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Trilogy #3
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos
In the winter of 1933 eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him the better part of a year. Decades later, when he was well over fifty, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, delightful, and beautifully-written travel books of all time.
The Broken Road is the long and avidly awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prize-winning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Rumania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds: in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s diary from the winter of 1934, when he had reached Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for: across the space of three quarters of century we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.
The Broken Road is the long and avidly awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prize-winning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Rumania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds: in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s diary from the winter of 1934, when he had reached Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for: across the space of three quarters of century we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 2013
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About the author
Patrick Leigh Fermor
54 books587 followersSir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.
Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
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November 23, 2016
This posthumous volume may be the most emotionally satisfying of the three works comprising the trilogy, which describe the eighteen-year-old author's year-long journey by foot along the Danube in 1934-35. (The first volume was A Time of Gifts and the second, Between the Woods and the Water. See my reviews on both of these.) It's astounding we even have it. The editors have taken several of PLF's unfinished manuscripts and pieced them into a convincing semblance of a third volume.
This volume is a more ruminative book than its predecessors. He muses on the strange nature of memory. For only one of the many notebooks PLF scribbled in during his sojourn would be available to him decades later when he started to write. Perhaps because of this deficit, Fermor enters into imaginative flights that were less prominent in the first two volumes, where historical background seemed to anchor the story. Here first impressions reign more. In addition, there are discursions into the approach the writing should take that now lays before our eyes. Should PLF include information from later trips to these same areas, or not? He decides to do so and to disclose it to the reader. No doubt much of this rumination, and a few inapt metaphors, he would have cut had he seen the volume to publication himself. Editors Thubron and Cooper have had to be much more inclusive.
For example, there are admissions of joy in the lush appurtenances of the great homes he visits outside of Bucharest— their libraries, chauffeur driven cars, frequent lush feasts, etc.—the like of which never appeared in volumes 1 and 2. There the rich châteaux were described, yes, but never was there the level of swooning one gets here. Granted, he is coming off a long period of sleeping outdoors under his great coat, or in flea-ridden, undistinguished hovels, and lately the weather has turned cold so these creature comforts are no doubt more keenly appreciated. Then guilt descends:
Leigh Fermor was a beauty and a philanderer of extraordinary scope. This third volume seems much more relaxed with regard to the author's female companions than its predecessors. The depiction of Nadejda in the Bulgarian town of Plovdiv is, I think, without parallel in the previous books. This no doubt has much to do with the fact that those earlier books were published during the author's lifetime, when his lady friends and their husbands were still alive. Now with everyone conveniently dead, the editors—one is PLF's biographer—can be forthcoming with textual hints of his libidinous exploits, which, it should be noted, are nothing more than normal hotblooded sexuality.
The triliogy is, among other things, something of a tribute to the peacefulness of Europe even in the face of the Nazi threat of 1934. PLF comes across some strong opinions during his trek from Holland to Istanbul, largely on foot. These often appear in the text. His facility for learning languages on the fly here is astounding. Nothing, however, quite prepares the reader for the night in Tirnovo, Bulgaria, when word is brought to the café where PLF and his host are relaxing, that a Bulgarian assassin has just murdered King Alexander of Yugoslavia and his host, the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou. Everyone in the café, except PLF, erupts into joyous cheers and dancing. At no point in the trilogy up until now has anything so damning been revealed of any of the dozens of peoples the author chronicles. But the Bulgarians make their mark here for blatant xenophobia and nationalist myopia unparalleled even by the Nazis PLF meets in volume one. It's an obscene moment which reveals longstanding Bulgarian suffering for years of poor decisions in the realm of foreign relations. Her hatred of those states surrounding her is beyond the irrational. Greece and Romania and Yugoslavia were all apportioned slivers of Bulgarian land because of the latter's support of Germany in the first world war. She would make the same mistake in the second world war. As PLF puts it:
It's interesting to compare francophile Bucharest, Romania, that PLF visits in October 1934—with its vigorous intellectual, artistic, literary and social life—with the dead city of the same name found in Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, crushed under the heel of Marxist-Leninist claptrap. Writing of the many wonderful people he'd met there, it was necessary for PLF to mention only those who had left the country or died. For to mention those still living in the country would have been to make them targets of the police state. See Herta Müller's astonishing The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment for an idea of what an unalloyed joy that can be.
