Why am I passionate about this?

I fell in love with Greece 50 years ago, when I had the good fortune of spending a summer on my fatherā€™s native island of Ikaria. I bagged my first writing job four years later when I wrote a guide to all the Greek islands. As a travel writer I tend to fall in love with all the places I write about! But Greece is where I feel most at home, and it has inspired some truly memorable travel books. I hope you like some of my all-time favorites.


I wrote

Northern Greece

By Dana Facaros,

Book cover of Northern Greece

What is my book about?

The first ever complete guide to a beautiful if lesser known region of Greece, including Thessaly, Epirus, Greek Macedonia andā€¦

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

Dana Facaros Why did I love this book?

Greece has never held an ā€˜Our Favourite Foreignerā€™ contest, but if they did, I suspect Patrick Leigh Fermor would win hands down. While fighting with the Resistance in Crete during WWII, he led one of the most daring missions of the conflictā€”abducting the German Commander of Crete in broad daylight.  

First published in 1958, his travel book on the wild Mani region is so evocative, adventurous, wise, and affectionate itā€™s not surprising he decided to spend the rest of his life there in Kardamyli. His writing is a deep well of inspiration: itā€™s no wonder he has been called ā€˜the travel writerā€™s travel writer.ā€™ He is certainly mine!

By Patrick Leigh Fermor,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Mani as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.

Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, andā€¦


Book cover of The Colossus of Maroussi

Dana Facaros Why did I love this book?

Henry Miller spent nine months in Greece in 1939-40 and was completely smitten even as the shadows of war lengthened. Miller was a keen observer, but one who knew almost nothing about Greece. His acute and very personal descriptions of the country and the characters he met perfectly capture a moment in timeā€”itā€™s a very different Greece now, but still recognizable in the countryā€™s humane spirit, the way Greeks maximize every moment of joy that comes their way. 

By Henry Miller,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Colossus of Maroussi as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the "colossus" of Miller's book, stirs every rooster withinā€¦


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Book cover of Somewhere Else

Somewhere Else by Merri Melde,

Merri Melde has spent over two cumulative years of her life traveling, answering to an inexplicable need to see the world, to experience different adventures, cultures, people and places.

Taken from her travel journals, Somewhere Else features some of her backpack travels in Nepal, where she trekked the Annapurna Circuit;ā€¦

Book cover of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

Dana Facaros Why did I love this book?

I came across this book while researching my guide to Northern Greece. Kapka Kassabova is a Bulgarian writer now living in the Scottish Highlands, who returned to the land she knew as a child: the once heavily militarized border between Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Her account of the places and people she meets in this forgotten corner of the world are uncanny, full of wonder, tragedy and horror, comedy and beauty, in a place where even in the 21st-century magic and the supernatural still live on.  

By Kapka Kassabova,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Border as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

ā€œRemarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.ā€ ā€”Peter Pomerantsev

In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the ā€œRed Rivieraā€ on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whoseā€¦


Book cover of The Station

Dana Facaros Why did I love this book?

As a woman, Iā€™ll never be able to visit the fantastical Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos, although Iā€™ve looked at from land and sea often enough! But after reading this evocative account from the 1920s by a very young Robert Byron (best known for his classic, The Road to Oxiana) I feel as if I had been there, in a completely other (and rather eccentric) world long before the monasteriesā€™ current revival and modernizationā€”they say the monks even have mobile phones these days! Byronā€™s black-and-white photographs and drawings add to the charm. 

By Robert Byron,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Station as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Mount Athos, the spiritual heart of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism, is perhaps the most sacred and mysterious place in Greece: an autonomous state, where no woman can set foot, which has its own calendar and its own time. This ruggedly beautiful peninsula in Macedonia boasts a history that stretches back to Herodotus and has been a sanctuary from the earliest days of Christianity, through the Byzantine and Ottoman eras, two world wars and up to the present day. In 1927, at the age of 22, Robert Byron journeyed to Athos with his friends and embarked on an adventure whose influence wouldā€¦


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Book cover of American Flygirl

American Flygirl by Susan Tate Ankeny,

The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.

This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United Statesā€¦

Book cover of The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece During the Civil War

Dana Facaros Why did I love this book?

In 1947, archaeologist Kevin Andrews went to the Peloponnese on a Fulbright fellowship to study the Crusader castles and found a country in the midst of a civil war. He was one of the few foreigners there at the time, which his book vividly brings to life.. after a first rather idyllic description of stomping on grapes with friends on Paros he enters another world. Yet he was so moved by the humanity of the villagers in a period of great poverty, suspicion, and turmoil that he made Greece his home, and wrote numerous other books about Greece, but this is his bestā€¦ about a period I hope is never repeated.  

By Kevin Andrews,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Flight of Ikaros as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"One of the great and lasting books about Greece."ā€”Patrick Leigh Fermor

"An intense and compelling account of an educated, sensitive archaeologist wandering the back country during the civil war. Half a century on, still one of the best books on Greece as it was before 'development.'"ā€”The Rough Guide to the Greek Islands

"He also is in love with the countryā€¦but he sees the other side of that dazzling medal or moonā€¦If you want some truth about Greece, here it is."ā€”Louis MacNeice, The Observer

"One of the best and most honest books about the modern Greeks."ā€”E. R. Dodds

"Kevin Andrews experiencedā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

Northern Greece

By Dana Facaros,

Book cover of Northern Greece

What is my book about?

The first ever complete guide to a beautiful if lesser known region of Greece, including Thessaly, Epirus, Greek Macedonia and Thrace, with all history and background you need to put their remarkable sights in context.

Book cover of Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
Book cover of The Colossus of Maroussi
Book cover of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

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