A Visit to Denestornya

Over the years the original outer ramparts had all disappeared, leaving only the main building to which had been added, at different times and in different styles, a series of later wings. The long rectangle of the main building was closed at each corner by massive stone towers which presumably had been added as a defence against the first cannon. Where the outer walls had stood, later Abadys, freed from the threat of siege, had planted flower-beds and lawns.

The last of the mediaeval defensive outworks, the tower over the gatehouse, had stood as late as the eighteenth century…[but] had to be demolished, leaving an empty space where once the great gatehouse had marked the entrance from the moat to the castle’s defended outer courts.

Here Count Denes Abady built a horseshoe-shaped forecourt, on the right of which he erected stables for thirty-two horses, while on the left there was a covered riding-school. In the apex of the horseshoe curve that joined these two buildings was an imposing gateway to the inner court through which could pass the largest carriages with all the parade of outriders and postillions. Over the doorway gigantic titans of carved stone lifted boulders menacingly as if they were always ready to hurl these down on anyone bold enough to venture that way; while towering above these giants was the figure of Atlas bearing the globe upon his back. On each side of the new great entrance were carriage-houses, tack-rooms, baking ovens to make enough bread for a hundred persons, a laundry furnished with a cauldron large enough to hold the dirty linen of a small town, and apartments for the equerries, footmen, coachmen, porters, grooms and huntsmen. The horseshoe court was built in rococo style between the years from 1747 and 1751, as an inscription over the door arch tells all those who pass below. The parapet, which half-hid the low curving roofs, was decorated on the outer side by large ornamental vases while on the inside, five metres apart, were placed statues of ancient gods and mythological figures, each with their traditional attributes and all writhing and twisting as if in ceaseless movement… 

Miklòs Bànffy, They Were Counted, 1934

In my dreams of one day being able to visit Transylvania, I’d placed high on my list of places to visit the Bànffy Castle at Bonţida – “Denestornya” in the fictional world of the castle’s most famous resident, the great Transylvanian writer Miklòs Bànffy. This March, with three companions, I managed to get to Transylvania. We began in Cluj-Napoca, where we visited the Bànffy family’s palace in town and the grand old New York Hotel, once one of the great literary hubs of eastern Europe. The first we saw amid the chaos of an occupying temporary travel expo, and the second lay shrouded in scaffolding, its once ornate interior, from what we could see through dusty windows, now in a shocking state of (hopefully temporary) disrepair. Leaving the visit to Bonţida for our return to Cluj - the castle lies some 30 kilometers outside the city - we drove out of the city and followed roughly the same route taken by Patrick Leigh Fermor on the 1934 road trip he describes in Between the Woods and the Water, making a loop through a bare majority of the medieval towns referenced by the Saxon name for Transylvania, Siebenbürgen. Over narrow roads shared by big-rigs and horse-carts, we made our way across wide plains and rolling hills; up into snowy mountain forests; past castles, fortified churches, factories and communist-era apartment blocks; though Romanian, Hungarian, Saxon, Székely and Tsigane villages; along the aisles and up into the bell towers of austere and baroque churches; and deep into fantastical salt mines, 19^thcentury cafés and contemporary Dadaist bars serving blood-thick wine. 

Daily snow that had pursued us since our arrival finally pounced in Sibiu, an unexpectedly heavy overnight storm that delayed our return to Cluj until too late for the visit to Bonţida. I tried desperately to adopt the sanguine attitude taken by Fermor at his having to forego the magnificent art collection of Sibiu’s Brukenthal Palace (something we managed not to miss) and resigned myself to returning Bànffy castle to the shelf of dreams. But the morning’s clearing skies brought courage: we’d risk a run for Bonţida despite an extremely tight schedule for making our flight out. A quarter hour before the castle’s opening time, a kindly man standing by the gate, as though as he’d been awaiting our arrival, withdrew tickets from his pocket and let us in.

