Sons of Sparta

“[I]n this century, scarcely a word has been written on the remote and barren but astonishing region of the Mani…but the name of the Mani at once suggests four ideas to any Greek: the custom of the blood feud, dirges, Petrobey Mavromichalis, the leader of the Maniots in the Greek War of Independence and the fact that the Mani…wrested its freedom from the Turks and maintained a precarious independence.”

— Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) MANI: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)