, rented a car, and, after a brief visit to Athens, headed to Delphi and on from there to the Peloponnesus – where we stopped at Olympia, the Apollo Temple at Vassae, Mycenae, and other sights. I tried to call Paddy, but the Greeks had added a digit to the old number, and I could not figure it out. So we drove to Kardamyle and then out to his house on the outskirts of town, and I rang the bell.

Paddy at home

And there he was – older, quite a bit slower in his gait, but very much himself. “Paul Rahe,” he said. “I don’t believe my eyes. Come in, my dear boy.” And when I mentioned my family, his response was immediate: “Bring them in. You can all stay here.” And so we did. That night we took him to dinner at the restaurant in town that Leyla now runs, and we sat up late talking and drinking. His eyesight was not good. He had glaucoma and in the candlelight at one point was not sure that we were still there. He had had a heart attack and had a pacemaker. He could hardly walk up the drive to the highway. But there was still a twinkle in his eye, and he was as alive as ever.

He was also writing, and in his nineties, after decades of resistance, he had actually learned how to type (no one could read his handwriting). A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were intended to be the first two parts of a trilogy. With the third part, he had had a terrible time. After 1989, he had returned to Roumania and Bulgaria to retrace his steps, and it was not as he remembered it. When I visited in the 1990s, I would ask about the third volume, and Joan would pull me aside and tell me not to mention it. “He is having trouble with it. He is very frustrated. That trip back to review his path robbed him of the confidence he had in his memory,” she once said.

When I saw Paddy in 2006, however, he was halfway done with the manuscript, and he was going over it to look for things that could be cut. I gather that somewhere in the house at Kardamyle there is a manuscript and that on the cover it reads “Volume Three.” I wonder what he called it. That last night just over five years ago, he, my wife, and I tried to come up with a title, and we could not think of anything satisfactory.

If and when the third volume of his trilogy does come out, I will buy a copy. Reading it will, I am confident, bring back the man. His other books do. I doubt, however, whether I will ever meet the like again – and that I very much regret. Perhaps the biography that Artemis Cooper is writing will relieve my gloom.

36 Hours only! – Colin Thubron talks about Paddy on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves

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At last a (somewhat) decent discussion about Paddy from the BBC. The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor died last Friday and his death has been followed by an outpouring of respect and admiration from fellow writers. Colin Thubron talks to Philip Dodd about the man and his writing.

Available to listen on iPlayer only until 10:47PM Mon, 20 Jun 2011.

The discussion starts at 38 Minutes and 10 seconds into the programme. Just click on the picture and then slide the cursor to that point to play. It will buffer very quickly.

The Humanist in the Foxhole

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Not so sure about the ‘minor’ bit ….

By Robert D Kaplan

First published in the New York Times, 15 June 2011

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, who died last week at age 96 at his home in England, was one of the great minor men of the 20th century. A hero for helping undermine the German occupation of Crete during World War II, he went on to become one of the greatest travel writers of his era.

At first glance, Fermor seems a throwback to the age of derring-do imperialists like T. E. Lawrence. But he did not simply glorify king and country; rather, he combined the traits of a soldier, linguist and humanist, and he appreciated history and culture for their own sake even as he used that wisdom to defend civilization. In today’s world of overly specialized foreign-policy knowledge, in which military men, politicians and academics inhabit disconnected intellectual universes, we need more generalists like Fermor.

Trained in the classics before being expelled from the King’s School in Canterbury, Fermor was the last member of an English-language literary Byzantium, which included Robert Byron, Freya Stark and Lawrence Durrell. Travel writers all, these children of empire had as their lair the Eastern Mediterranean and the greater Middle East.

The absence of electronic distractions gave these writers time to read and hone their intellects, allowing them to describe cultures and landscapes in exquisite but not needlessly florid language. Here is Fermor in his 1966 travel book, “Roumeli,” describing the sounds of the various regions of Greece: “Arcadia is the double flute, Arachova the jingle of hammers on the strings of a dulcimer, Roumeli a klephtic song heckled by dogs and shrill whistles, Epirus the trample of elephants, the Pyrrhic stamp, the heel slapped in the Tsamiko dance, the sigh of Dodonian holm-oaks and Acroceraunian thunder and rain.”

Unlike the young Winston Churchill in Sudan or the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke journeying through the Ottoman Empire, Fermor and his friends refused to reduce the world to questions of strategy and national interest: they were more taken by culture and landscape, which in fact made them more valuable than most intelligence agents.

Following the Nazi occupation of Crete, Fermor, fluent in both classical and modern Greek, infiltrated the island to help organize the resistance. He and a small band of British agents spent years in the mountains disguised as Cretan shepherds, complete with black turbans and sashes and armed with silver-and-ivory daggers. Fermor organized and carried out the daring 1944 kidnapping of Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, whom Fermor’s group marched to a boat that spirited them to Egypt.

Fermor could have settled comfortably into the War Office, or gone on to an illustrious diplomatic career. But his interests lay elsewhere: he traveled in the Caribbean, lived with French monks and wrote about it all.

He returned to Greece in the 1950s, where he produced his greatest works, “Mani,” about southern Greece, and “Roumeli,” about the north. Here we see his knowledge on full display: in “Roumeli” we are treated to disquisitions on Eastern monasticism, the dying dialect of the Sarakatsan tribe and the secret language of the Kravara, a region north of the Gulf of Corinth.

These are great works of travel, but they are also the gold standard of area expertise. Such expertise can only be built on devotion to subject, with no ulterior motive.

Because America’s own security will rest in a world where tribes matter as much as Twitter, Fermor is an icon of the kind of soldier, diplomat or intelligence expert we will need: someone who can seamlessly move from any one of these jobs to another, who is equally at home reading a terrain map as he is reciting the poetry of the people with whom he is dealing. The more depth and rarity of knowledge we can implant in our officials, the less likely they are to serve up the wrong options in a crisis.

But as Fermor shows, knowledge can’t be selectively learned for utilitarian ends. He was driven by the kind of appreciation of beauty with which life itself is sanctified.

I once visited his house in the Southern Peloponnese, where I fell into his library, pungent from the wood burning in the fireplace. Battered old bindings lay in recessed shelves piled to the ceiling.

At one point I mentioned the Neoplatonist philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon. I was suddenly regaled with a disquisition, between sips of retsina, of how Plethon’s remains were exhumed in 1465 by Sigismondo Malatesta, the mercenary commander of a Venetian expeditionary force that held the lower town of Mistra in the Peloponnese. Malatesta, Fermor recalled, refused to withdraw ahead of a Turkish army without first claiming the body of his favorite philosopher. Here was the erudition that flavors every page of Fermor’s books.

The British Empire lasted as long as it did partly because it produced soldier-aesthetes like Fermor, who could talk about medieval Greece as easily as he could the Italian Renaissance, for comparison is necessary for all serious scholarship. America needs men and women like Fermor if it is to maintain its current position in the world.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of “Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese.” He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 17, 2011

An Op-Ed article on June 15, about the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, misidentified the German general he helped capture during World War II. It was Heinrich Kreipe, an infantry commander operating in Crete, not Werner Kreipe, a Luftwaffe commander. The article also incorrectly stated the school from which Mr. Fermor was expelled. It was the King’s School, Canterbury, not the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

Paddy’s Radio Obituary on Last Word

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Listen to the (short) obituary on BBC Radio Four’s Last Word programme. Max Hastings speaks up for Paddy.

Click the image to listen. Paddy’s story starts at 8 minutes in.

The Funeral Service of Patrick Leigh Fermor, 16 June 2011

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Related article about Paddy’s funeral:

He was in constant celebration of being alive

He was in constant celebration of being alive

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Yesterday we buried Paddy in the rich, copper coloured, breccia marbled soil of Worcestershire, next to his wife and soulmate, Joan. Their graves overlook the entrance to the small churchyard of Saint Peter’s in Dumbleton which dates from Norman times.

by Tom Sawford

Amongst the one hundred or so mourners were members of his family, his friends, and many others  who came simply to pay their respects to a man who had given so much to them either through his friendship, his wartime activities, his writing, or just his simple acts of kindness and support.