***

Though just short of 75 years have passed since war forced the Bànffy family to flee their castle and just over 100 since the period described by Miklòs Bànffy in his Transylvanian Trilogy, my first glimpse of “the Versailles of Transylvania” was like a punch to the gut. Emerging from the arched entrance-way at the bottom of the horseshoe-shaped building that had housed the property’s stables and riding school, I had a panorama of the estate. The overwhelming immediate impression was of a world obliterated. Crumbling stone walls flanked an enormous gap in one wing of the horseshoe. The exterior surface of the main building, formerly the Bànffy family’s living quarters, seemed flayed. Most of the windows gaped into voids; one lower sill disappeared into a charred black hole. Others had been filled in with what appeared to be concrete. Patches of snow lay across the grassy courtyard, mirrored overhead by passing white clouds of the departing snowstorm. The absence of any sign of life, aside from a dog sleeping curled up against the cold, gave the place an overpowering atmosphere of desolation and abandonment.

Upon closer inspection, the façade of the main building showed some recent attention. Enterprising artists had treated some of the windows as canvases, a disorienting juxtaposition with the decay. Up the building’s fractured and crumbling stone steps, we entered what had once been a grand entrance hall with a sweeping marble staircase. The stairs were gone. The landing had collapsed, as had an adjacent vaulted ceiling, half of its bricks having fallen and broken through the flooring, leaving a mountain of rubble. We wandered the downstairs rooms, each stripped to the bricks except for occasional bits of plaster etched with graffiti, the floors consisting of bare wood planks or exposed dirt. As though in defiance of this dilapidation, several contemporary art installations occupied the foyer, including dozens of bulbs suspended on long white cords hung from the ceiling and a large, decorative oriental fan that doubled as a barrier, blocking off a wing of the building. A few panels in Romanian, Hungarian and English provided information about the structure, but none of these signs of activity hinted at the life, as described by Bànffy, that had passed through these rooms during the glory days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was as though nearly every trace of that world had been erased by intention and inattention, as in fact it had been. 

 

         

***

…the three young men retired to the library. This was a circular room in the tower above Balint’s own suite. All round the walls and even between the windows were fitted bookcases made of teak and fitted with doors of mirror-glass. These were full of all the volumes collected by generations of Abadys and, as they could not hold all the books, more cases had been built above them, also fitted with looking-glass doors. Above these, even more books were piled up, almost hiding the stone busts of the Seven Wise Men which had been placed there to look down on the baize-covered round table in the center of the room.

The earliest castle constructions at Bonţida appeared in the 12^thcentury, and mention of the village itself reaches back a further 300 years. Over the ensuing centuries, structures have been built up and razed, moved along by successive waves of damage, including during the 18^th century peasant revolt, the revolutions of 1848, and the political ravages of 20^th century Europe, of which the castle, having absorbed so much, might almost be an emblem. In 1944, the retreating Nazis, in retaliation for Miklòs Bànffy’s work to forge an anti-fascist alliance, burned the main building, heavily damaging the structure and destroying its precious library. The interior furnishings were hauled away in 17 trucks to Germany, where they were promptly blown to bits by Allied bombing. Amateur attempts at restoration during the 1960’s did more harm than good, and the Ceausescu regime saw the estate used variously as a village pub, headquarters of an agricultural interest and grazing land for local shepherds. Near total neglect followed the collapse of communism in 1989; excepting the structural bones of the castle, what little remained, including statuary and carved bas-reliefs, was picked off by looters. 

***

Even Versailles, however, might appear desolate and forgotten on a snowy morning in March absent visitors, and in fact my first impressions of Bànffy castle were deceiving. The Transylvania Trust, an NGO set up some 20 years ago to manage restoration, has renovated most of the building where Miklòs Bànffy last lived and has restored of all four of the castle’s conical towers, the buildings’ red tile roofs, and the outlying kitchen structure, which now contains an “Art Café.” In the stables, the vaulted ceilings are being rebuilt and the columns supporting them plastered and whitewashed. Such progress gives hope that the seemingly impossible task of restoring the family’s former living quarters may one day be accomplished. The Trust has creatively supplemented limited funding from the European Union through historically-themed “Bànffy Castle Days,” movie nights inside the ruins, conservation symposia and a prestigious architectural restoration training program that has graduated over 1,500 students. This July the estate will host the fourth annual “Electric Castle,” a five-day electronica music festival featuring name acts from across the world.