PLF gives us the lowdown on the Pharnriots, a Hellenic people who brought the last vestiges of Byzantine culture to Romania after the capture of Constantinople in the late 1400s. This whole area, by the way, Bulgaria mostly, but also Romania and Hungary, faced repeated violent upheaval due to their geographical position as land bridge from Asia to the west. The Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. all came marauding through this area over a period of many centuries. In 1529, the Turks reached Vienna itself which they would continue to attack from time to time over the next 150 years, but never take.
What is lost in terms of polish and finish here is more than made up for by the sheer ebullience of the writing. I don't know of any writer who drinks in a landscape the way PLF does. I find the book's descriptive verve, especially toward the end when he is walking along the Black Sea—and later, too, in the Mt. Athos diary which closes the book—so vivid, so moving. When, after almost drowning in a tide pool, our traveler comes back out onto the beach, he discovers a cave sheltering shepherds (Bulgarian) and fishermen (Greek) next to a roaring fire. He is soaking wet and we shudder to think what might have happened had he not, to use his phrase, "struck lucky." In the warm and welcoming cave, there's plenty of slivo to go around and soon this engenders dances by two of the men, to vigorous bagpiping of all things. A table is clenched in one dancer's teeth as he whirls to a blur.
It's vivid stuff, though not always complete. The main deficiency being the much anticipated description of Istanbul, for which the Mount Athos diary is meant to serve as a kind of compensation. It doesn't quite fill the bill though, despite the interesting descriptions of the Greek Orthodox monasteries and their monks, since it's fragmented and tonally different from the rest of the book. Hence, the editors' fitting title.
This volume is a more ruminative book than its predecessors. He muses on the strange nature of memory. For only one of the many notebooks PLF scribbled in during his sojourn would be available to him decades later when he started to write. Perhaps because of this deficit, Fermor enters into imaginative flights that were less prominent in the first two volumes, where historical background seemed to anchor the story. Here first impressions reign more. In addition, there are discursions into the approach the writing should take that now lays before our eyes. Should PLF include information from later trips to these same areas, or not? He decides to do so and to disclose it to the reader. No doubt much of this rumination, and a few inapt metaphors, he would have cut had he seen the volume to publication himself. Editors Thubron and Cooper have had to be much more inclusive.
For example, there are admissions of joy in the lush appurtenances of the great homes he visits outside of Bucharest— their libraries, chauffeur driven cars, frequent lush feasts, etc.—the like of which never appeared in volumes 1 and 2. There the rich châteaux were described, yes, but never was there the level of swooning one gets here. Granted, he is coming off a long period of sleeping outdoors under his great coat, or in flea-ridden, undistinguished hovels, and lately the weather has turned cold so these creature comforts are no doubt more keenly appreciated. Then guilt descends:
Pricked by conscience about this sybaritic way of life a few days later, after being driven (yet again) to luncheon at a country club on the edge of Lake Snagov, some miles outside of Bucharest, I set out to return on foot.
Leigh Fermor was a beauty and a philanderer of extraordinary scope. This third volume seems much more relaxed with regard to the author's female companions than its predecessors. The depiction of Nadejda in the Bulgarian town of Plovdiv is, I think, without parallel in the previous books. This no doubt has much to do with the fact that those earlier books were published during the author's lifetime, when his lady friends and their husbands were still alive. Now with everyone conveniently dead, the editors—one is PLF's biographer—can be forthcoming with textual hints of his libidinous exploits, which, it should be noted, are nothing more than normal hotblooded sexuality.
