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On the trail of a literary legend in Greece's most savagely beautiful corner

In the corner of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book-lined study, which is still pretty much left as if the man himself had popped out for a quick swim across the Hellespont, I came across a stack of papers. The top envelope included a long, rambling letter from a woman from Leamington Spa, which managed to be both breezy and beseeching. 

In it, she wrote how she’d been sad to miss him the other day; how she hoped that his wife hadn’t been bored by her rattling on about her travels when she’d come knocking on the door; and how she’d included some of her jottings about Albania, which she hoped he would read.

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“Did he get many such visitors?” I asked Elpida, Leigh Fermor’s housekeeper during his latter years, who was keeping an eye on us as we ranged through the house. “Oh, yes. They would come barging in, mostly without any appointment. So I would have to pretend he was ill or not there, which could be embarrassing if he suddenly appeared.”

Such shameless gatecrashing is downright rude, but then we were not that dissimilar, poking around among his effects, noting the separate bedrooms, and asking what he’d had for breakfast (“toast with marmalade and Gentleman’s Relish”). But at least we were there posthumously. And, frankly, if Leigh Fermor were still alive today, I’d have probably passed him a few of my jottings, too.

The travel writer, universally known as Paddy and locally as Mihali, lived in this waterside house on the isolated Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese  until his death in 2011 at the age of 95. Six years on, his flame is still very much alive. The “loose limbed monastery cum farmhouse” which he designed with his wife still sits in the “gently sloping world of the utmost magical beauty” that first captured his attention in the Sixties. It is about to be turned into a centre for literature and the arts called the Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor Centre, set to open in late 2018, and his legacy continues to pull admirers through the door (having first made an appointment with Benaki Museum which now owns it).

I was there with the first departure of a tour designed to follow in his footsteps, a literary pilgrimage of erudite individuals, some of whose names could be found in the copies of Debrett’s and Who’s Who that still sit on Paddy’s writing desks. Their itinerary had started several days earlier, farther north, following Paddy’s book Roumeli; I’d joined for the second half – the visit to the house, and the shadowing of his first big travel writing success, Mani, published in 1958.

That Paddy should still have a following strong enough to populate a high-calibre in-his-footsteps tour will come as no surprise to anyone who has read his books or knows a bit about his derring-do. He set off, as an 18-year-old, to walk across Europe to Constantinople, falling in love with a Romanian princess en route; in the Second World War, he worked with partisans on Crete to kidnap a Nazi general, a story retold in Ill Met by Moonlight, a film in which he was played by Dirk Bogarde. In later life he became a grandee of literary society. 

His word, therefore, is gospel – and it certainly sounded like gospel in the short reading from Mani that we listened to under fading frescoes in the 14th-century Orthodox church at Kampos, a small village at the entrance to the peninsula. Not that the reading itself was very spiritual; Paddy and his incredibly tolerant future wife Joan had struggled over the 2,400m Taygetus “mountains of steel... a habitat for dragons” in broiling heat, meeting a muleteer on the last descent to Kampos who’d taken one look at their state of extreme exhaustion and prescribed “a great deal of wine”. In Kampos, they’d followed his prescription to the letter, and they’d encountered a shady character who’d scoffed at this Outer Mani for being soft. Real men, he said, were in the Deep Mani, a lot farther south.

For us, as for them, the Deep Mani was something still to look forward to. Meanwhile, for this part of our journey we were based just around the corner from Paddy’s house in the refined settlement of Kardamyli, whose narrow cobbled lanes were lined with mulberry, jasmine, fig and pomegranate trees, and where caged birds sang in the shade. From there we ranged uphill using a 4,000-year-old path described by our guide Ruth as “Paddy’s favourite walk” up through cedar and cypress eventually to the little private church where the ashes of Paddy’s friend, Bruce Chatwin, were scattered, with a view down over the sun-dimpled Ionian Sea.

It was autumn, and the opposite of broiling heat, and on our second day here, when Ruth led us up above Kampos to walk the path that Paddy and Joan had followed over the mountains, the Taygetus were wreathed in clouds. It made for good walking conditions, turning the vegetation of holm oak, spurge and sage a luscious green. And although we didn’t struggle over the mountains ourselves, we nevertheless had our own “great deal of wine” afterwards.

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After a couple of days here, savouring Paddy’s descriptive writing, despairing of his bumptious digressions and criticising his personal infidelities, we upped sticks and set off for the barren Deep Mani that Paddy’s shady character of Kampos had spoken about.

It was this region’s fierce independence and harsh environment, that first attracted the young writer. He saw the outlaw Maniots, the only Greeks who’d successfully resisted the Ottoman invasion of the rest of the country, as “the closest descendants of classical Greeks”.

We’d been primed by Ruth to expect a change in the landscape, but even so the suddenness and starkness of that change came as a surprise. Around a simple promontory and the vegetation simply disappeared, leaving ankle-snapping rocks in mats of gorse and thorn. Nevertheless a century ago this land was densely populated by about 22,000 Maniots, who called their sons “guns” and lived a culture built on feud and vendetta, spurred on by ever-present hunger. Today only 3,000 still make their existences here, and not just because they all murdered each other: the landscape may be savagely beautiful, but it is also completely unforgiving. Paddy described it as a “pale marble world of rock and gold stubble… shuddering in the midday glare”, and the only thing that has changed since then has been the emptying of the villages. When civilisation eventually arrived in this cactus-choked place, bringing roads looping over the mountains and eventually (in the Sixties) electricity, too, even the Maniots realised that life would be better elsewhere.

As an illustration of that depopulation, Ruth took us to Vathia, a tumbledown version of Italy’s San Gimignano,  whose skyline of passive-aggressive towers, built to threaten their immediate neighbours, is typical of Deep Mani settlements. In 1900, Vathia had population of 1,000; now it is reduced to barely half a dozen. 

But despite their constant feuding, Maniots were, and are, hospitable to outsiders. Paddy, when he visited, was invited to eat by a family in the cool darkness at the top of their Vathia tower. We were lucky enough to be invited by a modern-day Maniot to his tower, too, but this time to its sun and cat-filled courtyard by the nearby town of Areopoli, formerly known as Tsimova, aka “the devil’s place”. 

Here our host Georgios looked every inch the embodiment of the ferocious Mani: piratical, wild haired, with an arsenal of guns and a pistol beside the laptop on his desk. But he was, in fact, generous, phlegmatic and extremely well travelled – as well as being Ruth’s husband.

For the final act in our pilgrimage Ruth and Georgios took us out to Cape Tenaro, which the early Greeks believed to be the most southerly point of the known world. This was supposedly the entrance to Hades, and although the exact location is disputed the remains of a Greek temple and a settlement with Roman-era mosaics are still in evidence, indicating the significance of the spot.

Here, at the final lighthouse on the point where the Aegean and Ionian seas met, we had our last Paddy reading from Mani. Afterwards, buffeted by wind, I wished that I could weaponise my words even half as well.

How to do it

This 11-day In the Footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor walking tour of Greece is offered by Kudu Travel (01225 436115; kudutravel.com) from £2,590 per person (two sharing), including accommodation, all meals, local transport but not flights. Involves one to three hours of walking per day. Departs October 7 2017, October 21 2017 and October 13 2018. 

Review | In the Footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor walking tour