The service, led by the Reverend Nicholas Carter, was moving, absorbing, and in fact quite conventional. But was it Paddy who added the interesting twist of a reading not from the New Testament, but from the Apocryphal Book of James, otherwise known as Protevangelium? This was read by Robert Kenwood.

The young British Soprano Sarah Gabriel started the service singing Amazing Grace unaccompanied, which was followed by Paddy’s friend and fellow writer Colin Thubron reading The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne. This was an interesting choice associated as it is with Hermetic wisdom. Whilst it was lovely to listen to, I certainly felt none the wiser after hearing it. As Colin returned to his seat he placed a hand on the Union Flag draped coffin as one might when passing a friend and patting them on the shoulder or forearm.

The first hymn was Baker’s The King of Love My Shepherd Is. It took a little while for the choir and the congregation to get into rhythmic step but once achieved it was sung with passion and meaning.

The hardest job of the day fell the Vicar, the Reverend Nicholas Carter, who like Paddy is apparently something of an exile, spending time living in France as well as ministering to the souls of those fortunate enough to live in the beautiful Vale of Evesham.

It was fortunate that Rev. Carter was a mature, ebullient, slightly rotund man, with a strong character and a voice to match. He admitted that he was ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when trying to say something about Paddy whose life had been full of words; a life as full as a ‘wine goblet overflowing with rich red wine’. How would he be able to do him justice? Wisely he kept the address short and flowing, talking about Paddy’s (or Sir Patrick as he constantly referred to him) achievements as a soldier, writer, walker, friend and most of all as someone who was ‘in constant celebration of being alive’.

The address was followed by prayers and the J S B Monsell hymn To Distant Friends and Close. Sarah Gabriel sang Vedrai Carino from Don Giovanni. A piper in the churchyard played Flowers of the Forest as the pall-bearers carried Paddy’s coffin out of the church, his medals, and his honour of the Order of the Phoenix laying colourful and shining upon a cushion. Members of The Intelligence Corps formed a Guard of Honour as we made our way out into a slightly overcast afternoon.

Paddy’s body was laid to rest with full dignity as a bugler from the Irish Guards played Last Post. After the Silence we looked up in joy and relief as he played Reveille, that tune which summons all old soldiers from their slumbers to join their comrades.

The sky threatened rain as we started to depart; but it hesitated, and finally submitted, with the clouds parting to reveal a blue sky, permitting a warm sun to shine on such a beautiful and peaceful corner of England. After all, how could it rain on the final parade of one who was in constant celebration of being alive?

Related article:

The Funeral Service of Patrick Leigh Fermor, 16 June 2011

Sir Patrick “Paddy” Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE: 11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011

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'A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness': Patrick Leigh Fermor in Saint Malo, France, in 1992 Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Patrick Leigh Fermor at school, Kings' Canterbury

Billy Moss and Paddy Leigh Fermor, Crete 1944

Paddy in uniform

Paddy in Ithaca in 1946 photographed by Joan

Paddy in 1966

Patrick Leigh Fermor with Joan Rayner after their wedding 17th January 1968. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Leigh Fermor will be remembered as someone who lived and talked as well as he wrote

At home in The Mani

Paddy on his 94th birthday (February 11, 2009)

Debo and Paddy 2008

Paddy and Debo 2008

We may just forget to die

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This post is from Diana Gilliland Wright’s lovely blog entitled “Surprised by Time” which she describes as ‘Outtakes from my work as a historian of the 15th-century intersection of the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the Ottomans.’
I found Paddy through my interest in those very same subjects so it is no surprise that Diana has  corresponded with Paddy … and almost met him …
In 1987, I wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor asking if I might visit him in Kardamyli, and said I was researching the Villehardouins and their castles.  He replied (that is the return address on his envelope):
Dear Mrs. Hanson,
     Thank you for your letter and the kind and v. encouraging. words.
     I’m going slightly off my rocker about impending calls this summer, and don’t see how I’m going to do any work, so don’t, please, be too upset if it’s no go then: but no harm in trying (0172-73225) when you are in the area.
     I look forward to the Villehardouin book as I know too little about them.  Please forgive tearing haste — Just back from England, where my wife had a hip operation — and best of luck.
                                                                        Yours sincerely
                                                                        Patrick Leigh Fermor

'Please forgive tearing haste ....'

I was in turmoil.  What do you say after you say I am so glad to meet you?     Why would he want to spend any time with me? At Kardamyli I took a room, looked at the “castle,” spent a couple of hours sitting on the rocky beach by his house, obsessing all the while. In the evening I drank too much ouzo and decided I would not be the visitor from Porlock.  In the morning when I paid my bill, I asked the landlady if she knew him.  Of course, she said, he walks by here every day.  I gave her a note and a gift of books I had brought for him and went away sorrowful.  I did not realize for twenty years that the woman with her was Joan, his wife.  I have twice more been invited to visit in the area, and promised introductions, but both times it seemed I would be taking something that was not mine.

The obituaries, and the dozens of articles over the past several years, have filled much space with his walk from London to Constantinople, and his kidnapping of the German general.  Essentially, everything he did was larger than anyone else’s life.  But there is an unmentioned aspect of PLF that moves me deeply.  In A Time of Gifts, he wrote of an extended stay in the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle in the 1950s.  Reviewers of the book have assumed that he was there to write a book, and he did considerable work on one.

Few have noticed a the scattered phrases that put this time in deeper perspective: “I managed, with considerable trepidation, to explain my proposal” (16); “depression and unspeakable loneliness” (19); “having finished a flask of Calvados . . . I sat at my desk in a condition of overwhelming gloom and accidie” (22); ” I slept badly and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon” (28).

Fragments, but I see the Abbey as his shelter while he stopped what must have been years of heavy drinking.  One has only to read Antony Beevor’s Crete: The Battle and the Resistance and notice how frequently PLF is cited and how rarely written about, to understand that the kidnapped general was a distraction from a war in which he saw and participated in the unspeakable.  He needed to drink.
Two anecdotes reflect my emotional response to him.  The first is from a Greek tavern owner in the town where PLF and his Romanian princess stayed before the war: “They were,” he said, “so beautiful.  And they dressed for dinner.”
The second is from a New Zealand writer:
Paddy told him: “You know we are very fortunate, we live in Kardamyli. We are fortunate – we have the mountains. We are fortunate – we have good food. We are fortunate – we have clean air to breathe. We are fortunate – we have the beautiful sea to swim in.”
          “Yes, Paddy, the mountains, the food, the air and the sea,” said the young man, nodding in agreement.
          And then Paddy said to him: “And for all these reasons and more, we may just forget to die.”

Diana Gilliland Wright

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com
http://nauplion.net
nauplion@gmail.com

From The Australian: Travel writing titan Patrick Leigh Fermor strode happily with all walks of life

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First published in The Australian, 15 June 2011.

OBITUARY: Patrick Leigh Fermor. Author. Born India, February 11, 1915. Died Worcestershire, England, June 10, aged 96.

AN author whose books were deeply rooted in the experience of a remarkable life, Patrick Leigh Fermor was an erudite man whose learning stemmed more from his travels, the people he met and the languages he acquired than from study. The Balkans, and especially Greece and its culture present and past, were the subject of some of his finest books.

He had spent much of World War II in Greece and then Crete, where he organised resistance activity, and distinguished himself by capturing a German general. This exploit was the subject of the 1952 book Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, which became a film of the same title in 1956, starring Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor and Marius Goring as his German captive.

Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was born in 1915 in India. After three years at King’s School, Canterbury, where his nonconformist spirit precluded academic distinction, he went to an army crammer in anticipation of a military career.

The curtailment of his formal education was compensated by his intellectual curiosity and by the civilising influence of his mother, who introduced him to the pleasures of art and literature. His gifts did not necessarily fit him for regimental duties or reconcile him to the restrictions of peacetime soldiering. His inclinations were rather those of an 18th-century patrician eager to scan the broader horizons offered by the grand tour. And so, shortly before his 19th birthday instead of joining the army, he sailed to Rotterdam and set out on foot for Constantinople.

