A companion book to Fermor's "Mani, Roumeli" takes readers on a journey that uncovers the inherent conflict of the Greeks' inheritance: a tenuous scholastic link with the glories of the ancient world and the more recent but no less historic Byzantine heritage and legacy of Ottoman domination.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was an intrepid traveler, a heroic soldier, and a writer with a unique prose style. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived partly in Greece--in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani--and partly in Worcestershire. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British-Greek relations.

Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece, Sugar Cane, a children's book, and The Book of Heaven, a novel. She lives in New York.