The Hill of Kronos

By Peter Levi

Book Overview

Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he was fascinated by its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship when his political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly he describes the country through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience and insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0955010543
• ISBN13: 9780955010545
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The climbing flower in the skeleton

This is an engaging read that affords a picture a Greece from after the Second World War through the military dictatorship of the 1960's. Levi, who was a Jesuit priest, archeologist and poet, is an ideal commentator on Greece's sacred past and profane present of those years. This is a good companion to Durrell and Miller.

A vividly personal discovery of Greece

"The Hills of Kronos: A vividly personal discovery of Greece" is the full title of this travelogue by Levi, an account of his time in Greece from the mid Sixties to the mid Seventies, before, during and after the military régime on the Colonels. Levi, a classicist, poet, academic (at one time Professor of Poetry at Oxford University) and an ordained Jesuit priest arrives for the first time in and falls in love with Greece. As a classicist, he has an interest in Pausanias' 'Guide to Greece' which he later translated for Penguin (Guide to Greece, Vol. 1: Central Greece and Guide to Greece, Vol. 2: Southern Greece) and which continually informs his classical travels. In a different, though complementary, area, Levi the poet meets and engages with many of the figures of the astonishingly fertile Greek literary scene of the period, meeting George Sepharis, encountering the work of Ritsos as well as other poets and writers perhaps less well-known outside Greece. The third level is Levi's increasing political engagement during the dictatorship that gives some pace to the mid-to-later part of the book. Finally there is Levi's own poetic response to Greece, never too far beneath the surface. Recommended.