“Private invasions of Greece”

“Private invasions of Greece”: a journey through the archive of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

In 1933, at the age of 18 and determined to kick-start his life as a writer, Paddy Leigh Fermor set off on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. From here he continued to travel in Greece and elsewhere until the outbreak of World War II, during which he was parachuted into occupied Crete as an officer of the Special Operations Executive to work with the resistance movement there, finding fame by leading the party that kidnapped General Kreipe, the German Commander on the island. Post-war, two of his most widely celebrated books, Mani and Roumeli, concern his travels around remote parts of Greece, one of which, the village of Kardamyli on the Mani coast, would eventually become his home from the 1960s until his death in 2011.

We will examine Leigh Fermor’s relationship with Greece, its people, culture, history and geography, with reference to the extensive collection of letters, notebooks, literary manuscripts, sketchbooks, photographs and more to be found in the Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive, acquired by the National Library of Scotland in 2012.

Graham Stewart has been with the National Library of Scotland since 2007 and became the Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive Project Curator in November 2013. He has an MA in English Language from the University of Edinburgh.

David McClay is senior curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland, in which position he was involved in bringing the Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor archive to NLS, as well as co-ordinating an extensive program of further acquisition, conservation, preservation, cataloguing, digitisation, researcher services and exhibition.