Mani, Greece
The main characters in Seeds of Winter find themselves in the Mani peninsula as the story reaches its climax. The Mani is the middle one of the three fingers that hang from the undercarriage of the Peloponnese. Mount Taygetos forms the peninsula’s spine, like a great dragon’s tail if you see it from above.
The top of the spine is a rocky wasteland above the tree line and often has snow lying on it over winter, but the slopes nearer to the sea are of a gentler nature, luxuriant with flowers in spring. Much of the mountain land is steep and uncultivated – what can you do when there are boulders at every step?
On the lower slopes small fields and terraces have been created by clearing the rocks and using them to make dry stone walls, but these places are often too small to admit heavy machinery. Cattle, sheep and goats graze freely, but that’s as intensive as it gets. The result is an extraordinarily rich wild flora unharmed by herbicide or artificial fertiliser; the natural garden that you could never recreate at home.
Travelling south from Kalamata you enter first the Outer Mani. Here the landscape is mountainous but thick with olive groves, pencil cypresses and ruined hill-top castles. Atmospheric cloud masses swirl around the higher and less accommodating peaks. Sometimes your whole gaze is refreshed, seeing nothing whatsoever man-made.
In Seeds of Winter, Carla, Graham and Sefi recuperate for a few days in Kardamyli, the most elegant of the villages south of Kalamata, and let its gentle climate heal them of their adventures. The village has more illustrious literary credentials: the late Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, eclectic and inspirational travel writer, built a beautiful house there in Kalamitsi Bay, and spent a good part of every year there until his death in 2011. His book ‘Mani’, first published in 1958, brings the area and its history vividly to life. And to add to the literary glory, Bruce Chatwin’s ashes were sprinkled on the slopes above the village in 1989.
Returning to matters fictional, the action in Seeds of Winter comes to a head in a very different terrain, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. Driving south to find the land’s extremity you go through Areopolis to enter the Deep Mani. This is a harsher land of ruined villages where families would perpetuate blood feuds from opposing fortified tower houses, and sons were referred to as ‘guns’.
While the peaks become less precipitous the land itself becomes everywhere more bare. The rock becomes closer to the surface till eventually little grows except low maquis and prickly pear. Finally the land peters out into the sea and it is here that legend ascribes an entrance to the Underworld.
