THE STRONGHOLD. An Account of the Four Seasons in The White Mountains of Crete. With photographs by Daphne Bath

London: Secker & Warburg, 1953. First Edition. 8vo.pp.xviii + 31,with photographs in black & white + map end papers,and a fine folding map at the rear.with contemporary booksellers ticket on endpaper which has caused offsetting to opposite page, not affecting map. The endpapers and the foredges are toning. The dust wrapper is toned, chipped & price clipped but presents well.

Original blue/green cloth hardcover titles in gilt in original pictorial dust wrapper. ,During the Second World War, Xan Fielding served for two years as an officer in the British Special Operations Executive on German-occupied Crete, where he ran an intelligence network in cooperation with the Cretan resistance movement.

Seven years later, Fielding returned to Crete to spend a year traveling in the island's White Mountains (the "stronghold" of the title), revisiting sites of his wartime exploits and seeking out former comrades who had returned to their peacetime lives.


Xan Fielding was a British writer and traveler, and a lifelong friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who served with him in Crete during World War II. (The introduction to Fermor's A Time of Gifts is written as a "Letter to Xan Fielding.").