Postcard from Mani: On the trail of Patrick Leigh Fermor

INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

Although it ought to be forbidden to use the word odyssey when writing about Greece, certain journeys do seem to resist any other term, finds writer and photographer Sam Parkes. He travels to Mani for "a pilgrimage of sorts", on the trail of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who first visited the Southern Greek peninsula in the 1950s while researching his book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958).

BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 26 JANUARY 2026

Many years ago, on a rooftop in Darjeeling, I spent a week wrapped in a blanket overlooking the Himalayas – it was warmer outside than in – reading about Greece.

The author was the English writer and scholar, Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, as he was known), and I’ve been in love with both ever since. Only once was the weather clear enough to see the peak of Everest glittering far in the distance.

It really ought to be forbidden to use the word odyssey when writing about Greece, and yet certain journeys resist any other term. My visit to the Mani was like that, set in motion all those years ago. Less an odyssey than a circling around; a convergence of longing, reading, failed attempts and circumstance. A pilgrimage of sorts.

“One of God’s great loners’, was how Jan Morris affectionately described Paddy: a natural bohemian, school drop out who never attended university, prone to seismic distractions, widely travelled, bibliophile, painful perfectionist, with a lifelong fascination of the monastic life (recounted in the brilliant A Time To Keep Silence), without money or fixed abode for most of his life, staying often in the beautiful homes of generous friends. 

He was also a classicist, an historian, polyglot, scholar, poet, essayist and novelist, with impeccable taste in the arts; an aesthete with a dazzling intellect and a breadth of learning that far exceeded many of his contemporaries; a man who at his best had a facility for the English language with few credible rivals in recent times.

Paddy first visited the Mani in the early 1950s, and his 1958 book, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, is the result of repeated stays rather than a single journey. The book, like most of his oeuvre, accumulates detail within a loose fitting narrative: conversations, detailed descriptions of landscape, architectural observations, recondite vocabulary and arcane historical digressions, linguistic traces and folkloric customs; his prose gliding effortlessly from anecdote to etymology, from shepherds’ songs to archival asides and common, market-place parlance.

The Mani doesn’t exist on any map. Like the origin of a river, or where a rainbow ends, it resists easy definition. One season flows into the next. It is a remote and barren region of the Peloponnese that juts into the sea in the middle of a jagged-three-pronged fork at the bottom of continental Greece. There are no signs, no obvious demarcations. Any gaps in geographical knowledge or intellectual uncertainties – like Patagonia or the Sahel or the Outback – are filled with imagination and desire.

Beautifully proportioned stone houses like cubed hay bales perch beside a sea so clear it could be gin. You feel in Limeni it would possible to walk through water devoid of a single seaweed blemish – magnified feet on white sand kicking up little phosphorous bubbles to rise and disperse like mushroom clouds against an invisible surface, the occasional fish darting at right-angles at the periphery of vision – from one side of the bay to the other without ever wading beyond waist depth.

Every time I dived beneath the surface I felt I was “swimming through the heart of a colossal sapphire” (a line from Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, which I continue to intone whenever I swim in clear waters, even a swimming pool).

In 1964, Paddy and his not-then wife Joan (by all accounts an equally remarkable person, with equally exquisite taste) acquired a plot of land on a peninsula overlooking the Gulf of Messenia (the house is in Kalamitsi, but such was the refined taste of Paddy and Joan, they continued to use the less sickly-sweet sounding Kardamyli). "Settled in tents, we read Vitruvius and Palladio,” and “learned all we could from old Mani buildings”.

I’ll never forget the excitement I felt at my first glimpse of the house on a failed attempt to visit a couple of years previous. Winding down the narrow lanes of the Tarygetus mountains, the sun setting, I saw it quite unexpectedly from a distance and recognised it immediately: its long, almost cruciform shape, light speckled stone stitched to a cross hatching of tiles the color of dust. It was as though suffused with its own private store of sunlight, like a quenched lamp’s afterglow, set amid the wine-dark green of tall Cypresses, pink Oleanders and red cliffs edged by a teal sea.

With the help of a master stonemason, they built a house of locally quarried limestone from the Taygetus that would sit as comfortably and unobtrusively in the landscape as piled grain, so much so that on more than one occasion "a white goat entered from the terrace, followed by six more in single file". They inspected the living room, then left again "without the goats or the house seeming in any way out of countenance”.

The result is a spare, capacious, utterly un-fussy space, like a monastery, filled with objects, paintings and books gathered from a life of travel.

In a living room that John Betjemen described as “one of the rooms of the world”, Paddy and Joan would host frequent symposium-like dinners with local Maniots – shepherds and craftsmen – and writers and artist friends including Nancy Mitford, Bruce Chatwin (I also made a pilgrimage high into the Taygetus mountains to the ninth century orthodox chapel where his ashes were scattered), Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Freya Stark, Osbert Lancaster, Nikos Ghika and John Craxton.

The building is not as large as it first appears, yet like all good architecture, it feels generous and expansive. It is a masterpiece of proportion and restraint, with a light touch of that hard-to-define-but-crucial element: flow. It is surely one of the most beautiful houses in Greece – the world, even. (For more images of the house I would humbly recommend Miguel Flores-Vianna’s Haute Bohemians Greece).

My last evening in Kardamyli: my pilgrimage rounding to a close. Across the bay, fishing boats moved in single file through a slick of moonlight on a bible-black sea- fists bunched with lamplight- probing the dark for octopus. I thought of Paddy, the house and Everest, those dazzling but set apart figures – loved, pursued, revered – outside of time somehow. Quixotic. Sui generis. In the world but not of it. Indelibly dovetailed in my mind by a strange, circuitous, peregrinating association. I think he would have liked that.