That solitary trek across Europe in the mid-1930s developed his linguistic talent – already fluent in French and German, he added Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian to his languages – and also his ability to hit it off with people of various nationalities and walks of life.

Sojourns in palaces and castles would alternate with bivouacs in barns and doss-houses. These adventures and his school career were entertainingly described in two volumes of autobiography, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986).

He returned to Greece immediately after reaching his goal in Turkey. The dignity and gaiety of the shepherds, peasants and fishermen among whom he lived inspired a lifelong contempt for materialistic values as well as a suspicion of the benefits of economic progress. A lack of creature comforts appealed to a latent element of austerity in his nature.

At the outbreak of war he hastened back to England and enlisted. He served as a liaison officer to the Greek forces in Albania and took part in the battles of Greece and Crete.

After the fall of Crete he returned there, one of a handful of English officers, to organise the resistance movement. He endeared himself to the islanders, who saw in him a reflection of their own leventeia (an amalgam of high spirits, humour, quick wits and zest for life).

His flair for guerilla warfare was accompanied by an unsuspected gift for administration, which he exploited with outstanding success in the ambush, capture and evacuation to Egypt of General Kreipe, the German commander.

A bout of rheumatic fever laid him low for several months. No sooner had he recovered than he volunteered for a third mission to Crete before being posted home to take command of an Allied airborne reconnaissance group which, but for the German surrender, would have parachuted into Oflag IV at Colditz to defend the fort and arm the prisoners against the threat of deportation east.

After demobilisation he joined the British Council and was sent as deputy director to the British Institute in Athens. This was an opportunity to broaden his understanding of Greece. As a travelling lecturer, he visited most of the mainland and the Aegean archipelago, studying folklore and customs, assimilating regional dialects, and immersing himself in village life. He had no vocation for teaching, however, and after a year he resigned his position to start writing.

Oddly, his first book was not on a Greek theme. A journey to the Caribbean, sponsored by John Murray, resulted in the publication in 1950 of The Traveller’s Tree. Much of the book was written in the Benedictine abbey of St Wandrille in Normandy, to which he retired for weeks at a time.

These retreats led over the next few years to further investigations into the monkish life. These, notably at the abbey of Solemnes and the Cistercian monastery of La Grande Trappe, with a visit to the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, furnished material for A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1953.

In a succession of temporary havens and during journeys to France, Italy and further visits to Greece, Leigh Fermor completed a translation from the French of Colette’s Chance Acquaintance (1952) and he wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953).

His first volume on Greece, Mani (1958), was based on his more recent journey but enhanced by distillations from the experience he had acquired during more than two decades, raising it above the level of mere travel writing. The acclaim he won was repeated eight years later on the publication of its companion volume, Roumeli (1966).

By this time he had settled in Greece, and in 1968 he married Joan Eyres-Monsell, who had accompanied him on his travels ever since the end of the war. They designed the lovely house on a cliff-edge in the southern Peloponnese.

Further publications included Three Letters from the Andes (1991) the collection Words of Mercury (2004) and, in 2008, In Tearing Haste, an entertaining selection of his 50-year correspondence with the Duchess of Devonshire. He was knighted in 2004 and the Greek government made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix in February 2007.

Each of his books reveals stylistic virtuosity and imaginativeness. Another striking feature is his polymathy, the ease with which he disserts on a wide range of subjects, to name but a few beginning with the same letter, heraldry, hagiology, Hellenism, headgear (Byzantine) and history (church).

Those who knew Leigh Fermor will not easily forget his laughter, his singing and his infectious enthusiasm. In his company a bus ride became an odyssey; on his lips a mundane event was transformed into a saga.

He was blessed with arete, that Greek quality liable to half-translation as virtue, goodness or valour. His appetite for life was prodigious, and he appreciated the joys of the flesh as well as those of the mind and the spirit.

The pleasure he derived from his youthful foot-slogging was repeated in his late middle age, when he joined expeditions to the Andes and the Himalayas led by his friend Robin Fedden. In his 70th year he swam the Hellespont. He continued to live in Greece until the day before his death.

His wife died in 2003. There were no children.

Christopher Hitchens pays tribute to Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Last of the Scholar Warriors

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Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor,by Steve Pyke (1991)

Farewell to Patrick Leigh Fermor and his extraordinary generation.

By Christopher Hitchens

First published in Slate on Monday, June 13, 2011

The death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor at the age of 96, commemorated in many obituaries as the end of a celebrated travel writer, in fact brings down the final curtain on an extraordinary group of British irregular warriors whose contribution to the defeat of Hitler, significant in military terms, still managed to recall an age when nobility and even chivalry were a part of warfare. All these men were “travel writers” in their way, in that they were explorers, archaeologists, amateur linguists, anthropologists, and just plain adventurers. Men, as Saki put it so well in The Unbearable Bassington, “who wolves have sniffed at.” But they put their amateur skills to work after the near-collapse of Britain’s conventional forces in 1940 had left most of the European mainland under Nazi control, and after Winston Churchill had sent out a call to “set Europe ablaze” by means of guerrilla warfare.

Suddenly it was found that there were many bright and brave young men, not very well suited to the officers’ mess, who nevertheless had military skills and who had, moreover, back-country knowledge of many tough neighborhoods in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Leigh Fermor had lived in Greece before the war, had taken a part in the revolution of 1935, and had seen the German invasion sweep all before it. He spoke the language and loved the culture and could be fairly inconspicuously infiltrated onto the island of Crete. In 1944, with the help of some British special forces and a team of Cretan partisans, he managed to kidnap the commander of the German occupation, Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, and carry him over a long stretch of arduous terrain before loading him into a fast motorboat that sped him to Egypt and British captivity. The humiliation of the German authorities could not have been more complete. Perhaps resenting this, Gen. Kreipe was at first obnoxious and self-pitying, until the moment came when he was being taken over the crest of Mount Ida and a “brilliant dawn” suddenly broke. According to Leigh Fermor’s memoirs:

“We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said: Vides et ulta stet nive candidum Soracte. [“See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep snow.”] It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off. … The general’s blue eyes swiveled away from the mountain top to mine and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. “Ja, Herr General.” As though for a moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Have no fear, this did not result in some sickly reconciliation. Several of Kreipe’s colleagues were executed at the end of the war for the atrocious reprisals they took against Cretan civilians. One of Leigh Fermor’s colleagues, another distinguished classicist named Montague Woodhouse, once told me that Greek villagers urged him to strike the hardest possible blows against the Nazis, so as to make the inevitable reprisals worthwhile. He lived up to this by demolishing the Gorgopotamos viaduct in 1942,* wrecking Nazi communications. But the brutality of the combat doesn’t negate that moment of civilized gallantry at Mount Ida, where the idea of culture over barbarism also scored a brief triumph. (Woodhouse went on to become a Conservative politician and active Cold Warrior, but while fighting Hitler he was quite happy to work with Communist and nationalist fighters, and he wrote in his memoirs that “the only bearable war is a war of national liberation.”)

What a cast of literally classic characters this league of gentleman comprised. Bernard Knox went with poet John Cornford to fight for the Spanish Republic, was later parachuted into France and Italy to arrange the covert demolition and sabotage of Vichy and Mussolini, and, after the war, set up the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard.* Nicholas Hammond, who had walked rifle in hand over the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia, later suggested from his study of the terrain that those seeking the burial treasure of Philip of Macedon might consider digging at Vergina. (He was right.) Some of the brotherhood was very much to the left: Basil Davidson helped organize Tito’s red partisans in Bosnia, and after the war he went to work with the African rebels who fought against fascist Portugal’s dirty empire. Frank Thompson, brother of the British Marxist historian Edward Thompson, was liaison officer to the resistance in Bulgaria before being betrayed and executed. Others were more ambivalent: Sir Fitzroy Maclean was a Tory aristocrat but helped persuade Churchill that Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia were harder fighters than the monarchists when it came to killing Nazis. On the more traditional side of British derring-do, Billy McLean and Julian Amery emerged from the guerrilla resistance in Albania with a lively hatred of Communism and later took part in several quixotic attempts to “roll back” the Iron Curtain. Col. David Smiley saw irregular action in almost every theater, and in the 1960s and 1970s he organized the almost unique defeat of a Communist insurgency in Oman.

Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn’t look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.

Christopher Hitchens’ Kindle Single, The Enemy, on the demise of Osama Bin Laden, has just been published.

Greek blog: People & Ideas

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Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor,by Steve Pyke (1991)

An article in Greek about Paddy. It mentions this blog, myself and Thos Henley.

Μου αρέσουν πολύ τα βιβλία του Patrick Leigh Fermor «Μάνη» και «Ρούμελη» καθώς και ένα άλλο με τίτλο “Words of Mercury” με αποσπάσματα από τα διάφορα ταξιδιωτικά του, τις απίστευτες περιπέτειές του και με δοκίμια που αποδεικνύουν το θαυμαστό εύρος των γνώσεών του. Επειδή λοιπόν μου αρέσει τόσο το γράψιμο του PLF -ενός ανθρώπου που έχει περάσει μεγάλο μέρος της ζωής του στην Ελλάδα- χάρηκα που ανακάλυψα στο διαδίκτυο ένα ολόκληρο σάϊτ αφιερωμένο σ’εκείνον και σκέφτηκα να αναδημοσιεύσω εδώ κάτι από αυτό το σάϊτ.

Εδώ ο δημιουργός του σάϊτ, εξηγεί γιατί θεωρεί τον PLF τον πιο σημαντικό ζώντα Άγγλο:

Access the complete article here.

Paddy’s radio obituary this Friday 23 June on BBC Radio 4’s Last Word programme

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Following my contacts with the BBC (!!) I have found out that the Radio 4 obituary programme, Last Word, will be running a lengthy feature on Paddy this Friday.

You can obviously listen on the radio, via some TV services, and on the internet. The programme should also be available to listen to afterwards via BBC iPlayer. Visit the Last Word website for more details.

Complain about the BBC reporting of the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Following my article moaning about the paucity of BBC reporting around Paddy’s death, I have sent in a comment to the Feedback programme which holds BBC executives to account.

If enough of us raise the issue, I am sure that something will be done. At the very least we may get some weak explanation.

I encourage you to follow me and send an email to feedback@bbc.co.uk with your complaint. Don’t forget to add your name; town; and telephone number. They like to have that so they can get back to you if required.

The text of my email is below:

The writer, soldier, war hero and polymath, Paddy Leigh Fermor died on 10th June. I run a blog devoted to his life and work and was contacted by two news outlets by 1.00 pm.  The first report on the BBC was on the 6.00 pm news. I neither heard nor saw any more on the BBC until the website produced an obituary which included errors. The Broadcasting House programme on 12 Jun ran an excellent personal tribute by Colin Thubron.

 That seems to have been it for the BBC. Paddy represents one of the last of the WW2 generation; and a particularly distinguished one. His wartime service was uniquely famous for his role in capturing the German commander of Crete. He is acknowledged by many as Britain’s greatest travel writer yet we had few reports, no repeat showing of Traveller’s Century, in fact nothing to mark the passing of this great man.

 This has caused a lot of anguish and I would like the BBC to explain why they could not have done better when minor actresses receive more reporting, and also what the BBC intend to do to rectify this situation. Perhaps Paddy was seen as too much a figure of the establishment due to his friendships and he ran afoul of some left-wing inspired editorial policy, but if so it shows that the BBC team did not understand the man at all. 

Related article:

The pitiful BBC reporting of Paddy’s death: they let Paddy down for a second time 

Join dozens of others and leave your tribute on the Your Paddy Thoughts page

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We already have some wonderful tributes and direct memories of Paddy. Please add your own thoughts, or your story about meeting him. Perhaps you even have some memory of someone in your family who came across Paddy sometime in his long life.

Visit the Paddy Thoughts page to leave a comment. Let’s all hear your thoughts and tributes to Paddy.

He brought so much joy into our lives and the lives of others, let’s say what we think!

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A personal tribute by Jan Morris: A war hero and a travel writer of grace, Paddy was the ideal English scholar

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Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was one of ‘God’s intimate loners’. Quirkily bold and full of fun, he reflected the easygoing confidence of the best of Englishness. The doyenne of travel writing assesses his unique genius.

by Jan Morris.

First published in The Guardian, 12 June 2011.

Envy, they say, is the writer’s fault, but no writer of my acquaintance resented the pre-eminence of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the supreme English travel writer, who died on Friday after 96 years of a gloriously enviable life. He stood alone.

One must not gush, but like Venice, Château d’Yquem or a Rolls-Royce of the 1930s, he really was beyond competition; and since so far as I know everybody liked him, everyone enjoyed his mastery.

Few of us want to be called travel writers nowadays, the genre having been cheapened and weakened in these times of universal travel and almost universal literary ambition, but Leigh Fermor made of the genre a lovely instrument of grace, humour and reflection. He was, in my view, perhaps the last of a line that began with Alexander Kinglake and Eothen in the 1840s and depended for its style upon the easygoing confidence of the best of Englishness, in the best days of England. Nobody could be less racist, insular or pompous: but then the best of England never was.

For in many ways Paddy Leigh Fermor really was the ideal Englishman – good-looking in a gentle sort of way, strong but not beefy, full of fun, poetical and scholarly, metaphysically inclined, with a wife, a house, a cat and a calling, all of which he loved. Besides, he was a war hero.

In an aesthetic sense he was lucky to live when he did, because it enabled him to fight a fine war in a just cause. He was no Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen, because to fulfil the heroic image completely he ought to have died in battle, preferably at Gallipoli, but nevertheless he was a hero in a particularly English (as against British) kind – an individualist hero, quirkily bold, adventuring on his own or with friends and enjoying himself.

In war as in peace, he was one of a kind. He went to no university, but he was one of God’s own autodidacts, with a prodigious gift for languages and a fascination with the most intricate, subtle and sometimes obstruse constructions of historical learning. Partly because he chose to live for much of his life in the southern Peloponnese, he was especially good at relating modern to ancient worlds, so that travelling with him, if only on the page, was like simultaneously travelling through several ages.

Nothing illustrates his life better than the story of his most famous book, an uncompleted trilogy about his adolescent pedestrian journey across Europe, from Hook of Holland to Constantinople, just before the second world war. There is nothing ordinary about this work. In it a solitary young man, scarcely out of school, pits himself in a literary sense against the astonishingly varied social and political circumstances of 1930s Europe. He earns his living by his wits, by his outgoing personality, by his willingness to have a go at anything, and by drawing pictures of people, and he makes friends with Europeans of every class and kind, from the wildest of aristocrats to the grizzliest of peasants – treating them all, as Kipling would have liked, just the same. The journey lasted several months. The trilogy took a lifetime to write. Leigh Fermor was 19 when he started his walk, but did not put pen to paper (A Time of Gifts, 1977) until he was in his sixties. The second volume (Between the Woods and the Water) appeared 10 years later, while the third volume has never been published, and perhaps remains unfinished – eagerly expected for 30 years already, and now presumably awaiting its dramatic posthumous revelation.

Nothing could be more Leigh Fermorian! Part of the original manuscript was lost and Leigh Fermor had to rewrite it long after the event, which perhaps gives the work an extra element of the imagination. He was hardly more than a boy when he started thinking about it, a nonagenarian when he last laid down his pen, and in between he had not only fought his war and become famous, but had produced several other books of travel, memoir and fiction.

But just as, so it seems to me, the central character of the narrative remains essentially unaltered, certainly unabashed, from start to quasi-finish of his odyssey, so the character of Leigh Fermor himself remained instantly familiar, in frail old age as in irrepressible youth.

