Description
From Athens, the capital of Greece, to Mount Olympos, the home of the ancient Gods in Macedonia, the country echoes with place names which date back to Homer and Hesiod: Thebes, Boeotia, Delphi, Mount Parnassus, Helicon and many more. Here John Hillaby, writer and walker extraordinary, staged his latest marathon. He and his wife Katie backpacked through the bare Pindos mountains on routes unknown to tourists and purposely smudged by military-minded mapmakers.
Geoffrey Moorhouse once referred to John Hillaby as 'a well- stocked mind on the move'. In this book John comments on the history and mythology of the whole country; on the owls - those familiars of the Goddess Athene - the orchids, the butterflies, temple architecture, Civil Wars, Byron's exploits and the age-old cultivation of the olive and the vine. Belching frogs put him in mind of Aristophanes and the Persian wars; bee-keeping took him back to Virgil's classic treatise in the Georgics.
In remote villages John and Katie met with traditional Greek kindness to strangers, and with scanty knowledge of Greek they combined sign language to hold entertaining conversations in dusty squares and small tavernas. On the stark flanks of mountains they introduce us to the mysterious world of the Vlachs or Wallachians, Europe's least-known ethnic minority. In black woollen capes those nomadic herdsmen known to the Greeks as 'The Black Departers' stand guard in silence, like Easter Island figures, over flocks of sheep and goats.
Through Attica and Boeotia, over mountain gorges cut by the Sperkios river, in and around the Plain of Thessaly, they reach the slopes of Mount Olympos, and it is there that Zeus justifies his title as Gatherer of Storms. John Hillaby's assured descriptive writing with occasional back glances to other and more exotic travel and the learning he wears so lightly must surely make this the climax of all his journeys.
ISBN:9780094698604
