The Flight of Ikaros

“There is a surplus of books about modern Greece, but this one is the best for many years”, writes a reviewer in the New Statesman in the latter half of the last century.

Hitherto I have avoided all of them except those written by Patrick Leigh Fermor; until James Heneage recommended The Flight of Ikaros by Kevin Andrews, when I was staying with him on the Mani peninsula last month. As you may be able to see on the cover (below), P L F approves: “one of the great and lasting books about Greece”. He adds: “the most brilliant and penetrating book on the bitter and often tragic aspects of Greek rustic life to come out since the war”. Had you heard of Kevin Andrews? Me neither. Actually, to digress, a friend recently told me she had never heard of P L F but she is French and the author on Wikipedia of an article on philhellenism omits him and Kevin Andrews from a list of  notable 20th and 21st century philhellenes while including some undeserving names. Lesson: do not rely on Wikipedia.

Kevin Andrews breaks the mould that produces young Englishmen who go abroad, turn native, write book. That’s indeed what he does but he was a young American when he went to Greece in 1947 although this is debatable.

”Kevin Andrews was born in Peking in 1924, of an English father and an American mother. His education was equally divided between England (Ripley Court and Stowe) and America (St Paul’s and Harvard University). From 1943 to 1946 he served as a reconnaissance scout in the American 10th Mountain Infantry Division, with combat service in Italy and six months in Allied Military Government in Gorizia*.

It was while finishing his college course in 1947 that he was awarded a year’s travelling fellowship to the American School of Archaeology in Athens, where he in fact stayed till the end of 1951, with his fellowship extended for the purpose of making a study of Byzantine, Frankish, Turkish and Venetian fortresses of the Peloponnese, which was eventually published under the title Castles of the Morea. This opportunity to travel through little-frequented areas during Greece’s post-war Civil War and before the advent of tourism, industrialisation or easy communications, brought him into immediate contact with village populations, shepherd clans and the paramilitary vigilantes who kept their own kind of order in the provinces as well as with the deracinated peasantry of the Athenian slums. The close experience of all these lives took shape in his second book, The Flight of Ikaros.”  (Penguin Travel Library authorial note)

* Gorizia is a town in Friuli, NE Italy.

Although Andrews lived in Greece from 1956 until he drowned in 1989, swimming off the southern tip of the Pelopponnese, and wrote articles, travel books, history and poetry about Greece he is best remembered for The Flight of Ikaros. When it was published in 1959 it was subtitled “a journey into Greece”.