He was a true travel writer. Most of his books were based upon movement and actual journeys remained the basis of his studies of place. Unlike most of his successors and disciples, he was not world-ranging. He wrote little about Africa or India or China, let alone Australasia or the United States. Europe, and especially Grecian and Byzantine Europe, was essentially his stomping-ground and the classic travel works of his maturity were about two regions of Greece, Mani and Roumeli.

The first of his published books, Travellers’ Tree (1950), was indeed a journey through the Caribbean Islands, and won him immediate recognition, but for me its best moment occurs when Leigh Fermor, wandering around the parish churches of Barbados, comes across the graveyard inscription: Here lyeth ye body of Ferdinando Palaeologus, descended from ye Imperial lyne of ye last Christian Emperor of Greece. Died 3 Oct 1679. Forty years after the book’s publication I wrote to reassure Paddy that the inscription was still in good order. “How very nice to know,” he replied, “that you and our old pal Palaeologus are prospering!”

He wrote that message on a picture postcard of Kardamyli, where he and his wife were living in the adorable house above the sea that they had themselves designed, and he wrote it in a form that had become by then a sort of Leigh Fermor trademark. The text was written within a loosely scrawled cloud, and around the cloud, meticulously disposed, were 10 or 12 birds, seabirds I suppose, which gave the ensemble a delightful sense of liberty. Leigh Fermor was an able artist, as those clients of Mitteleuropa had discovered, and he used this agreeable device to make the mere signing of a book, or the dashing off of a picture postcard, a small ceremony of goodwill.

I know little about Leigh Fermor’s religious convictions, although he did frequently retreat into monasteries, and once wrote a book (A Time to Keep Silence, 1957) about his experiences. He ended the writing of it at the top-storey window of a Benedictine priory in Hampshire and said of the blessing he found there that it brought “a message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit”. He was certainly a man of profound contemplative habit, a kind man, and in the course of my own long if sporadic correspondence with him I was chiefly impressed by his generous association with nature – the world, so to speak, seen from that top-storey window.

Here, he once writes, “a big blackbird has settled on my window sill. Can’t move!” Here he is sorry to report that Tiny Tim the cat is “in a better world, mousing above the clouds”. And time again Paddy reports that from the table where he writes under his pergola he can see the dolphins of the Mediterranean delightfully swimming up the bay.

A complex soul, then, but with a stillness at the heart of him. The obituarists, I do not doubt, will make much of his wartime guerrilla exploits – above all his part in the kidnapping of the German general Heinrich Kreipe in Crete in 1944, and his whisking away to captivity in Egypt. It was certainly a wonderfully dashing adventure, bravado at its most filmic, and it certainly illustrated one part of Leigh Fermor’s multi-faceted character.

For me the most telling part of the oft-told tale, though, is an episode when he overhears the captive general, waiting in the dawn to be shipped away from the island, murmuring some lines from Horace which Paddy himself had long before translated from the Latin. He recognised them at once, and responded in kind, with five more stanzas. As he remembered half a century later, “the general’s blue eyes had swivelled way from the mountaintop to mine – and when I had finished, after a long silence, he said ‘Ach so, Herr Major!'”

It was very strange, the young major thought, “as though for a moment the war had ceased to exist”. But I think of that moment as the silent stillness at the heart of his own often tumultuous and complex mind. Beloved as he was, rich in friendships, celebrated, successful, happy, convivial, nevertheless he struck me always as one of God’s intimate loners.

One must not gush, one must not gush, but I am proud to have known him, and happy in my sadness to be writing about him now.

LIFE AND TIMES

■ Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, born in London in 1915, was the architect of one of the most daring feats of the second world war, the kidnapping of the commander of the German garrison on Crete in April 1944 while working for British special operations on Crete.

Dressed as a German police corporal, he and a fellow British soldier ambushed and took control of a car containing General Heinrich Kreipe, the island’s commander, and bluffed their way through 22 checkpoints.

After three weeks avoiding German searches, Kreipe was taken off the island by boat. The daring escapade was later turned into a film, Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde.

■ He wrote some of the finest pieces of travel writing and has been described as a “cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene”. His most celebrated book, A Time of Gifts (1977), told of a year-long walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934, when he was 18.

■ He married Joan Elizabeth Rayner, daughter of the first Viscount Monsell, in 1968. She died in June 2003 aged 91. There were no children.

Washington Post obituary: Patrick Leigh Fermor, British adventurer, writer and war hero

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By Matt Schudel

First Published in The Washington Post, Sunday, June 12 2011

Long before Patrick Leigh Fermor died June 10 at age 96, his extraordinary achievements as a writer, adventurer and war hero had entered into legend. At 18, he set out across Europe on foot, reciting poetry along the way, sleeping in a barn one night, in a castle the next.

He rode into battle on horseback in a Greek cavalry charge in the 1930s. He went into disguise as a shepherd on the island of Crete and, in one of the most daring escapades of World War II, pulled off the kidnapping of a German general. In a subsequent movie about it, he was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde.

Mr. Leigh Fermor was a constant traveler who wrote books about monks in France, islands in the Caribbean and the people of Greece. Finally, more than four decades after his solitary transcontinental trek as a teenager, he wrote two books, “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water,” which have become classics of modern travel literature.

His books, composed in a striking, original prose style, led British author Jan Morris to pronounce Mr. Leigh Fermor “beyond cavil the greatest of living travel writers.”

Although he lived in Greece for many years, Mr. Leigh Fermor died at his home in the English county of Worcestershire. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Until the end, he remained the classic British writer-adventurer, a blend of casual diffidence, cool confidence and infinite charm. Historian and journalist Max Hastings called Mr. Leigh Fermor “perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist of his time.”

Mr. Leigh Fermor’s formal education ended when he was expelled from a British boarding school for boys, ostensibly for sneaking away to see girls.

“He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” a housemaster wrote in an official report, “which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.” Continue reading →

Obituaries from Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain

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A selection of obituaries about Paddy from Europe. He was well known and respected all over Europe.

Welt Online

Greek Reporter

Il Giornale

ΣΚΑΪ.gr

enet.gr

EL PAÍS

ABC Periódico  

Hechos de Hoy … unfortunately they use a photo of Bruce Chatwin!

MeLoLeggo.it

Leer y Viajar

Serving is honour enough

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From Matthew Bell’s Diary.

First published in the Independent on Sunday, 12 June 2011.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of two of the most poetic travel books ever written, chose to die at home in Worcestershire on Friday, after seeing the world. He was, according to his biographer Artemis Cooper, desperate to come home one last time to see his friends. Since the death of his wife in 2003, Sir Patrick had been living in Kardamyli, his house in the Mani, southern Greece. I can reveal that fans will be able to visit the house, as he has left it to the Benaki Museum in Greece. His death at the age of 96 cast a shadow over the 25th wedding celebrations of Cooper to her husband, the historian Antony Beevor, who held a party in London on Wednesday. Other friends of the writer included Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, whose book of correspondence with Paddy, In Tearing Haste, was a hit in 2008. The good news is that Paddy had nearly finished editing the third and last volume of his travelogue, which follows the wonderful A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. This will cover the year 1935, in which he walked from the Iron Gates, on the Danube, through Bulgaria, Romania and Greece to Constantinople. The pressure is now on for Cooper to finish her biography too. “I have written too many words,” she tells me, “though some parts aren’t written at all.”

The pitiful BBC reporting of Paddy’s death: they let Paddy down for a second time

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Time for a moan, and a big moan at that. I write without any objectivity, and with the clear unreconstructed bias of a fan. The BBC let Paddy and Billy Moss down in 1944 when they captured Kreipe; the BBC did not send out the agreed message about having already taken the General off the island thus intensifying the search. In my view the reporting of his death is another let down for Paddy.

I listened to as much news as I could on Friday, and I only recall hearing one mention on the BBC Radio Four news programmes: Adam Porter’s account 25 minutes into the Six O’clock news. Not even a mention on the flagship daily arts programme, Front Row, and as far as I could tell nothing on the television news either.

Even the short obituary on the BBC news website contains a glaring error saying that Paddy lived his last years in Crete; no, it was in the Mani near Kardamyli!! Sloppy journalism and showing a distinct disdain for the man. (edit: I see they have now changed this to ‘Greece’ – well that hits the spot!)

