Gareth Clark Living with the Fermors

To where – and how – does a travel legend retire? Well, we modestly get some clues from Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, by nosing around his fabled literary retreat in the Peloponnese

- Sir Patrick Leigh

“This is how it happens everywhere. Someone makes a beginning and others follow,” smiled Elpida Belogianni, fondly nudging an old picture frame.

The proof was all around me. I was stood in the lounge of one of Britain’s most celebrated travel writers, the late Sir Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor, gazing at an old photo of the home he’d built here over 50 years ago in a lonely bay in Greece. Back then, little but a thick stubble of macquis surrounded it; now it was part of the tiny, leafy suburb of Kardamyli.

Elpida was Fermor’s housekeeper and knew him well. Her words seemed a fitting epitaph. Whereas some stumble upon their place in the world, others carve one. As a traveler, soldier, and author, Paddy had searched longer than most when in the 1960s he and his wife, Joan, settled here as ‘the only foreigners in the Mani’, a region deep in the southern Peloponnese, trailing visiting artists, writers and politicians in their wake.

Now the couple’s old home, left in the care of the Benaki Museum since Paddy’s death in 2011, has opened as a seasonal boutique stay. But while COVID rules meant that I couldn’t stay overnight, in Elpida’s company I found something more: a house that seemed to tell a hidden story.

A pioneer home