The triliogy is, among other things, something of a tribute to the peacefulness of Europe even in the face of the Nazi threat of 1934. PLF comes across some strong opinions during his trek from Holland to Istanbul, largely on foot. These often appear in the text. His facility for learning languages on the fly here is astounding. Nothing, however, quite prepares the reader for the night in Tirnovo, Bulgaria, when word is brought to the café where PLF and his host are relaxing, that a Bulgarian assassin has just murdered King Alexander of Yugoslavia and his host, the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou. Everyone in the café, except PLF, erupts into joyous cheers and dancing. At no point in the trilogy up until now has anything so damning been revealed of any of the dozens of peoples the author chronicles. But the Bulgarians make their mark here for blatant xenophobia and nationalist myopia unparalleled even by the Nazis PLF meets in volume one. It's an obscene moment which reveals longstanding Bulgarian suffering for years of poor decisions in the realm of foreign relations. Her hatred of those states surrounding her is beyond the irrational. Greece and Romania and Yugoslavia were all apportioned slivers of Bulgarian land because of the latter's support of Germany in the first world war. She would make the same mistake in the second world war. As PLF puts it:
Bulgarians have a perverse genius for fighting on the wrong side. If they have been guided more by their hearts and less by their political heads, which usually seem to have lacked principal and astuteness in equal measure, their history might have been happier one. (p. 95)
It's interesting to compare francophile Bucharest, Romania, that PLF visits in October 1934—with its vigorous intellectual, artistic, literary and social life—with the dead city of the same name found in Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, crushed under the heel of Marxist-Leninist claptrap. Writing of the many wonderful people he'd met there, it was necessary for PLF to mention only those who had left the country or died. For to mention those still living in the country would have been to make them targets of the police state. See Herta Müller's astonishing The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment for an idea of what an unalloyed joy that can be.
PLF gives us the lowdown on the Pharnriots, a Hellenic people who brought the last vestiges of Byzantine culture to Romania after the capture of Constantinople in the late 1400s. This whole area, by the way, Bulgaria mostly, but also Romania and Hungary, faced repeated violent upheaval due to their geographical position as land bridge from Asia to the west. The Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. all came marauding through this area over a period of many centuries. In 1529, the Turks reached Vienna itself which they would continue to attack from time to time over the next 150 years, but never take.
The passes in the mountain barrier outside were perhaps the funnels through which, in 1241, the hordes of Genghis Kahn had swarmed to tear Europe to bits. (p. 193
What is lost in terms of polish and finish here is more than made up for by the sheer ebullience of the writing. I don't know of any writer who drinks in a landscape the way PLF does. I find the book's descriptive verve, especially toward the end when he is walking along the Black Sea—and later, too, in the Mt. Athos diary which closes the book—so vivid, so moving. When, after almost drowning in a tide pool, our traveler comes back out onto the beach, he discovers a cave sheltering shepherds (Bulgarian) and fishermen (Greek) next to a roaring fire. He is soaking wet and we shudder to think what might have happened had he not, to use his phrase, "struck lucky." In the warm and welcoming cave, there's plenty of slivo to go around and soon this engenders dances by two of the men, to vigorous bagpiping of all things. A table is clenched in one dancer's teeth as he whirls to a blur.
It's vivid stuff, though not always complete. The main deficiency being the much anticipated description of Istanbul, for which the Mount Athos diary is meant to serve as a kind of compensation. It doesn't quite fill the bill though, despite the interesting descriptions of the Greek Orthodox monasteries and their monks, since it's fragmented and tonally different from the rest of the book. Hence, the editors' fitting title.
March 21, 2014
The final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy of the Great Trudge, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, begins with a rearriving at the Danube at the Iron Gates and ends, like the continent of Europe herself, shattered in fragments along the shores of the Black Sea. The book was not completed when Paddy died in 2011, and the broken road of this broken text falls into shards of diary entries, barely hinting at his time in the great city that was the goal of his youthful wandering, and then projects his journey, through excerpts selected from the Green Diary, beyond to the monasteries of Mt. Athos and eventually back to England, predicting the volumes on Greece and A Time To Keep Silence that were to come. Though incomplete, and certainly less “written”, less full of those “whorls of words” that the first two books are famous for, what he has left us with is more than sufficient, more than a mere pleasing capstone to his work. The Broken Road assures that the trilogy will find its place among the great writings of the 20th century: a long, erudite love letter to the people and landscapes of Mitteleuropa between the two wars, a wondrous record of a brilliant young man’s youth well spent traversing and documenting these vanished worlds. There is high nostalgia not only for the ghosts of the Hapsburg, but also dreamy invocation of the legacy of Byzantium, darkened by omens of the great war to come. So a document of myriad vanished worlds, worlds vanished by the disasters of history, and Paddy’s own temps perdu.