 

***

One wonders what Miklòs Bànffy would have made of Bonţida today. Even in a week in Transylvania one can grasp that some problems the author articulated so powerfully still remain – corruption, political short-sightedness, illegal logging of the region’s vast forests, tension over ethnic divisions (Hungarian books, including Bànffy’s, seemed all but absent from bookstores, and just weeks before our trip the Romanian Prime Minister had been forced out after suggesting that if the Székely hung up Székely Land flags he’d hang the Székely up with them). But the progressive Bànffy would no doubt would have been gratified to see so much attention given to revitalizing his castle. I’m not sure the music of Electric Castle would have been to his taste, but as a designer of political pageantry and theatre sets, and an encourager and collaborator with innovative artists of his day, including Béla Bartók, I think he would have appreciated the spectacle. 

While our brief pilgrimage to Bànffy castle made for a poignant coda to the motifs of neglect and dissolution that run through Bànffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, the recent attentions seemed to affirm an unexpected and defiant optimism, and to underscore the author’s long view of the human comedy. Bànffy castle might well survive to hear the last laugh.

***

So, with time, the great house grew and was transformed and spread itself with new shapes and new outlines that were swiftly clothed with the patina of years, so that when one looked at it from afar, from the valley of the Aranyos or from the hills even further away, the old castle with its long façades, cupola-capped towers and spreading wings and outbuildings, seemed to have sprung naturally from the promontory on which it stood, to have grown of itself from the clay below, unhelped by the touch of human hand. All around it, on the rising hills behind and in the spreading parkland in front, vast groves of trees, some standing on their own while others spread like great forests, seemed like soft green cushions on which the castle of Denestornya reclined at its ease, as if it had sat there for all eternity and could never have been otherwise.

Below, a couple of videos from Electric Castle with some good views of the castle:

                                          

Well Read By Moonlight

Over the past few days, a few literary bloggers (you know who you are) have been discussing what constitutes a “classic” and how the “canon” is formed: in other words, how literature comes to be valued collectively. Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations generously (and humorously) offers that “a classic is whatever other people say it is, and also whatever you say it is.” It’s that second category of valuation that interests me here: each reader’s “personal” canon, those works he or she might carry along to a desert island. When the “classics/canon” discussion arose, I’d just been musing about that topic in a tangential context.

On a less than 24-hour passage through London recently, I spent one of those rare travel days when everything clicked, the whole day an enchaînement of enchantments. I spent some time in second-hand bookshops, emerging both relieved (no more books to cram into my bags) and disappointed (no more books to cram into my bags). The shops seemed ransacked; I found nothing I was seeking, nor anything I wasn’t. But heading back to my hotel in the remains of the day, I noticed a bookshop I’d missed earlier, like the others not clean, not well-lighted, bereft of all but the most forlorn books. But suddenly I spied a pristine Folio Society edition of William Stanley Moss’ Ill Met By Moonlight, a work I’d wanted to read since learning of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s role in the tale it recounts. For the few British coins remaining in my pocket, it was mine.

Some books seem to leave one reluctant to the risk tarnishing the singular power of their storytelling by something so superfluous, mingy and indecorous as critical commentary (a few that come to mind: Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Ill Met By Moonlight, Moss’ log of his and Fermor’s daring 1943 kidnapping, with the help of local partisans, of the Nazi general overseeing the occupation of Crete, fits this mold. It’s a supremely absorbing adventure tale. I read it in a single sitting, finishing in the jet-lagged wee hours of the morning. I wish to add or subtract nothing from its mesmerizing story, but one marginal, bookish element snagged my attention.