Colin Thubon gave an excellent tribute on the Broadcasting House programme this morning, Sunday 12 June.

The death of Paddy at the age of 96 years is clearly distressing to his family, friends, and even those of us who are quite simply admirers. However, it is much more than this; it is an event of national and international significance.

We have lost a great man, one of the last of a breed of British men who gave their all to secure victory against Fascism, and then went on to live even more remarkable lives afterwards. Paddy’s achievements were unique and worth celebrating in themselves. However, as one of the last of a kind the case for a full and proper tribute is even more compelling.

I only hope that at this very moment BBC editorial staff are working on a proper programme to commemorate his life, and that even at this late hour the BBC may rescue itself from the condemnation it appears to want to bring upon itself.

Tom Sawford

Anthony Lane’s New Yorker article on Fermor is now free to view

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Anthony Lane's New Yorker article, May 2006

In trying to make this blog a focal point for all information related to Paddy I have had some problems accessing all on-line material. The one I most sought is the acclaimed May 22, 2006 profile by Anthony Lane which was published in the New Yorker.

This has sat behind their subscriber firewall, tempting us with one-off subscriptions. Now it appears that (possibly marking Paddy’s death?) this is no longer the case. You can now visit their archive, read the article in full on-line, print it or possibly even download it.

There are many profiles of Paddy. This is probably one of the longest and best, and includes interview material with him that many will have not seen before.

Take a trip to the New Yorker website and have a read.

Editor’s Note:  the pdf download appears to be no longer available – click on the article to magnify to read and then drag your cursor to move around the page.

Thos Henley’s personal tribute to Paddy

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Thos Henley at Paddy's door

Thos Henley is a young musician and cites Paddy as one of his major influences and inspirations. He has already written two articles for the Blog and felt moved to provide his own tribute to Paddy …..

“A splendid afternoon to set out”, these were the first words that I read of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the first of his beautifully constructed sentences that I whispered out loud to myself in a miasma of wanderlust; the first words of A Time of Gifts.

It is hard to sum up in words what this book and this man mean to me. Paddy has become somewhat of a deity for me and my travels in the last few years. I remember there was a time when I toyed and teased with the idea of walking to Italy and I knew at the back of my skull, deep in my conscious that this lust for walking was substantial, but at that time I had no real reason to do so. Paddy was my reason. I discovered A Time of Gifts in an old dusty maze of a bookshop in England’s old capital, in Winchester and was first stopped in my tracks by the wonderfully sharp, romantic imagery of John Craxton’s front cover. But this was nothing compared to the prose, memories, history and romance that inhabited its fading pages.

The storks that flow through his European rambles flick and swoop through the milestones of his adventures and I think I will always have a memory, a sight of those migrating long necked birds as they followed him through cold Holland, into shape-shifting Germany as he turned nineteen, and onto Stuttgart where he imitated the constructed Mr Brown, and from there; a drunken night in Prague, a lonely night in Hungary and onto Greece, love, war, heroism, Cairo, love again, legacy and literature. I wake every day in envy of this life of his and wonder how I (in my infinite competitive nature that inhabits all wistful youth) could ever match, or come close to this man. But with this jealousy, has revolved structure and reason. With the words of A Time of Gifts, or Between The Woods and The Water, Or Travellers Tree, A Time to Keep Silence, and the crackling, volcanic prose of his short, sharp masterpiece; The Violins of Saint Jacques, I have faith in this ever deteriorating, modern, seemingly unromantic world that we live in.

I visited Paddy’s house last year, on a personal crusade. It was my Hellespont, though the journey was less rough. He was too tired and old then to see me and I completely understood his situation. As I sat outside his house and wrote down a scribbled confession of my devotion for his personage, and wrapped the letter around my old Swedish compass, I could hear his deep dark voice, speaking Greek, still with his old fashioned, distinguished English accent, and that was enough for me. I will always remember that moment, when I was yards away from greatness and blessed enough to hear its tone.

I am (as I type this tribute) recording my first proper album entitled “In Hearing Taste” which features a song of the same title. This is my song to Paddy and I hope in some way it will live on along his words, his life and his memory, as an accolade and a tribute to what he stood, and stands for.

I could go on and on about what this man has meant to me and how he inspires me. In September of this year I aim to move to a small Greek island where 600 old Greek ladies live a simple, hermit like life. Greece has become a refuge for me. A place where legends lived and where relaxation and creativity swim side by side in caves and in cool, turquoise shores. Byron lived, rode and died in Messolonghi, Cohen found the guitar in Hydra, Durrell fell in love with Cyprus and Rhodes and of course Leigh Fermor built his house in the Mani. These are my influences, my heroes, the men to whom I escape to when a mobile phone rings, or when the buzz of electricity takes over silence, and thus I will join them in the Hellenic dream.

And so now, as Paddy has had to leave us, is our time to keep silence. Indeed we have a well stacked, inherited future in front of us, for he has left us with his legacy, his talent, his wit and his gift. Now is the time to open that gift, and indulge ourselves in his heroism and his beauty; he is our icon. Now is the time of gifts and I must say, it is a splendid afternoon to set out on this adventure that he has rolled out in front of us.

Thomas James Henley

Paris, June 2011

Related articles:

I knew Patrick Leigh Fermor through his words, and he will know me by mine

Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor by Thos Henley

A Tribute to Paddy on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House by Colin Thubron

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by Colin Thubron,

You can listen on BBC iPlayer (if it works in your country) here … The tribute starts at around the 33 minute mark.

There are just seven days to listen to this so assume you have until midnight Saturday 18 June.

Washington Post: Writer-adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor dies at 96

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First published in The Washington Post 10 June 2011

By Matt Schudel

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who may have been the greatest travel writer of the 20th century, has died at the age of 96. He was one of those intrepid British adventurers of a bygone age who could recite the odes of Horace from memory, sleep in a barn one night and dance with royalty the next.

When he was 18, Mr. Leigh Fermor walked across Europe, and when I say that, I mean exactly that: He walked on his own two feet from England to Turkey. He chronicled this remarkable journey in a book written many years later, “A Time of Gifts.”

During World War II, Mr. Leigh Fermor was part of the British special operations forces and managed to kidnap the German general who was in charge of the occupied island of Crete. Mr. Leigh Fermor conversed with Greek shepherds, using the ancient Greek he had learned in school. He lived with a Romanian princess at her estate in Moldavia. He wrote many books, all with a brilliantly original prose, and was by any standards a remarkable man. The full obituary will follow.

The Channel 4 News report of Paddy’s death

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Daily Mail obituary: Max Hastings pays tribute to one of Britain’s last war heroes

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The Lionheart who stole a Nazi – and the heart of every woman: Max Hastings pays tribute to one of Britain’s last war heroes.

By Max Hastings

First published in the Daily Mail, 11 June 2011.

Paddy disguised as a German NCO during World War II, when he and fellow Special Operations soldiers carried out the daring kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe

One of the last authentic heroes of World War II is gone. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, a legend to his generation, died early yesterday in Worcestershire at the age of 96.

Paddy’, as he was universally known and beloved, spent two years as a British agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Crete. His most celebrated exploit, in April 1944, was to kidnap the commander of the German 22nd Division, General Heinrich Kreipe, a  story romantically portrayed in the 1957 movie Ill Met By Moonlight, with Paddy played  by Dirk Bogarde.

The SOE team and their Cretan guerrilla companions marched the general, evading furious German pursuit, to a beach from which the Royal Navy spirited them to Egypt.

Paddy received a richly-deserved DSO, but the Cretan experience was only one chapter in a lifetime devoted to the pursuit of adventure, learning and romance.

After the war, a succession of wonderful books about far-flung places made him the most famous travel writer of his generation.

Awesomely good-looking as a young man, he spoke half-a-dozen languages fluently and had a smattering of several more. His wit, zest for life and joy in companionship won him a legion of friends, some very grand — his comic correspondence with Debo, Duchess of Devonshire was published as a book last year — and others entirely humble.

