I remember buying my copy, but my memory is wrong. I remember buying it in Hay on Wye in Summer 2004,
back in its glory days for second-hand books. I can even see the shelf. But I didn't go to Hay on Wye till the October. Who knows where I bought it. I certainly didn't know what it was. I was
at the end of my Byzantine masters, caught up in the labyrinthine seductions of
medieval Greece. I had barely read any travel literature at all, half of which
other people had bought for me. I certainly hadn’t heard of its author, and I
couldn’t have placed the peninsular on a map (this last is perhaps most
embarrassing). I read it immediately, and I loved it. I bought pretty much the
rest of the Fermor corpus in the months that followed. I even have the mediocre
novel. And while the Constantinople trilogy is the most famous, it is to
Mani
that I keep returning. It is absolutely my favourite.
Because of this, I engineered taking my family to the Mani
this Easter, and I reread it in the Mani, fifteen years after I last read it;
more than twenty since I first did. And, as well as visiting his house in
Kardamyli, we stayed in Areopoli, and drove to the southern tip. The roads
were too terrifying to drive all the way round, but Fermor took a boat for most
of that bit too, so I don’t feel bad about that. I got most of the locations,
except that I forgot one of the nearest villages to where we were staying. It
was superb. I even got to read out sections of it on location, which did not endear me to my children.
And we did it in a day. The astonishing thing about reading Mani
is that the whole itinerary can be driven in less than three hours, if you don't stop.
There are whole sections where they take mules up tracks; there are whole sections where Fermor doesn’t even take the track
because it’s impossible and he takes a boat. In both cases, there is now a road, much of which isn't even single track. I don't know where you would source a boat, or for that matter a mule. In some villages, it's not clear where you would source anything. Some of the villages are pretty much empty; all of them are tamed. Kitta, famous for the last bloodfeud in the region, is now central for its supermarket.
And yet, the geography is still the geography, and the history isn't very far away. Kitta was silent when we visited (apart from a couple of cars coming to the supermarket), but the towers of Nomia are still just across the valley. It is not a
dramatic feat of imagination to take yourself back to those battles. The past lingers longer in empty backwaters than in bustling modern cities. It is easier to project back where there is little there. However, no matter how much was there, it would not be possible to change the absolute insanity of
Vatheia’s hilltop towers, which have to be approached to be believed. The road
was newer there – and I was profoundly grateful for it.
But the Mani itself isn't the only reason it is easy to scrape back the layers of history to the book; it's also because the book is already doing that for you. Fermor spends much more time talking about his sense of culture and history of where is than the experience of being there. Kitta's last feuds, which he evokes with such immediacy, happened in the 1870s. No one alive then was alive when he visited. This is not a thing you would know from reading the book. This blurring of past and present happens a lot. A shaky drawing of the coat of arms he sees in the church at Areopoli is presented with a rhetorical flourish as possibly imperial and Byzantine. In Areopoli, I went to the church. The board outside tells me it is the coat of arms of the most famous family in the Mani - the Mavromichalis. He will have known that, but it's a much better myth if the fact is left untold.
The precision of sites and locations in Areopoli is at the start of the book and the location of the coat of arms is testament to the clarity of description he was capable of. Only when looking to recreate the route, does it become very clear how skeletal the route actually is in the writing. Certainly the sequence of visits is uncertain. A string of villages get no more than namechecks in the text; he visits precisely one village on the east coast before doubling back to the west and then sailing up the Gytheio. Thre are great descriptive sections (I enjoyed reading Fermor's description Mezapos bay), and there are superb set pieces (I fell in love with it years earlier in the Byzantine flight of fancy right at the start), but the act of travel is very minimally present.
I've seen complaints about this. That Mani suffers in comparison to the Constantinopolitan trilogy because of their propulsion of their narrative. But it's clearly deliberate. This is a book about his Greece and the Mani is an exemplar of that. An extraordinary
about Mani is the amount of time that is devoted to essentially
atmosphere, a pleasing amount of which is about getting drunk. I remembered the sections where he goes off on tangents about his thoughts on (e.g.,) icon painting. I didn't remember the narrative asides where he directly addresses the reader apologising for those tangents. It's an act of course - we know every word was carefully weighed and edited - it's why his books took so long to write - but it's a very good act.
And it works. Reading Mani in the Mani gave me a loose itinerary, but it also suffused the whole trip with a distinctive vision of Greece that is hugely compelling. Every sight carried both the present and layers of past with it, and all of it evoked a world already gone when Mani was written, but still accessible because it was.
