A warm June night in the foothills of the Amari Valley. The moon is down and the land is dark. Below us, the gorge falls away unseen toward the medieval chapel of St. Anthony and the Minoan cave sanctuary, then down to the coastal plain at Rethymnon, where the lights twinkle around the bay. White light from the taverna’s terrace where we sit spills onto the shade trees and spring of Patsos’s tiny plateia. Behind us, the invisible hills push upward through the darkness toward the pale hump of Mount Psiloritis, from whose southern face the gorges defile steeply into Crete’s rocky southern coast. We cannot see this geography as we sit on the terrace, but we know it is there.
We have come to Patsos in a group from the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society. In April 1944, Leigh Fermor, his fellow Special Operations Executive officer William Stanley Moss, and a supporting cast of Cretan resistance fighters kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe, the commandant of German-occupied Crete, on the road near Knossos. For 18 days and nights, the kidnappers evaded German search parties and traversed the mountainous spine of Crete—until a Royal Navy launch extracted them and their prisoner from the beach at Rodakino on the south coast. In 1957, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a film out of William Stanley Moss’s diary of the operation, Ill Met By Moonlight, with Dirk Bogarde as an improbably dainty Leigh Fermor.
