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Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital EditionRoger Norman salutes the incomparable style and spirit of the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose masterpiece was 40 years in the making
The long walk, in PLF’s own description, was his university, teaching him to observe, scribble, question and think. It also turned out to be the foundation stone for his life’s work as a writer.
He always wrote in longhand, although in his 90s he planned to take typing lessons in order to speed things up (on a 1951 Olivetti). That plan didn’t materialise, and perhaps we should be thankful that it didn’t. His writing style is leisurely and digressive. He never seems in a hurry to get anywhere particular, but nothing seems out of place. His life motto was solvitur ambulando (“it is solved by walking”), and certainly his writing proceeds at the pace of a long walk, as if he thought like he walked and wrote like he thought. There is none of the fragmentation of the digital, which even an old Olivetti might have occasioned.
PLF’s obituarist in the Guardian, James Campbell, said that he was “at some deep level essentially a poet”. Dalrymple called him a prose-poet. Listen a moment. “Rich in digressions and vallonia oaks, the plain and the pale blue ridges glided by.” “The peaks all round us sent darker volleys of shadow along their path, all of them streaming westwards and tilting down into the canyons.” “The soft murmur of the town took over again, wooing me down into its midst.”
Dalrymple and Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin agreed in calling A Time of Gifts (the title is borrowed from a poem by Louis MacNeice) the best of travel books. Campbell referred to it as “one of the wonders of modern literature”. Others argue that Mani is the most astonishingly interesting and lovely of PLF’s works, illuminated by his profound delight in everything Greek – the people, their faces, their hands, the food, the wine, the songs, the buildings, the boats, the sea, the sea. A whole page is devoted to eyes and three pages to the light.
“All the vapours that roam the Italian atmosphere and muffle the outlines of things are absent here. A huge magnifying glass burns up the veils of distance, making objects leagues away leap forward clearly as though they were within arm’s length… A distant cordillera completes a curve begun by the vein along the back of a plane-tree leaf, a far-off belfry has the same intensity as a goat’s horn a few yards away, a peninsula leans forward to strike the stem of a dried-up thistle.”
In writing out this passage, one is tempted to go on and on, for it gets even better. There is something in the quality of observation and imagination that is truly extraordinary, and still effortless.
How did the troublesome teenager turned war hero, “clubman, guerrilla and grandee” in Dalrymple’s words, played on screen by the Fifties matinee idol Dirk Bogarde, come by such insights? There may be a clue in the slimmest of his books, A Time to Keep Silence, which recounts brief sojourns in French monasteries, experiences which he described as a “supernatural windfall”. The book is about monks and monasticism, attended by PLF’s sure grasp for the history, the architecture, the rules and patterns of things. With the enforced inward-looking silences and the pervasive contemplative mood, it is also about himself. His reaction to monastic life is somewhere between admiration and incredulity, but he became aware that “the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away… floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world”. One imagines a similar non-ordinary state taking hold when he was writing.
His curiosity about monasteries took him to Cappadocia, travelling “from Constantinople through Broussa and Ankara through the lion-coloured uplands of Anatolia to the ancient Caesarea… Biblical and gaunt. Buffalo carts and an occasional string of camels, all heading for the odd town [Kayseri] on the flank of an extinct volcano”. His preference for obsolete names suggests an older time, as do the images redolent of the past – lions, camels, the Bible, the extinct volcano.
But he’s not at home here as he always is in Greece. The ravine leading to Ürgüp is “tormented”; “cloth-capped Turks bubbling in silence over their nargiles” are “the last vestiges of humanity before the labyrinth swallowed us up”. The church interiors are “tenebrous”, Solomon and Elijah “glower” from the columns, “the blind matrix of rock presses in on all sides”. Outside, “the day seemed stationary, as if Joshua, conjuring the cobalt sky, had commanded the sun to stay still”.
The half-dozen or so pages on Cappadocia wonder at the industry of the 11th-century monks who carved out exact replicas of Byzantine churches, complete with windows that can never open, arches and columns that support nothing, apses, basilicas and cupolas all from a single rock. Who were these people, why did they resort to this lunar landscape, what were they fleeing, and what caused them, suddenly, to move on, leaving behind them almost indestructible monuments to an isolated sanctity?
What’s missing, in comparison with his tales of Greece, is the human contact, the larger-than-life characters that spring up in every Greek village and around every feasting table. In “The Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia”, there are no people, there is no dialogue, no folk memory. Apart from the bubbling nargile smokers, only a handful of women appear, on their way to the well. “On their heads their right hands supported heavy pitchers, and at our approach their left hands drew their veils across their faces with a fluttering and simultaneous motion.” No word is spoken.
This may have been partly due to the natural reserve of Anatolian villagers and the unlikelihood of conversing with the women. But one suspects more recondite influences. The land was strange, the mysteries more intractable. Cappadocia, like so many places in Turkey, has a sense of uniqueness, as if the Anatolian landscape has over the centuries given birth to quite separate marvels – Nemrut, Hatay, Pammukkale, Sumela, the City of Midas, the citadels of the northeast – each requiring distinct and barely related explanations, whereas Greece, for all its variety, has always a quality of Greekness.
No one has understood this quality better than Paddy Leigh Fermor or expressed it with a finer touch.
The novelist Roger Norman has spent equal amounts of time living in Greece and Turkey. He was a wheelbarrow farmer on Euboia for years. In 1995, he walked from Istanbul to Athens for a Turkish–Greek charity, writing for the Turkish Daily News as he went. He now lives in Eskişehir and lectures at Anadolu University.
With a taste for adventure Indiana Jones would appreciate, the Dutch architectural historian Machiel Kiel has risked life and limb in his mission to expose the annihilation of Ottoman monuments in the Balkans. The art historian Holta Vrioni pays tribute to his work and exploits
When Amsterdam’s renovated Rijksmuseum reopens in 2013, the public will be able to visit the Turkish Cabinet of Cornelis Calkoen, the Dutch republic’s ambassador to Istanbul from 1727 to 1744. For more than a century now the museum has been the keeper of his collection of paintings.
‘Never swim before the first watermelon rind falls into the water,’ goes an old Istanbul saying. By the time they ripen, the sea will have reached just the right temperature for swimming.
She was born to be a New York society beauty, but the late Josephine Powell’s chosen world was that of the Anatolian Nomad. Five years after her death, her archive of photographs recording old Anatolia in all its glory will see the light of day in Istanbul
As Turkey and the Netherlands celebrate
400 years of fruitful trade with a series of spectacular exhibitions in both countries, Philip Mansel, author of a new history of the Levant, reflects on the curious role of the Dutch at the Sublime Porte
Not far from the World Heritage city of Safranbolu lies the quiet village of Yörük Köyü, once famed for its valiant cavalry. Berrin Torolsan continues her series on Anatolia’s country houses with a visit to the Sipahioğlu Konak, a beautifully built mansion of satisfying simplicity and unassuming flair.
Rather than follow the crowd and dismiss Ankara as a dull, soulless modern capital, says Patricia Daunt, visitors should take time to discover why the famed Angora of old, twice capital in ancient times, is back on the map.
Over the past decade Turkey’s wine industry has come of age. It is now more than ready to join the grown-ups of the wine-producing world. Kevin Gould and the Cornucopia team pick the best of a sparkling bunch. Photographs by Berrin Torolsan.
Cornucopia’s self-guided wine tours
The First Balkan War, a hundred years ago, is an obscure affair, overshadowed by the First World War that followed. But it ended the Ottoman Empire in Europe and came close to ending Turkey itself. It left almost half a million refugees and three times as many dead. David Barchard tells the story of a catastrophic conflict
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