Stone, Sea, Silence
There is a track, just south of Kardamyli, that turns off the main road and disappears behind a high stone wall. Most people miss it. This is, one suspects, exactly as intended.
Follow it far enough and the wall opens. Beyond it: a low house, stone-built, L-shaped, set into a headland above the Messenian Gulf. Cypress and olive. White oleander. The sea below, clear enough to count the rocks on the bottom. A terrace facing west, where the light in the late afternoon does something to the water that is difficult to describe and impossible to forget.
This is where Patrick Leigh Fermor chose to spend the second half of his life. He found the headland in the early 1960s, negotiated for it, and built here with the Athenian architect Nikos Hatzimichalis, low walls, native stone, proportions borrowed from the landscape rather than imposed upon it. He moved in with his wife Joan and stayed for fifty years. He swam off the private beach every morning until he was ninety-four. He dined, on the last night of his life, in full evening dress.
He died in 2011, aged ninety-six, and left the house to the Benaki Museum in Athens with the instruction that it be used as a writers' retreat. It is now, depending on the season, a place of quiet work and a place of quiet pilgrimage. People come from considerable distances to stand on the terrace and look at the water. They are trying to understand something. Most of them are not entirely sure what.
Begin, if you want to understand Patrick Leigh Fermor, not with the books. Begin with the fact that at eighteen years old, recently expelled from school, he packed a rucksack with a greatcoat, several jerseys, nailed boots, and white linen shirts for dressy occasions, and set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Alone. In December. On a pound a week.
He slept in barns. He was also invited, through the accumulation of charm and good manners and an apparently inexhaustible willingness to be interesting, into the country houses and castles of Central European nobility. He moved between these registers — barn to schloss, shepherd's hut to Transylvanian palace — with the ease of a man who had decided, at some early and fundamental level, that the world was not divided into places where he belonged and places where he did not. He belonged everywhere he turned up, because he brought himself entirely to each arrival.
He carried the white linen shirts because dinner, wherever it was served, was worth dressing for. This is not a minor detail. It is, in many ways, the whole argument.
He wrote about the walk eventually — A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977, when he was sixty-two, reconstructing from notes and memory a journey made forty years earlier. The result is one of the great books of the twentieth century, though it resists every category you try to put it in. It is not quite a memoir and not quite travel writing and not quite a history of a vanishing Europe, though it is all of those things. What it is, most purely, is the record of a particular quality of attention applied to the world over the course of a lifetime.
The prose is dense and sensuous and unapologetic. He will spend a full page on a staircase in Prague. He will stop the journey entirely to follow a digression about the Holy Roman Empire or the migratory habits of storks in Hungary. Lawrence Durrell called the style truffled and dense with plumage. Some readers find this excessive. They are reading the wrong book. For Leigh Fermor, the world was not a backdrop to move through on the way to somewhere else. It was the thing itself. The staircase mattered. The storks mattered. The quality of light through a Bavarian inn window on a December evening in 1933 mattered, and he had the language to say why, and the confidence to believe you would follow him into the explanation.
This is rarer than it sounds. Most writing about the physical world keeps its distance. It describes from outside, noting properties, the colour, the height, the age, without ever quite making contact. Leigh Fermor made contact. His sentences reach into things and come back with something actual. You feel the cold of that December. You feel the warmth inside the inn. You understand, from the prose alone, that the young man walking through a pre-war Europe that was already disappearing was paying the kind of attention that most people pay to nothing.
He was twenty-three years later than the Romantics, but he had their appetite. Everything warranted examination. Everything yielded more on the second look than the first.
The war came and he fought it in the manner you would expect of someone who had spent his youth walking into the unknown and making friends in every language. He was dropped into occupied Crete, lived for two years disguised as a shepherd in the mountains, and in 1944 organised and led the kidnapping of the German commander of the island, General Heinrich Kreipe. They smuggled him across Crete on foot, through German checkpoints, into the mountains, and eventually to a waiting boat for Egypt.
At one point, resting in the mountains with their prisoner, Kreipe gazed at the snow on the peaks and began to quote a Horace ode, Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte — and Leigh Fermor, without hesitation, completed it from memory, to the end, in the original Latin. The two men looked at each other across the war. Something passed between them. Leigh Fermor wrote later that for a moment it was as though the war had ceased to exist. They had both, long before any of this, drunk from the same fountains.
This is the man. Scholar and soldier and walker and talker. A person so comprehensively himself that even a German general, mid-kidnap, felt it.
