This story is part of the June 2 edition of Sunday Life. See all 15 stories . Greece is a place, but it’s also an idea.
For those who fall in love with it, Greece represents freedom and joy, untangled limbs, beauty at its purest. As one of the more famous Hellenophiles, Lawrence Durrell, wrote about arriving in Greece after the greyness of England, stepping into Greek light is like “being allowed back into Paradise”. The centuries have changed, but Greece is eternal.
Credit: Stocksy Greece is not tame like France or Italy – though both those countries have wild, undiscovered pockets, and Italians in particular have a reputation for being unruly. Greece is unique, its beauties and griefs cartoonishly large, as if the Gods themselves designed a place specifically for their own use. I’m certainly not the first writer to fall in love with it.
The enthralled queue goes back beyond Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald in the 1930s to the poet Lord Byron, who died while preparing to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire in the 1820s, and the German scholar Simon Schaidenreisser, the first person to translate the myths and legends of Homer for non-Greek readers, in 1537. Greek myths have enchanted generations of writers, singers, poets and artists ever since – from Patrick Leigh Fermor to Henry Miller to Leonard Cohen and our own George Johnston and Charmian Clift. But it’s the Greek light, the impossible clarity of the water and the nature of the Gree.