I’d found this notable elsewhere, even in Fermor’s own travel books: the supreme importance, on a personal level, given to literature, to the point of hauling it around as a travel accessory (necessity, more like). Reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, an account of his travels in the 1930’s through Persia and Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but notice the number of books Byron brought along. Byron’s library for his punishing travels – not exactly beach reading - included Proust, Boswell, Thucydides and some detective novels, as though he were toting along a whole civilization, like a talisman to prevent him from losing himself in foreign lands. In a less cumbrous example of literature as travel necessity, Antonio Tabucchi, writing about Miguel de Unamuno, notes that when exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, Unamuno insisted on taking along the New Testament, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi. Certainly there are hundreds of other such lists.

But finding this same phenomenon in Ill Met By Moonlight raised an eyebrow. Unlike Byron, off on a self-initiated grand cultural adventure, and unlike Unanmuno, fleeing into indeterminate exile, Moss and Fermor were on a clandestine, highly dangerous war-time mission, involving night travel on precarious goat paths, hiding in caves and ditches, evading German patrols and myriad other perils. Nonetheless, writing in a canyon after a long night’s rugged march several days after his secret disembarkation on Crete, Moss reveals:

I have with me the books which Paddy and I selected in Cairo to take with us, and among them there is something to suit every mood. My literary companions are Cellini, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Tolstoi, and Marco Polo, while in lighter vein there are Les Fleurs du Mal, Les Yeux d’Elsa, and Alice in Wonderland. Then there are The Oxford Book of Verse and the collected Shakespeare which Billy MacLean gave us on our last night in Tara…smiling shyly and giving us these two volumes, one to Paddy, one to me, saying that they had been with him in Albania and would surely bring us luck.

What a commitment to literature! What an almost superstitious faith in its power! This attitude is underscored by the role that literature and poetry play in the mission itself, as when the young Fermor completes in Latin some lines from Horace that the kidnapped German general has begun to mutter, or in the numerous poems and songs recited by the Cretans and Brits alike to provide solace, courage and sustenance.

But it’s not as though hauling around a load of literature is restricted to those on grand explorations, perilous missions or trips into exile. After all, on my fortuitous London evening, Ill Met By Moonlight joined 18 other books I’d already picked up during two weeks of travel. I wonder, though, which books I’d bring along on a voyage if I knew there was a more than significant chance I wouldn’t come back. The canon formed by what other people think is a classic is certainly not something I dismiss; I suspect, though, that it wouldn’t be the first place I’d turn to make my choices for this journey.

Of Violins and Volcanoes

The Violins of Saint Jacques, a 1953 novella of some 140 pages, stands out by virtue of its claim to fame as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s sole work of fiction. Those familiar with Fermor’s many outstanding travel books will know that this is true only at a slant; his other works, based in fact and rich in historical and cultural detail, include passages of prose capable at any moment of blowing up like splendid dust devils of imagination into whirls of fantasy and poetry that entwine with the fictional realm. As though an experiment in inverse manner, Violins weaves into its fictional narrative a wealth of factual and historical detail equal to that in any of Fermor’s non-fictional works, as though he’s chosen to use the mold itself rather than the model, providing us a kind of negative of his usual approach such that the fictional elements dominate. The result is a baroque confection of rare concentration, compression and color in which the fiction is created parallel to an actual historical event, such that the full force of the event itself – the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelée on the Caribbean island of Martinique on May 2, 1902, which purportedly killed all but one of the island’s 30,000 inhabitants – resonates in a way that an actual historical account never could (or should).

