The Silent Towers Speak

THE SILENT TOWERS SPEAK - Secrets of the Deep Mani

ARTWORK VALERIE HELPS AND GEOFFREY BULL

The Silent Towers Speak is Valerie’s third illustrated book. It tells of her exciting life exploring a remote region of the southern Peloponnese with her partner, Geoffrey. This book, based on her journals, was written before she left Greece for France to cruise the French waterways on their canal boat; their story, The Voyages of de Villehardouin, was published in 2018. This was followed by A Third of a Pond published in 2020, describing their idyllic life in rural France and the restoration of a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse with its neglected garden.

Join Valerie in the remote and barren region of the Deep Mani - a land of savage history where fleeing Spartans in the eighteenth century built their fortified villages and soaring feudal towers in the southernmost part of the Peloponnese.

Valerie and Geoffrey find the harbour in Homer’s mythological Odyssey where Ulysses loses twelve of his fleet to the cannibalistic Laestrygonian giants, locate crumbling Frankish castles and Nestor’s Palace, enjoy an evening at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, swim in the Messenian Gulf and live life to the full.