He was loved for what he was as much as for what he did, though heaven knows, what he did was remarkable enough.

Paddy was born in 1915, the son of a distinguished geologist who spent most of his life in India, leaving his son to his own devices in England for much of his childhood. An unsuccessful schoolboy, he was eventually expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, allegedly after being caught holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter.

At the age of 18, in December 1933, he set out on a remarkable quest, to walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, carrying only a few clothes and the Oxford Book Of English Verse in his rucksack.

He slept often in barns and shepherds’ huts, but a few letters of introduction to German noblemen enabled him to start dossing down in mansions and castles. Successive hosts ‘passed me on to others like a parcel’, as he put it to me many years later.

Those were golden days, when the European aristocracy had plentiful money and leisure. They were captivated by his boundless curiosity about their countries, languages and people.

In training: Paddy was part of the secret Special Operation Executive, who conducted behind enemy lines operations during the War

He reached Constantinople at last on New Year’s Day 1935, then plunged into adventures in Greece, some of them as a spectator of a minor civil war. He told some of the story of his great journey in two books published 40 years later, A Time Of Gifts and Between The Woods And The Water, which became instant classics.

In Athens, he met a Romanian princess named Balasha Cantacuzene. They fell in love and spent the next two years together.

W  hen the war came, he joined the Irish Guards. His command of languages caused him to be sent first to serve as a liaison officer in the doomed 1941 Greek campaign, then transferred to SOE, with which he spent the rest of the conflict.

Paddy brought the spirit of Lord Byron, British hero of the 19th century struggle for Greek independence, to the war in Crete. He loved the Cretans, revelled in the romance of life in their mountains, often disguised in their traditional dress.

 ‘He was a born warrior,’ said his friend, the writer Lord Kinross.

‘He was lionised by all the hostesses in Cairo between missions. He had the Irish charm, that giving, generous spirit and gift of the gab — and, of course, he was incredibly handsome.’

Paddy told me, with the happy mischief in his eyes: ‘The Cretans were the finest natural guerrilla fighters in the world. They were always so keen on kidnapping girls that the idea of kidnapping a German general struck them as tremendous fun.’

A model gentleman: Sir Patrick was a man who was a joy to every company he met and devoted himself to the fun and fascination of exotic people and places

Captain Billy Moss, who afterwards wrote a best-selling account of the episode, was Paddy’s companion in the venture. The two British officers disguised themselves as German NCOs — which required Paddy regretfully to shave off his moustache. On the night of April 26, 1944, they flagged down the general’s car in darkness as he drove to his residence at the Villa Ariadne south of Heraklion.

‘Ist dies das General’s wagen?’ demanded Paddy. ‘Ja, ja,’ said a voice from inside.

Moss quickly coshed the driver and took the steering wheel. Paddy put on the general’s hat and clambered into the front of the big Opel, while three guerrillas sat on the semi-conscious old general in the back.

During the hours that followed, they drove unchecked past 22 German control posts and the centre of Heraklion. Only when safely in open country did they abandon the car and start walking.

Three weeks later, after an epic march across the mountains and many hair’s-breadth escapes, they found themselves safely aboard a British warship, bound for Alexandria, and their kidnapped German general was handed over for interrogation.

Paddy succumbed to rheumatic fever, but this did not prevent him from returning to Crete by parachute for a further mission, followed by more adventures at the end of the war in North-West Europe.

His love affair with Greece persisted. In the 1950s, he wrote two fine travel books about the country, Mani and Roumeli, and built a heavenly house at Karadamyli on the coast of the Peloponnese with his wife, the photographer Joan Eyres-Monsell, where they lived for most of the year thereafter for the rest of their lives. He became the Greeks’ favourite Englishman, an honorary citizen of Heraklion.

The writer Lawrence Durrell memorably described how Paddy once visited his villa in Cyprus: ‘After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing — songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle, I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb.

Anecdote: Writer Lawrence Durrell described the time Paddy visited his villa in Cyprus and left locals dumbstruck with his Greek songsAnecdote: Writer Lawrence Durrell described the time Paddy visited his villa in Cyprus and left locals dumbstruck with his Greek songs

‘One said: “Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!” It is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.’

I first met Paddy as a very young man, when I listened enthralled to him holding forth to a dinner party with quotations from Horace, snatches of Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, both ancient and modern. I read avidly his travel books, and later reckoned it a privilege to get to know him a little.

He remained until his death a model of the 1940s British gentleman abroad: impeccably dressed, effortlessly courteous and literate, tirelessly funny.

He was one of those men who brought joy to every company he joined in war and peace. He was completely unpolitical, and though indifferent to money was lucky enough to live among the rich with no need to care about tomorrow. He devoted himself to the fun and fascination of exotic people and places, and wrote like an angel.

In 1991 he became one of the few men ever to refuse a knighthood, though he belatedly accepted one in 2004: more than a hero of the war, he was a British hero for our times.

Related article:

Maggie Rainey-Smith’s tribute to Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor and her 2007 meeting

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Please read Maggie Rainey-Smith’s tribute and further thoughts on her 2007 visit to Paddy’s house in Kardamyli.

The article includes some lovely new photographs, including pictures with Paddy inside his house

Obituary from The Independent by Paddy Leigh Fermor’s biographer Artemis Cooper

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Leigh Fermor will be remembered as someone who lived and talked as well as he wrote

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: Soldier, scholar and celebrated travel writer hailed as the best of his time.

By Artemis Cooper

First published in The Independent Saturday, 11 June 2011.

In Greece just after the Second World War, Patrick Leigh Fermor was on a lecture tour for the British Council.

The lecture was supposed to be on British culture, but he had been persuaded to talk about his wartime exploits on Crete. Leigh Fermor took sips from a large glass as he spoke and when it was nearly finished, he topped it up from a carafe of water. The liquid turned instantly cloudy: he had added water to a nearly empty tumbler of neat ouzo.

A roar of appreciation went up from the audience at this impromptu display of leventeia. A quality prized in Greece, leventeia indicates high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor had leventeia in spades.

Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor

He was born in 1915, the second child and only son of Lewis Leigh Fermor and his wife, Aileen Taaffe Ambler. The family were based in Calcutta, where Lewis Fermor worked for the Geological Survey of India. Aileen went to England for the birth, but did not dare bring Leigh Fermor back to India as the First World War intensified. She entrusted her baby to the Martins, a couple she scarcely knew in the village of Road Weedon, Northamptonshire, and for the next four years “Paddy-Mike” was adored, indulged and allowed to run wild. When his mother and sister Vanessa came back to collect him in 1919, it was the end of an infant idyll that had, he admitted, “unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint.”

Leigh Fermor saw little of his father but was devoted to his flamboyant mother, who wrote plays, played the piano and loved reading aloud. He learnt to read late but devoured the works of Sir Walter Scott before he was 10, awaking an addiction for history, heraldry and adventure. Yet he was not a success academically, perpetually in trouble, and expelled from almost every school he attended.

The King’s School, Canterbury, might have been the exception, but he was often in trouble, and the final straw came when he was caught holding hands with the greengrocer’s daughter. His last report complained that he was a “dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”, and a bad influence on the other boys.

His parents felt a career in the army was the only hope, but he gravitated to Bohemian London and a raffish group who introduced him to nightclubs, strong drink and modern poetry, and encouraged his ambition to be a writer – but he had nothing to write about. He was drifting in a fog of disappointment when the solution came: he would embark on a walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

He was 18 when he set off in 1932. With an allowance of £5 a month he slept in hostels, sheep-folds, monasteries, barns, people’s sofas, and for a few luxurious months in castles and country houses in Hungary and Transylvania. He reached Constantinople on New Year’s Day, 1935. He spent his 20th birthday on Mount Athos, and a month later took part in a Greek royalist cavalry charge against Venizelist rebels across the River Struma on a borrowed horse. He then made his way to Athens, where he met Princess Balasha Cantacuzène.