Fermor uses a framing mechanism to tell the story: the novel’s narrator, while on the Greek island of Mythilene, encounters one Berthe de Rennes, an elderly, worldly traveler and amateur painter who eventually tells him the extraordinary tale behind one of her paintings, a depiction of a smoldering volcano dominating an island town where a grand ball is under way. Essentially, the tale Berthe tells is that of the Mount Pelée disaster, though Fermor has elected to shift the site of the catastrophe to the fictitious island of Saint Jacques des Alisés, imaginarily located to the east of Guadalupe, Marie Galante and Dominica, and the date of the catastrophe – while still in 1902 – to Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras). Berthe, while still a young woman, has quit the continent and moved to the island for adventure, welcomed as governess by a branch of her family, the Serindans, who own much of the island’s wealth. While the early part of the novel details Berthe’s installation and introduces the novel’s cast of characters, much of the narrative centers on the elaborate ball that takes place on the island the night of the catastrophe and which Fermor depicts in page after page of characteristically glorious Fermoresque description. This must surely rank among literature’s greatest parties, and includes a lovely passage summing up the experience that a great fête can convey:

A ball is almost a short lifetime in itself. Everything that happened beforehand retreats, for the time being, into a kind of pre-natal oblivion and the world waiting for you when you wake up next day seems as vague and shadowy as the eternity that waits beyond the tomb. Like somebody’s life, the ball goes on and on and the incidents stand out in retrospect like a life’s milestones against a flux of time whose miniature years are measured out in dance tunes.

The party presents a grand vision of the world in all its complexity, with all the island’s inhabitants participating whether landowner or slave, seafarer or farmer, wealthy scion or banished leper. Love affairs unfold; enemies reconcile; duels are arranged; and a great myriad of events large and small take place amid the night’s dancing, dining, theatrics and intrigues. Fermor’s tale unfolds with the skill of a born storyteller. One could be forgiven for mistaking The Violins of Saint Jacques for one of Isak Dinesen’s densely rich tales. As in those tales, the pleasure lies not so much in plot or outcome but in the manner of the telling.

As in his other works, Fermor frequently employs various elements of the epic, which in Violins lend the novella a grandness that its brevity might otherwise be unable to convey. Principle among these is the epic catalog, a favorite Fermor device, and one which he puts to extensive use here, including a genuinely hilarious vision of the room of one of the novella’s most memorable characters, the lively writer and commander of the sloop Beauséjour, Captain Henri Joubert, who inhabits, during his respites on the island, a veritable cabinet of curiosities gathered from across the globe and painstakingly cataloged by the narrator.  In like manner, Fermor delights in this wildly inventive list of names of guests invited to the ball (should anyone ever write a treatise on the list as literature, Fermor should surely merit at least a chapter):

…the Solignacs of Triste Etang, the Vauduns of Anse Verte, the Tharonnes  of Morne Zombi, the Vertprés of Battaka and Bombardopolis, the Chaumes of Carbet du Roi, the Cussacs of Ajoupa, the Rivrys of Allégresse, the O’Rourkes of Bouillante, the Kerascoët-Plougatels of Cayes Fendus, the Fains of Noé des Bois, the La Mottes of Piton-Noir, the Fertés of Deux Rivières, the Flour d’Aiguesamares of Sans Pitié, the Montgirards of Morne Bataille, the Chambines de la Forest d’Irvy of Pointe d’Ivry and the La Popelinières from the strange named acres of Confiture; Hucs, Dentus, Pornics, Médards, Vamels; here and there a visiting cousin from another island - a de Jaham or a Despointes from Martinique, a du Boulay from English St. Lucia…