After the war he wrote. He travelled. He fell in and out of love with Greek islands, with Romanian princesses, with monasteries and mountain villages and the company of painters and poets. He was, by any account, almost impossibly good company — erudite without being oppressive, interested in everything, capable of reciting Shakespeare and Marlowe and Keats from memory while also being, evidently, tremendous fun at dinner.
And then, in the early 1960s, he found the headland at Kalamitsi and understood that he was finished travelling. Not because the appetite had left him — it never did — but because he had found the place that contained everything else. The Mani peninsula, the middle finger of the Peloponnese pointing south into the Mediterranean. A landscape of stone and sea and silence. Byzantine villages. Olive groves running to the water's edge. Light that arrives at the hills in the late afternoon and does something irreversible to the colour of everything.
He had written about this coast in 1958, in Mani, a book about the peninsula's history and character and the particular quality of its emptiness. He had written, with some satisfaction, that the place was too inaccessible and there was too little to do there for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism. He was right about the assessment and wrong, eventually, about the conclusion — partly because the book itself became one of the reasons people came. This is the particular fate of the man who describes a paradise accurately.
The house he built is, in itself, a kind of argument.
It is not large. It is not grand in any conventional sense. The rooms are proportioned for work and for conversation, not for display. The library, six thousand books, in Greek and Latin and French and Romanian and English, poetry and history and natural history and theology — occupies what would, in another house, be the showpiece. Here it is simply where the books are kept, which happens to be everywhere.
The poet John Betjeman, visiting, declared the sitting room the most beautiful room in Europe. This is the kind of claim that embarrasses the cautious. But photographs of the room, the sea through the window, the books on the walls, the particular arrangement of things accumulated over a lifetime of looking, make you understand what he meant. It is not beautiful because of what is in it. It is beautiful because of what it knows. Every object was chosen by someone who understood that the things around you are not decoration. They are the atmosphere in which thinking happens.
The terrace faces west. The mosaics in the courtyard were laid in the traditional Maniot style, small stones pressed into patterns that local craftsmen had been making for centuries. Nothing was imported for effect. Nothing was chosen to signal anything. Everything was chosen because it was right for this place, this light, this life being lived here.
This is a different thing from taste. Taste is a position taken about how things should look. What Leigh Fermor had was something closer to understanding — an intimate, practised knowledge of what things actually are and what they require. It takes longer to arrive at. It shows differently. You cannot acquire it quickly, and you cannot perform it. You can only develop it, slowly, through sustained attention over time.
He dressed the same way.
There are photographs from Kardamyli, unhurried, sun-bleached afternoons on the terrace, where he wears the clothes of a man who solved that question long ago and moved on to other things. Open collar. Cloth that moves in heat. Nothing performing anything. The impression is not of someone who thinks about what he's wearing. It is of someone who thought about it once, arrived somewhere, and thereafter simply appeared dressed in the way that was right for him.
This is different from indifference. Indifference produces a different result. What you see in those photographs is the outcome of a man who understood his own proportions, physical and otherwise, and dressed to meet them rather than to override them. The clothes and the body had reached an accord. The accord is visible.
He needed, near the end of his life, to be appropriately dressed before receiving female visitors. This arrived not as a social obligation but as an instinct still operating at ninety-something, undiminished. Not vanity. Consideration. A recognition that how you present yourself to another person is a form of respect for that person. That getting dressed is not a private act. It is a declaration, made daily, of how seriously you take the day.
What the house, the prose, and the clothes share, and this is the thing worth taking from Leigh Fermor, the thing that survives all the biography and the legend-making, is a consistent quality of seriousness applied to the surfaces of life.
Not gravity. He was, by every account, a man who laughed easily and often. Not solemnity. A man who got drunk with gypsies and quoted Horace with generals and swam off Greek headlands in his nineties is not a solemn man. What he had was the opposite of carelessness. An insistence, maintained across a lifetime, that the things in front of you, the cloth, the sentence, the stone, the light, deserved your full attention. That nothing was too small to look at properly. That the quality of your looking determined, eventually, the quality of your life.
The house at Kalamitsi is what that looks like when you give it fifty years.
You take a track south of Kardamyli, behind a high stone wall. You find a headland blanketed in olives and asphodels above the Messenian Gulf. You stand on the terrace in the late afternoon and look west at what the light is doing to the water. And you understand, without needing it explained, that this is what it means to pay attention. To everything. Without exception. For as long as you have.
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was the author of A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, Mani, and The Broken Road, among others. His house at Kardamyli, bequeathed to the Benaki Museum in Athens, operates today as a writers' retreat.