A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

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Boukalas, Pantelis (7 February 2010). "Υποθέσεις"[Hypotheses] (in Greek) . Retrieved 16 April 2019. Leigh Fermor opened his home in Kardamyli to the local villagers on his saint's day, which was 8 November, the feast of Michael (he had assumed the name Michael while fighting with the Greek resistance). [24] New Zealand writer Maggie Rainey-Smith (staying in the area while researching for her next book) joined in his saint's day celebration in November 2007, and after his death, posted some photographs of the event. [25] [26] The house at Kardamyli features in the 2013 film Before Midnight. [27] Well, to get straight to the point, even by the end of the introduction I found myself disappointed. This was surprising. At first I thought I was misinterpreting my own feelings. The book had everything I expected: fine prose, snippets of culture and history, a few youthful misdeeds here and there. Why the persistent feeling of letdown? Is it me? But in the end, true to form, I have decided that my instincts are not misfiring, and that this book is not quite the masterpiece it has been made out to be. His tendency to fetishize learning and his romanticism are, I think, both symptoms of a deeper malady: the habit of looking at only the surface of things. Or, to put this another way, the exclusive preference for the specific at the expense of the general. Swish! Swish! Swish!", [43] originally written for the Greek edition of Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, first appeared in The London Review of Books, London, Vol. 43, No. 15, 29 July 2021.

The Broken Road – Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos (2013), edited by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron from PLF's unfinished manuscript of the third volume of his account of his walk across Europe in the 1930s. [40]

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Central part of Leigh Fermor's villa at Kalamitsi, Kardamyli Leigh Fermor's office, c. 2009, view of French wallpaper Desk in Leigh Fermor's garden near Kardamyli, 2007 Leigh Fermor's grave at St Peter's, Dumbleton, Gloucestershire In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion… They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe.”— Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic After living with her for many years, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of Bolton Eyres-Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. [23] They lived part of the year in a house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. Now, despite all this, was I often astounded by Leigh Fermor’s diction and his fluency? Yes I was. Did I enjoy some parts of this travel book? Undeniably I did—particularly the section where he is taken in by the German girls. Do I think Leigh Fermor is insufferable? Often, yes, but he can also be charming and winsomely jejune. But did I learn something about the places he traveled to? I’m honestly not sure I did; and that, more than anything, is why I felt the necessity to write in opposition to the famous travel-writer. George Elliot both anticipated and perfectly summed up Leigh Fermor in Middlemarch, in the character of Will Ladislaw—another young Englishman with vague literary and artistic ambitions who travels to the continent to bask in the culture: “rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.” This description fits Leigh Fermor to a T—the total aimlessness, the nebulous hopes of someday writing a book, the amateurish sketching that Leigh Fermor himself is careful to denigrate.

Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. [29] Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life.Undertaking this journey today would be most unwise. To do it in 1933 at the age of 18 seems positively insane. What Fermor saw is now a completely vanished world, of course. Imagine walking across Europe at that young age and in that time, walking across Germany just as the Nazi terror was coming to power, strolling observantly through a wonderful world that was about to vanish forever, in flame and death. The elderly author sees sensitively through the eyes of the young traveler, and the reader is keenly aware of having the benefit of both perspectives. The young Fermor observes the charming folk traditions of the gypsies of Bulgaria, and the reader knows they will all surely be liquidated in the coming fascist occupation. There is a bitterly poignant air that hangs over this trilogy -- of aching beauty, doom and death, love and loss, an irrepressible zest for living overshadowed by the reader’s knowledge of what was about to befall these beautiful countries and these lovely people.

Now, I am being rather unduly harsh towards a book that is generally good-natured and light-hearted. Partly this hostility comes from defensiveness: If I am to accuse someone as highly respected as Leigh Fermor of writing badly, I must make a strong case. As the final exhibit in my prosecution, I include this snippet of a description from a bar in Munich: A Time of Gifts, whose introduction is a letter to his wartime colleague Xan Fielding, recounts Leigh Fermor's journey as far as the Middle Danube. A second volume, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), begins with the author crossing the Mária Valéria bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and ends when he reaches the Iron Gate, where the Danube formed the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania. A planned third volume of Leigh Fermor's journey to its completion in Constantinople was never completed. In 2011 Leigh Fermor's publisher John Murray announced that it would publish the final volume, drawing from his diary at the time and an early draft that he wrote in the 1960s; [3] The Broken Road, edited by Artemis Cooper, was published in September 2013. [4] Description [ edit ]The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728.