Which writer best captures the essence of Greece? Prose or poetry, literature offers valuable insights into the Greek soul. Vivienne Nilan pulls together her own must-read list of books that convey a sense of Greece as the perfect present, not just for the holidays but on any occasion.

Greece, real or imagined, occupies a privileged space in our minds. Its legacy may spark a passion for the Greek world long before we set foot there. Reading is a prime gateway, triggering a desire to learn more, perhaps to visit. The titles mentioned here, drawn from a range of genres and eras, and all available in English, are a very personal selection of the many that have shaped this writer’s response to the myths, history, arts, landscape and people of Greece.

Homer’s Odyssey is where it starts. The story of stories, a cornucopia of a tale, overflowing with gods, heroes, monsters and adventures, it has entertained generations of readers and proved fertile ground for writers, painters, sculptors, vase painters, and dramatists. Its archetypes of courage and treachery, its insights on exile, identity and war continue to feed the speculations of psychologists and philosophers. Their re-workings and re-imaginings become part of our mental furniture without supplanting the original epic. Re-reading the account of Odysseus’ eventful journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War is to be spellbound by the storyteller’s art.

Classical drama delivers maximum impact when seen in an ancient theatre. A tragedy that knocks the socks off modern audiences is Euripides’ The Bacchae. In line with convention, the violence takes place off stage, but that does not lessen the horror. When Dionysus comes to Thebes from the East to enlist new adherents in his cult, Pentheus, the king, flouts his divinity and the god unleashes vengeance through his frenzied acolytes. They dismember Pentheus, whose own motherbrandishes his head as a trophy. The Bacchae retains its fascination and power to shock by deploying a rich mix of themes that resonate down the millennia: the clash between old religion and new, the rival claims of reason and instinct, and the dark, destructive flip side of the creative Dionysian impulse. Is divine intransigence wrong? Can warring drives in human nature be reconciled? No production will provide definite answers, but seeing those questions explored on stage is an inexhaustible pleasure.

Expunged by accident or design in a city that has belonged to several empires, the complex multicultural, multi-confessional, polyglot history of Thessaloniki is rarely visible. Shifting borders, new regimes, fire, war, migration, growth, development and policy have worked constant transformations. Historian Mark Mazower offers redress in his magisterial Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, published by Harper Perennial in 2004. “Can one,” he asks, “shape an account of the city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities–the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and genocide–which it has also experienced?” He achieves that in a compelling narrative built on scrupulous scholarship.

The Hellenistic past and the humble contemporary haunts of his native Alexandria supplied an emotional and intellectual lifeline to the poetry of C. P. Cavafy. His work has attracted numerous translators, many of them poets, and the past decade has been kind to his Anglophone readers, with a fresh outpouring of translations into English. For all the erudite references in his historical poems, Cavafy is always accessible, offering a distillation of life’s joys and sorrows. “The God Abandons Antony” urges the defeated Roman general to savor his last moments in Alexandria, a city “worthy” of him. “Ithaca” argues that the destination outweighs the journey. “Thermopylae” lauds courage in the face of certain defeat. “The City” dismisses the illusion that a change of location might mend one’s fortunes. Other poems limn memory, love’s pleasures and pangs, as well as the evanescence of physical beauty. And, in a timely reminder, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” satirizes the habit of shifting political blame. Those barbarians who failed to materialize were “some kind of solution.”

Just ten when he landed in Corfu with his family in 1935, Gerald Durrell brought a heightened sense of curiosity, a passion for the natural world and his eccentric family’s disregard for convention. His relatives’ antics famously gained them double billing with the wildlife in My Family and Other Animals, his 1956 account of that time. Another star turn, which didn’t make the title but has enticed visitors ever since, is the island itself. The budding naturalist scours it with his dog, collecting specimens animal and human. He makes friends with peasant women, fishermen, farmers, grave, gentlemanly tutors and vagabonds. He sees it all, loves it all, and shares it with us in effervescent prose.

