Greece: A Literary Companion Book

In Greece, said Byron, "where'er we tread' is "haunted, holy ground". Many came to tread (or dig up) the ancient stones and some, like Lamartine, Heinrich Schliemann and Mary Renault (all included here), wrote vividly about them. But more immediate experiences were available as well: Byron met "Friars and Friers", menacing brigands, and Ali Pasha of Ioannina - attentive host and roaster of enemies on spits. Edward Lear painted the landscape enthusiastically, but also endured the "woes of Thessaly" as heavy rain and soggy storks poured through his roof. Gladstone (accidentally) head-butted the Bishop of Paxos. William Golding snorted at the inescapability of the Parthenon and consumed quantities of beer on Lesbos, where in 1915 Sir Compton Mackenzie had been afflicted by red bugs like "animated cayenne pepper". Henry Miller hymned the distinctiveness of the cool glass of Greek water, leaving Liudprand, tenth-century Bishop of Cremona, to denounce retsina and Evelyn Waugh to find that ouzo "tastes like camphorated oil". Included here are responses to the great, often bloody events of post-classical Greek history: the heroic fights between the Knights of Rhodes and the Turks; the Massacre of Chios; the fiercely resisted German occupation. Travellers are awed by the stern Christ of Daphni, or laugh with Osbert Lancaster at the church in Arta that looks like "an old-fashioned biscuit-box". The writers who appear in these pages, and cover all the many regions of Edmund Wilson's "purer, soberer land", include a wide range of modern Greeks, notably Nikos Kazantzakis and the Nobel Prize-winning poet George Seferis, as well as visitors like Chateaubriand, Thackeray, Flaubert, Melville, E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, both Durrells, and many more.Read More