That Fermor did not write more fiction is unfortunate, for The Violins of Saint Jacques more than proves his capacity for it, and the sheer delight he takes in language gives the novella an almost delirious atmosphere of exaltation that manages to overwhelm the horror of catastrophe (about which philosophy is kept to a respectful minimum). The island sinks beneath the seas, taking with it its glittering human world in the full flush of both celebration and the courageous or nefarious machinations going on in the shadows beyond, serving as a moral warning for human effort in the face of indifferent powers beyond human control (“as wanton as the blows and tramplings of some immense and muscular idiot”). While the novella comes across as more of an entertainment than a serious treatise on human impotence in the face of raging nature, the harrowing description of the volcano’s sudden explosion and the realization of all the human complexities that it sweeps away present a nonetheless sobering vision of the nothingness beyond death and of the fragility of humanity. In the end, Fermor’s fictional, disappeared island lives on primarily in the mariners’ poignant superstition that lends the novel its title, the sounds of violins and voices they claim sometimes to hear coming from beneath the expanse of water at the site of the disappeared island. There is, however, one other place where life on this fictional island continues, one that Fermor would most certainly have found amusing. In response to various on-line inquiries about the most beautiful place in the Caribbean, someone has posted, on numerous Internet travel forums, a response with which, after having read Fermor’s novel, one would find it difficult to argue. Without question, asserts this clever Internet poster, it is the magnificent Beauséjour Marina and Resort, located on the tiny private island of Saint Jacques des Alisés, somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of Guadalupe and Domenica. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Reader's Appreciation

One writer who certainly did not need 250 pages to answer the question “Why read?” was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who passed away this June at age 96 and who, with a mere sentence or exactingly crafted phrase, could provide any sentient reader a compelling, unequivocal answer. On a single page Fermor could encapsulate as much elegance, passion and life as most writers manage to fit into a lifetime of writing. And if ever there were a monument to affirm the value of education, erudition, intellectual curiosity, and rationalism, it is the body of work Fermor left us, including, one eagerly hopes, at least another book to come, given reports of a draft manuscript that may at last bring to a close the journey to Constantinople on which he set out by foot from the Hook of Holland in 1933 at age 17 and, in the written record of his adventure, had yet to reach. I came to news of Fermor’s death the same way I came to his works: late. And while I know him only through the several books of his that I’ve read, the debt I feel to those works and to the person who wrote them is beyond measure. They opened for me entire worlds, and stand as a testament to the profound possibilities that life – and the life of the mind - can offer. Over the past two months I’ve felt increasingly remiss about letting go the passing of a writer so important to me without making some gesture of acknowledgement and gratitude. I can almost certainly best accomplish this by directing anyone still with me to the Patrick Leigh Fermor blog, where Tom Sawford has done a tremendous job in drawing together a great number of memorials and reminiscences that testify to Fermor’s remarkable life. By way of a more personal commemoration, I thought I'd embark on another of Fermor’s books, and chose his Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese for Fermor’s obvious love of the region.

I’d heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor for years, but only last year finally decided, on a whim, to pick up A Time of Gifts. Having fallen under its spell, I quickly moved on to its sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, and then to A Time to Keep Silence. I’ve saved a few of his books for later, confident of the rewards they’ll inevitably provide and hesitant to get through all of them too quickly; riches like these need to be relished and given the patience they seem to gently request. Fermor’s writing - vastly informed and capacious, poetically keen, lyrically rapturous, of an astonishing linguistic agility and versatility - surpasses genre. His works are not just travel, history or art history, anthropology or sociology, not even what today might fall under the opaque rubric of “cultural studies.” They possess a literary quality that’s almost novelistic, with careful structuring, compelling narrative propulsion, memorable characters and a sense of forward movement marked by growth and expansion. Their attention to rhythm, meter, sound and structure can be as concentrated as that of serious poetry. Searching out a copy of Mani for a friend after having finished it myself, I found Fermor’s travel works both in the travel section of the bookstore and, as though they had migrated there on their own power, filed under “Fiction.” The store had plastered a sticker on the back of the NYRB copy I purchased categorizing it as “Travel Essay” - but calling Mani a mere travel essay is a bit like calling the Winged Victory of Samothrace a mere slab of rock.