Balasha Cantacuzene

A Romanian painter with dark, exotic looks, Balasha was eight years older and recently divorced. That summer they lived in a watermill opposite the island of Poros, and in autumn they retreated to Balasha’s family home in Romania. Baleni, in the Cantacuzene estates in Moldavia, was his refuge for three years. Here he made the first attempt to write up his notes from his trans-European journey. He did not like the results, but he did earn money by translating Constantine Rodocanachis’s Ulysse fils d’Ulysse which as Forever Ulysses became a bestseller in America. When war was declared, Leigh Fermor decided to go home. “The farewells next day,” he wrote, “were like marching orders out of paradise.”

He had hoped to join the Irish Guards, but took the commission offered by the Intelligence Corps which gave him the opportunity to return to Greece. As a British Liaison Officer he followed the Greek army’s early successes against the Italians on the Albanian border in late 1940. When the Germans invaded the following April, the British and Greek forces retreated southwards. Leigh Fermor escaped by caique to Crete, where he took part in the battle in May 1941 against German paratroopers; when the battle was lost he was evacuated to Egypt. He was sent back to occupied Crete in June 1942, as one of a handful of SOE officers who were helping the Cretan Resistance.

After the Italian surrender in August 1943 he was contacted by the Italian general Angelo Carta. Rather than co-operate with the Germans, Carta wanted to leave Crete. Leigh Fermor saw him safely to Egypt – a mission which sparked the idea of kidnapping a German general. Promoted to major, he returned from Cairo to Crete in February 1944. With his second-in-command, Capt William Stanley Moss, and a hand-picked team of resistance fighters, the ambush took place on 26 April, when General Heinrich Kreipe, commander of the Sebastopol Division, was pulled out of his car on his way to his villa.

Moss, Kreipe and Paddy

The hardest part was not so much the capture but the getaway. The wireless broke down, German troops flooded the south coast, from where they had planned to rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch, and the General hurt his shoulder in a fall. The party spent two weeks in caves and sheepfolds in the White Mountains, making their way over the snowy ridges of Mount Ida to a more secluded evacuation point. German patrols kept up the pressure, and leaflets were dropped warning that anyone who gave aid and succour to the kidnappers could expect the most severe punishment. No one gave them away.

The success of the operation and the discomfiture of the occupiers gave the Cretans a tremendous boost: as one of them put it, “the horn-wearers won’t dare look us in the eye!” William Stanley Moss’s diary was made into a book, Ill Met by Moonlight (and later a film with Dirk Bogarde.) Leigh Fermor was awarded the DSO and remains a hero on Crete. But he never published an account of his own experiences on the island.

After the war, he became assistant director of the British Institute in Athens. A colleague recalled the songs and laughter emerging from his office, which was a magnet for Cretans looking for a job. His boss sent him on a lecture tour to get him out of the way, which proved a success and took him all round Greece. This was the first of many journeys taken with Joan Rayner, a tall, blonde intellectual he had first met in Cairo. Daughter of the first Viscount Monsell, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty in the 1930s, she was widely travelled and a talented photographer.

In October 1949, the couple set off for the French Antilles. Leigh Fermor had been commissioned to write captions for a book of photographs by his friend A Costa, but this developed into his first full-length book, The Traveller’s Tree (1950). The reviews were generous in their praise and he was earmarked as a writer to watch.

He was now free to concentrate on Greece. Over the next few years he and Joan travelled all over the mainland and the archipelago, by boat and bus and mule and on foot, exploring a country that was still remote outside the main towns and where customs and traditions were observed as they had been for centuries.

Spells of travel would be broken by long stints of writing, translation and journalism. In 1953 came two small books. A series of articles on monasteries, written for the Cornhill Magazine, were collected in A Time to Keep Silence, while his only novel, The Violins of Saint Jacques, grew out of a chapter he was supposed to have written for a book called Memorable Balls. He translated the wartime memoirs of his friend George Psychoundakis, which appeared in 1955 as The Cretan Runner, and wrote for The Spectator and The Sunday Times.

Beyond an insatiable thirst for travel, wine and books, Leigh Fermor and Joan lived a frugal life. She had a small private income, and by living abroad for most of the year they avoided tax. Friends helped by lending houses where he could write; among the most important was a house in Normandy owned by Amy Smart, the Egyptian wife of the diplomat Sir Walter Smart, and that of the painter Nico Ghika on the island of Hydra. When they were in England, Joan would retire to her family home at Dumbleton in Worcestershire while Leigh Fermor headed for the bright lights.

His friends scooped him up into a round of celebrations and reunions and house parties, where Leigh Fermor revelled in company. Among them were brothers-in-arms like Xan Fielding and George Jellicoe, celebrated hostesses such as Annie Fleming, Deborah Devonshire and Diana Cooper, and writers and poets such as John Betjeman, Robin Fedden, Philip Toynbee, and later, Bruce Chatwin.

Writing, on the other hand, was hard and solitary. Though many of his set-piece descriptions were written at a gallop and barely changed, other passages involved months of work. He was acutely attuned to internal rhythms; the alteration of one word would set up a ripple effect demanding whole chapters to be rewritten. His friend and publisher, Jock Murray, was often in despair as every set of proofs came back covered in crossings-out and addenda.

It was not until 1958 that Murray published Mani, Leigh Fermor’s first book on Greece. It shows the southern Peloponnese as it was before tourism – a land of rocks and dazzling light, blood feuds and deep superstition, where people still told tales of their struggles against the Turks and pirates. Its companion volume, Roumeli covers his travels from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

Leigh Fermor and Joan were keen to settle in Greece, and they were always on the look-out for the perfect patch of land. They found it in 1963, in the Mani, a little promontory near the village of Kardamyli, south of Kalamata. Surrounded by olive groves, it looked out to sea and had its own rocky beach. With the help of a local stonemason, Leigh Fermor and Joan set about building the house. The result was the perfect monastery-built-for-two, at the heart of which was a library described by John Betjeman as “one of the rooms of the world”.

A Time of Gifts, 1977

Leigh Fermor at last had a permanent home, all his books in one place and uninterrupted solitude. His next subject was the one he had waited half a lifetime to write – the story of his great walk to Constantinople. “Shanks’s Europe”, as he called it, was worth the wait. A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977, and Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume in a proposed trilogy, in 1986. Together they present a snapshot of old Europe just before the joint cataclysms of war and Communism swept them away for ever. Every paragraph reflects the loss of a way of life still linked to its soil and its history, while celebrating the joy and enthusiasm of a young man discovering the riches of a continent. The reviews hailed him as the best travel writer of his time – and reader reviews on Amazon show him being rediscovered.

Unfortunately, the clamour for him to finish the last volume ushered in an ice age of writer’s block. In 1988 and 1990 he revisited his old haunts in Bulgaria and Romania, hoping to kick-start the creative process. Shocked by the all-obliterating change, he found his own memories fading. In an effort to get him over it Jock Murray commissioned another book about a journey to Peru, which appeared as Three Letters from the Andes (1991). He wrote articles, introductions, obituaries, reviews, and even translated a story by PG Wodehouse into Greek – but the pen-paralysis persisted. The two people he most relied on for moral support died: Murray in 1993, and his wife Joan 10 years later. Leigh Fermor was knighted on his 90th birthday, but his eyesight was beginning to deteriorate. He carried on writing in longhand for as long as he could, but the final volume of his trilogy remains unfinished.

He will be remembered by his friends as someone who lived and talked as well as he wrote, whose leventeia was irrepressible, his conversation unforgettable. He could launch into a monologue that turned into a one-man show, a verbal rollercoaster that ranged from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians or chased mythical beasts through primeval forests, tribal customs, Guatemalan bus tickets, German heraldry and Napoleonic uniforms – leaving the company breathless with laughter and exhilaration.

British soldier and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor with Joan Rayner after their wedding at Caxton Hall, Westminster, London, 17th January 1968. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, writer and soldier: born London 11 February 1915; OBE (military) 1943; DSO 1944; Kt 2004; married 1968 Hon Joan Eyres-Monsell (died 2003); died 10 June 2011.