This book distils the author s experience, as a young traveller and later an anthropologist, of a way of life which, although seen here in a Greek context, was in its essentials once common throughout the world. Simple archetypal houses, terraced fields and plunging forests, the love of land and family, unceasing labour, a vivid communal life, and a continual drama of jokes and quarrels formed the texture of Greek village life for centuries until the changes of the last decades. The author has shown how the spiritual vision which evolved in these elemental conditions shaped people of great social dexterity, intuitive symbolic perception, and immense strength of character; and the result is not simply a work of scholarship, but the record of an inner journey.