Fermor’s accounts plunge one into realms that to outside eyes probably would have appeared exotic enough when he traveled through them, but which now, through the alchemy of time, exist in large part only as fictions, as jewel-like glimpses of disappearing or now bygone people, places and experiences.  It strikes me as perfectly congruent that Fermor wrote the preface to the English translation of Miklós Bánffy’s great Transylvania trilogy, as he shares with Bánffy a curious temporal distance from his subjects. A Time for Gifts, the first volume of Fermor’s 1933-36 journey from the Netherlands to Constantinople, saw publication in 1977, more than 40 years after the journey itself, just as Bánffy’s strongly autobiographical work, covering the first few years of the 20^th century, was not written until the 1930’s. This distancing in time adds to an unearthly earthiness in these books. The places and people they describe, as palpable as in the best literature, at the same time appear as though viewed through a glass – though certainly more lightly than darkly, particularly in Fermor’s sun-drenched Mani, where he explores the people, geography and history of this wild, remote, southernmost peninsula of the Greek mainland – the place he chose to make his home for much of the rest of his life.

I can think of few other writers who have been so successful in stealing so much from time.  In recording aspects of the world in the process of their dissolution and/or disappearance, Fermor somehow manages to pin and hold them in abeyance, much as cold matter physicists have been able to stop and hold light for nanoseconds (this acute attention to the moment is helpfully underscored by Fermor’s having lovingly given a descriptive heading to each page of Mani) [i]. Beyond this powerful immediacy and vitality in his accounts, the rich history that he provides to bracket his personal experiences lends a an acute and pervasive awareness of time’s erasures, as in his preface to Mani, where he offers this partial justification for the book: “…between the butt of a Coca-cola bottle and the Iron Curtain, much that is precious and venerable, many living mementoes of Greece’s past are being hammered to powder. It seems worthwhile to observe and record some of these less famous aspects before the process is complete.”

Yet, not content to simply rail against the ravages of time, Fermor balances his disappointments with a sanguine and broad view of change. One senses in everything he writes a vital acknowledgment of the brevity of individual lives in the context of great movements of history, as well as an effusive delight in the intellectual challenge of tracing the tiniest of details back to their remote origins, in part to unsettle their sense of permanence, as, for example, in his gentle rebuke in Mani of those who would see the Greek language purged of its foreign influences, as it would dishonor history and “rob the rich spoken tongue of much of its stimulus and bite” (a point of view that might be stressed to language purists everywhere).  Fermor’s task, as he seemed to see it – “observing and reporting” – took the long view. I don’t know enough about his convictions to ascertain whether anyone might characterize this perspicacity and deep, respectful engagement as religious. His sojourns in monasteries detailed in A Time to Keep Silence suggest an attraction to the concept of spiritual retreat and development, but he seems to have spent this time in them largely out a desire to write in solitude, partly out of his unquenchable curiosity, and, at least in small part, as sober respite from his adventures. In any case, Fermor clearly felt towards the righteousness of the world’s religions much as he felt about linguistic purism, and repeatedly expressed a wistful appreciation of the old polytheistic worlds that were generous and receptive enough to welcome and incorporate other gods and beliefs, as opposed to a less morally accommodating monotheism he described in Between the Woods and the Water as being as inseparable from strife and conflict as “stripes from a tiger.”

One of the attractions to Fermor’s writing is his uncanny ability to create impressionistic passages, sentences and phrases stunning in their precision and bewitching in their beauty (not to mention – and I don’t think I’m being too unreasonably hyperbolic here - a capacity arguably unmatched by any English writer since Shakespeare of gleaning out of individual words unexpected facets and nuances of meaning). Even just the opening pages of Mani offer an abundance of such phrases, as in these few examples:

The sauntering loops of the Eurotas had shrunk now to a thread whose track was marked by oleanders opening cool green sheaves of spiked leaves and pretty flowers of white and pink paper over little more than the memory of water: a memory whose gleam, through the arid months to come, would keep their bright petals from languishing.

Wine-heavy sleep soon smoothed out these wrinkles of perplexity.

Felons on invisible treadmills, our labour continued through viewless infernos like the taste-shoots of lime-kilns…

A faint tinkle of bells from the abyss told that faraway goats were shaking off the mesmeric stupor of midday.

