Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, known as Paddy Fermor, was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer" during his lifetime. One BBC journalistonce described him as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".
He and his wife, Joan Rayner, a well-traveled Englishwoman he had met in Cairo, built this house, just outside the village of Kardamyli, a few miles down the jagged coast from Kalamata, in the wild and remote Mani.
The house, largely untouched from when Fermor lived there, was bequeathed to the Benaki Museum in Athens