Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British author, scholar, and WWII Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, who fought with the Cretan resistance during the German occupation, died aged 96, on June 10.
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor was inextricably tied to Greece. An honorary citizen of Heraklion and of the village of Kardamili in Mani, where he lived since the 1960s, he was a proud godfather to children in both places.”Sir Paddy” was knighted in 2004 and made a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix by the Greek Government in 2007. His command of the Greek language extended to several regional dialects and the last sixty years of his life was spent in his beloved Greece.
Fermor’s extraordinary life is the stuff of legend; as a travel writer, classical scholar and undercover soldier in Crete in WWII, the author leaves an indelible mark on both 20th Century literature and Greece itself.
Born in 1915 to Eileen (nee Ambler), a playwright, and Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, the director of the Geological Survey of India, the infant Patrick was raised in Northamptonshire by a family called Martin, as his parents returned without him to India. His mother and father later separated, after which he lived with his mother in London. Rather than go to university in 1933, at the age of “18 and three-quarters,” he walked from the Hook of Holland to what he insisted on calling Constantinople (Istanbul). At New Year, 1935, he crossed the Turkish border at Adrianople to reach his destination. Soon after his epic journey was complete, in Athens, Fermor met the first great love of his life, Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian princess who was 12 years his senior.
He lived on her family’s estate in Moldavia until the outbreak of WWII, before enlisting with the Irish Guards. Fermor joined the Special Operations Executive in 1941, and was soon helping to co-ordinate the resistance on the eastern side of German-occupied Crete. With his knowledge of the Greek language he made the perfect undercover agent and relished the need to assume a Cretan identity. His most audacious act was the ambush and kidnap of the man overseeing the Nazi occupa