Patrick Leigh Fermor

Author profile

born

February 11, 1915 in London, The United Kingdom

died

June 10, 2011

gender

male

genre

Travel

About this author

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Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, after Hitler had recently come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also in the country houses of Central Europe with the landed gentry and aristocracy. Along the journey, he listened to the many stories and dialects he came across. Two of his subsequent...more Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, after Hitler had recently come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also in the country houses of Central Europe with the landed gentry and aristocracy. Along the journey, he listened to the many stories and dialects he came across. Two of his subsequent travel books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, detail this journey. Written decades later, they benefit from his scholarly learning, giving a wealth of historical, geographical, linguistic and anthropological information as the narrative proceeds. A planned third volume, intended to follow the journey to its completion in Constantinople, has not yet appeared. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued on to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. He was fascinated by Greece and its language. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Bălaşa Cantacuzino), a Romanian noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Băleni, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living when World War II was declared.

Leigh Fermor joined the Irish Guards, but due to his knowledge of Greek he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains and led the party that captured and evacuated the German Commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, in 1944. The episode was immortalised in the book and later film, Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. He was awarded the DSO, was made Honorary Citizen of Heraklion and later of Kardamyli and Gytheio. The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete, in file number HS 5/728.
In 2005, a documentary film on the Cretan resistance movement entitled The 11th Day was released. The documentary, produced by filmmakers Christos and Michael Epperson, contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor, filmed in 2003. He recounts in great detail his service in the S.O.E. and his activities on Crete, including the capture of General Kreipe.

In 1950, Leigh Fermor's first book, The Traveller's Tree, was published about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Many critics and discerning readers regard his 1977 A Time of Gifts as one of the greatest travel books in the English language. He translated the manuscript, The Cretan Runner, written by his former subordinate on Crete during the war, the dispatch runner George Psychoundakis, and had it published. He also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted and set to music as an opera by the composer Malcolm Williamson.
Leigh Fermor's extraordinary charm and gift for bridging the cultural divide between the Uni(less)

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Books by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Average rating: 4.13 · 1,860 ratings · 377 reviews · 12 distinct works

	A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris 4.22 avg rating — 737 ratings — published 1988 — 16 editions	My rating:
	Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris (Introduction) 4.37 avg rating — 291 ratings — published 1979 — 10 editions	My rating:
	A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Karen Armstrong (Introduction) 3.90 avg rating — 216 ratings — published 1989 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York Review Books Classics) 4.19 avg rating — 105 ratings — published 1959 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Patricia Storace (Introduction) 4.10 avg rating — 77 ratings — published 1962 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Violins Of Saint Jacques 3.81 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 1953 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Words of Mercury 3.93 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2003 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Introduction) 3.73 avg rating — 26 ratings — 10 editions	My rating:
	Three Letters From The Andes 3.57 avg rating — 21 ratings — 4 editions	My rating:
	Loose as the Wind 2.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1996	My rating:

More books by Patrick Leigh Fermor…

Series by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Trilogy (2 books)
by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris (Introduction)

4.27 avg rating — 1,028 ratings

Quotes by Patrick Leigh Fermor

“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor

6 people liked it

“All horsepower corrupts.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

2 people liked it

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