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Athens
A description from Patrick Leigh Fermor in the Times Literary Supplement, June 13th, 1980 which also appears in WORDS OF MERCUREY"
But the reality of the ruins, re-cohering in cobalt and blood-red, studded with metal, gaudy with idols, shiny with spilt honey and blood and reeking with sacrificial smoke, will have replaced the tinted ivory artefacts that had stolen their place and the void between the cutting of the flutes on the columns and the laying of the tramlines begins to fill up with people and events. The reader learns to distrust the cleaned-up, Westernized version of Greece with which the authorities try to palm him off: official folk-dances, for instance, 'carefully resurrected, costumed in a way we shall never again see in a village, flawlessly executed and dead as mutton'; and, above all, the reduction of the actual Greeks, those ambulant cauldrons of flair, inferiority complex, megalomania, courage, energy, folly and improvisation, into evzone dolls. (Clearly, Kevin Andrews is not one of the settlers here whom love has made blind; shallow Philhellenism, as one might expect, gets it in the neck.) One of the springs of the book is the author's anger at this doctoring of the facts all for the benefit of gently nurtured and wholly imagined foreigners: 'We don't want them to think we're Mau Mau.' Translations of the book should be compulsory throughout the Secretariat of Tourism and on the tables of every town-planner, mayor, nomarch and civil engineer in the country; all those in fact, who will only be happy when Greece, from Sunium to the top of Olympus, is safely concreted over.
But the reality of the ruins, re-cohering in cobalt and blood-red, studded with metal, gaudy with idols, shiny with spilt honey and blood and reeking with sacrificial smoke, will have replaced the tinted ivory artefacts that had stolen their place and the void between the cutting of the flutes on the columns and the laying of the tramlines begins to fill up with people and events. The reader learns to distrust the cleaned-up, Westernized version of Greece with which the authorities try to palm him off: official folk-dances, for instance, 'carefully resurrected, costumed in a way we shall never again see in a village, flawlessly executed and dead as mutton'; and, above all, the reduction of the actual Greeks, those ambulant cauldrons of flair, inferiority complex, megalomania, courage, energy, folly and improvisation, into evzone dolls. (Clearly, Kevin Andrews is not one of the settlers here whom love has made blind; shallow Philhellenism, as one might expect, gets it in the neck.) One of the springs of the book is the author's anger at this doctoring of the facts all for the benefit of gently nurtured and wholly imagined foreigners: 'We don't want them to think we're Mau Mau.' Translations of the book should be compulsory throughout the Secretariat of Tourism and on the tables of every town-planner, mayor, nomarch and civil engineer in the country; all those in fact, who will only be happy when Greece, from Sunium to the top of Olympus, is safely concreted over.
- GenresGreece
102 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
12 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Andrews
4 books4 followersKevin Andrews was a writer and archaeologist. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he attended Harvard University and then traveled to Greece on a Fulbright fellowship. In addition to The Flight of Ikaros, he wrote many other books about Greece, where he became a citizen in 1975.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 20, 2012
A great read for those interested in Athens. The city has exploded since he wrote this, but the work is pretty timeless. Really captures Greece and Greeks.
Displaying 1 of 1 review