Fermor could also inject a remarkably subtle wit into his elegant sentences:

As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre, subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold.

Besides his precision of language, other aspects of Fermor’s erudition, so sharp and wide-ranging, inspire wonder at how he managed it all: his seemingly miraculous ability to keep centuries of historical family names at his fingertips; the comprehensiveness of his probing intelligence, equally adept, for example, at comparative studies of Byzantine ikons as at describing the glories of Mediterranean gastronomy; the dazzling ekphrasis, in one passage after another, of his appreciation of works and genres of art ranging over so many diverse styles and periods (I hope I don’t sound ungrateful in expressing a personal wish that such a prodigious mind and heart could have lived to explore still other corners of human experience; recently reading an amply fascinating account of late 19^th and early 20^th century archeological explorations of China’s Silk Road [ii], I nonetheless found myself wondering, with no small sense of loss, at what Fermor could have done with such provocative historical material). Yet at times, Fermor’s passion for the mind also carries him on fantastical elaborations almost exactly opposite to the dense, exactingly researched investigations of history, art history, and genealogy that mark so much of his writing, such as in the lengthy section of Mani that comes off as an extemporaneous, multi-page improvisation on the migrations of the world’s birds (birds often seem to invite Fermor to take off on wild flights of fancy; I can’t help but wonder whether his account of an old man in the village of Layia finding a quail tagged with “42, Rue Lenormant, Paris” is either an inside joke or pure invention, since I can find no reference to any such street ever existing in Paris).

At times his appreciation for an artwork, a person, a place or even some abstract element also inspires these free-form riffs, saturated with the sheer joy of literary invention and expression (every time I read him, I find myself compelled to copy down some such passage just for the pleasure of it):

The air in Greece is not merely a void between solids; the sea itself, the houses and rocks and trees, on which it presses like a jelly mould, are embedded in it; it is alive and positive and volatile and one is aware of its contact as if it could have pierced hearts scrawled on it with diamond rings or be grasped in handfuls, tapped for electricity, bottled, used for blasting, set fire to, sliced into sparkling cubes and rhomboids with a pair of shears, be timed with a stop watch, strung with pearls, plucked like a lute string or tolled like a bell, swum in, be set with rungs and climbed like a rope ladder or have saints assumed through it in flaming chariots; as though it could be harangued into faction, or eavesdropped, pounded down by pestle and mortar for cocaine, drunk from a ballet shoe, or spun, woven and worn on solemn feasts; or cut into discs for lenses, minted for currency or blown, with infinite care, into globes.

But the marvels of Fermor’s language aside, what makes his work so rich and affecting is the manifest, deeply genuine interest he conveys in not just the human experience, but also in human beings individually. His profound respect for and interest in others – be they rich nobles or poor fishermen, be the occasion a ceremonial dinner in a palace or the asking of directions from a young girl tending goats on a mountain path – comes across with a tremendous property of dignity, a recognition in each encounter of the mutual sharing of an unprecedented and never to return again moment of humanity amid the great sweep of history. All of Fermor’s meticulous intellectualism, his adventuring and his devotion to service, seem in him not points of pride, but rather an expression of a grand responsibility towards life itself, a firm, almost devotional stand against the indifference he viewed as “a sign of brutishness and a denial of human feeling.”  Though Fermor is no longer with us, his time of gifts appears nowhere near its end; like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, it promises to keep providing, offering the limitless pleasures and insights of reading a deep and generous mind, and reminding us that the effort to travel, to explore, to acquire knowledge of history, literature, languages, art, diplomacy and wit, and above all, of people, is not an end, but rather a means for participating more profoundly in, and sharing to the utmost with others, the marvels of the world in which we find ourselves.

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[i] The NYRB edition of Mani preserves this pleasant feature; it’s a shame, though, that NYRB was unable also to preserve the wonderful black and white photographs taken by Joan Fermor that feature in the original edition of the book.

[ii] Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, by Peter Hopkirk