Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I was inspired by our upcoming trip to Greece to read this beloved book on the Mani region of the Peloponnese in which we will spend a few days this coming Fall.  It's reputed to be one of the remotest parts of that country, a notion that Fermor brings to life in full detail.

I was particularly drawn to the book, knowing little about it, by the fact that Fermor's home is now open to the public near the town of Kardamyli, in which we will stay two nights.

The book had moments of shear brilliance, including the following bits:

"Sometimes, in the inspired half-trance of the miroloy, the singer goes clean off the rails, drifting into personal reminiscence and old grievances, even into questions of politics, where, without any relevance, problems of taxation and economy, the fall of governments, the names of ministers and generals, the price of salt, the Bulgarian frontier, the need for roads or a new mole for the caiques to unload their flour—all in faultless sixteen-syllable couplets—weave themselves into the song, until the next mourner tactfully steers the klama back to its proper theme.

"A spell of peace lives in the ruins of ancient Greek temples. As the traveller leans back among the fallen capitals and allows the hours to pass, it empties the mind of troubling thoughts and anxieties and slowly refills it, like a vessel that has been drained and scoured, with a quiet ecstasy. Nearly all that has happened fades to a limbo of shadows and insignificance and is painlessly replaced by an intimation of radiance, simplicity and calm which unties all knots and solves all riddles and seems to murmur a benevolent and unimperious suggestion that the whole of life, if it were allowed to unfold without hindrance or compulsion or search for alien solutions, might be limitlessly happy.

Late arrivals are initiated to this novelty and for hours and years after the original detonation, long, long after the new joke’s acceptance into the canon, it will be greeted with unflagging laughter and a chuckle at the memory of its risky and unorthodox origins. A stranger bringing a new joke to an isolated mountain community is at once a benefactor and an object of love; and, returning a decade later to one of these lonely thorpes, he will be greeted with affection and his innovation, now a household word, joyously recalled.

The first quote tells of the Mani tradition of female mourners at funerals.  The second perhaps reaches a peak of sublimity that captures the essence of Greek travel.  The last explains how an outsider, meeting new friends in a taverna, can occasionally inject a new joke that can live on for generations in Greek culture.  Wonderful whimsy in which Fermor excels.

My only gripe is that the book often drifts far from the Mani, taking wild diversions into subjects as anachronistic in time and space as one could possibly take while still holding a tenuous link to Greece.  Sometimes for dozens of pages at a stretch.  

The book really uses the context of a sojourn through the Mani to tell a much broader tale of Greece and the Mediterranean world than I had set my sites on.  Well worth the read, but not exactly what I had hoped to cull from its pages.