Though much of Durrell’s prelapsarian idyll has vanished, the physical terrain he extolled still rewards cultivation. If you fancy getting your hands dirty, landscape architect and gardener Jennifer Gay delivers no-nonsense advice in Greece: Garden of the Gods, published by Athens News in 2004. Concise and plentifully illustrated, it grew from her newspaper column. The introduction cites the myths surrounding Greece’s extraordinarily rich flora and traces gardens in epic poetry, cults, games and philosophers’ schools. A directory lists plants by botanical, English and Greek names, alongside the nitty-gritty on how and where to grow them. Glossaries simplify navigation. Her approach is commendably easy on the environment: there are tips on compost, erosion, holistic pest control, and being water wise. Gay makes it all look doable and fun.

Patrick Leigh Fermor came to Greece in 1935 after walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was twenty. His love of the country found a practical outlet in wartime when he worked for British Intelligence with the Greek army in Albania and later in captured Crete. He recorded his experiences in lapidary prose marked by riveting digressions. Examples appear in Words of Mercury, a selection edited by Artemis Cooper and
published by John Murray in 2003. They include a tribute to his valiant Cretan hosts and fellow-fighters a baroque, ouzo-fueled fantasy of spotting the last scion of imperial Byzantium in a Mani village, and tributes to other writers who were committed to Greece, notably Kevin Andrews.

The traumatic Axis Occupation of Greece in the second world war had a lastingly corrosive aftermath. While some individuals had joined the partisans, others were tempted by poverty or opportunism to reach an accommodation with the invaders. Hard choices, such as taking an Italian soldier as a lover so as to feed a starving family, did not fit the preferred post-war narrative of heroic resistance and met harsh retribution. Raraou, whose mother was thus punished, is the principal narrator of The Daughter, by Pavlos Matesis. Her story, told in flashbacks and fast-forwards, exposes the hardships, betrayals and cruelty leavened with humor and occasional solidarity of a hardscrabble village in wartime. Though Rarou is a fantasist whose account of her later life becomes increasingly unreliable, her real or imagined self-reinvention mirrors much in a society emerging from the convulsion of war and civil war. Published by Kastaniotis in 1990 and translated into English by Fred A. Reed for Arcadia Books, 2002, the novel is both unsentimental and profoundly moving.

When Gazmend Kapllani entered Greece in 1991 through a tentatively opened border, he and thousands of his fellow Albanians knew the deprivations and constraints they were fleeing but had little idea of what awaited them. They didn’t even know if the Albanian border guards would hold their fire. Several menial jobs later, with a doctorate from Panteios University and a column in a Greek daily under his belt, Kapllani has revisited that crossing and its fallout in two books. The first, A Short Border Handbook, first published by Livanis in 2006, is now available from Portobello in an English translation by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife. Kapllani traces the first fumbling footsteps of an ad hoc group who fled the same day. They meet isolated acts of kindness amid growing suspicion and dislike, while navigating–to comic effect–such unfamiliar novelties as automatic doors. Alternating chapters muse on the inner borders they traverse, exchanging a totalitarian homeland for a country that doesn’t want them.

It’s strong meat, served with lashings of black humor.

The lead-up to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens was an unrepeatable moment that Petros Markaris encapsulates in Che Committed Suicide. The third volume of a series featuring murder squad Inspector Costas Haritos, it was published by Gavrielides Editions in 2003; Arcadia Books brought out an English translation by David Connolly in 2009.

With unprecedented funds and prestige at stake, large-scale infrastructure projects delivered long-awaited civic improvement coupled with maximum disruption to daily life and unparalleled opportunities for corruption and mismanagement. A large migrant population, swollen by geopolitical upheaval in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, presented both a ready-made workforce and a target for extremists. On sick leave after being wounded on duty, Haritos discreetly investigates a televised suicide for which an extreme nationalist group claims responsibility. Harassed by his superiors, annoyed by his well-meaning wife, and exasperated by the anarchic tangle of traffic and construction sites, he confronts the other chaos, where the paths of criminals, contractors, officials and migrants cross. Markaris offers a sardonic, unvarnished take on the Athens of today in the making.