Along the Rumanian Danube and down through Bulgaria, an extended stay with the charming Nadjeda in Sofia (I picture a swarthy Anna Karina, but that might be my own desires intruding) and across the Wallachian Plain and back north into Rumania for an extended stay in Bucharest among a group of bright young Francophile socialites (including a microportrait of Arthur Rubinstein entertaining an all-night party with impressions and improvisations) (a great number of these bright lights, sadly, were to be extinguished in the coming years- ”Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings…”) and then south again along the craggy Black Sea coast amid hoary cliff-edged forests and fields, this span of the Trudge tends toward a pastoral, bucolic feel, necessarily of course because of the sparsely populated landscape covered. But this allows the space and opportunity for luxurious, languorous, verbose descriptions of rolling hills, fields, rocky edifices, rivers and streams, rapturous bursts of flora, wildlife (storks are a Fermor specialty, and there is a multi-page, brilliant description of the progress of an enormous flock crossing a Bulgarian range), exact descriptions of tiny villages stumbled upon, brief acquaintances with goatherds and shepherds, a variety of peasants and shop and innkeepers, and always, of course, Paddy’s fascination with words, names, and place-names, his attempt to chronicle and take hold of multifarious tongues and dialects encountered, to pursue their folklore, to unfold the history of each and every locale, to enumerate the particularities of costume, dress, and food, to find the resonant past emanating through the present. There are countless episodes of sensitive recording, each attaining a kind of bewitchment of accumulated detail. To pick one out almost at random from my quick recollection, I think of an oneiric night under quicksilver stars and a staggeringly large full moon, spent in a sepulchral abandoned mosque, Paddy’s only company a stray dog, beside the glinting brightblack thread of a murmuring rivulet. Fermor’s descriptive powers are unparalleled, as evocative and ineffably graceful as can be. An early winter walk along the Black Sea coast yields to introspection:
So with The Broken Road we have the final word from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Byronic chronicler of Europe in the lee between the great wars, a last representative of the old guard of European Romantic intellectuals. The book ends fittingly, with an urging toward the future man that was to come to write these volumes we hold, that we can thankfully and respectfully turn open and begin Paddy’s adventures again, again, again…
Along the Rumanian Danube and down through Bulgaria, an extended stay with the charming Nadjeda in Sofia (I picture a swarthy Anna Karina, but that might be my own desires intruding) and across the Wallachian Plain and back north into Rumania for an extended stay in Bucharest among a group of bright young Francophile socialites (including a microportrait of Arthur Rubinstein entertaining an all-night party with impressions and improvisations) (a great number of these bright lights, sadly, were to be extinguished in the coming years- ”Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings…”) and then south again along the craggy Black Sea coast amid hoary cliff-edged forests and fields, this span of the Trudge tends toward a pastoral, bucolic feel, necessarily of course because of the sparsely populated landscape covered. But this allows the space and opportunity for luxurious, languorous, verbose descriptions of rolling hills, fields, rocky edifices, rivers and streams, rapturous bursts of flora, wildlife (storks are a Fermor specialty, and there is a multi-page, brilliant description of the progress of an enormous flock crossing a Bulgarian range), exact descriptions of tiny villages stumbled upon, brief acquaintances with goatherds and shepherds, a variety of peasants and shop and innkeepers, and always, of course, Paddy’s fascination with words, names, and place-names, his attempt to chronicle and take hold of multifarious tongues and dialects encountered, to pursue their folklore, to unfold the history of each and every locale, to enumerate the particularities of costume, dress, and food, to find the resonant past emanating through the present. There are countless episodes of sensitive recording, each attaining a kind of bewitchment of accumulated detail. To pick one out almost at random from my quick recollection, I think of an oneiric night under quicksilver stars and a staggeringly large full moon, spent in a sepulchral abandoned mosque, Paddy’s only company a stray dog, beside the glinting brightblack thread of a murmuring rivulet. Fermor’s descriptive powers are unparalleled, as evocative and ineffably graceful as can be. An early winter walk along the Black Sea coast yields to introspection:
”...that freezing razor-clarity which had seemed to presage snow relaxed into milder sunshine, wandering cumulus and light intermittent rain as gentle as the quality of mercy. There was something consoling about this soft unfolding landscape, the low hovering glint of the sierras, and the sea ruffling under the wind. Sunlight and rain alternated, and often the two of them together in that union, propitious to rainbows, which is known in some places as a fox’s wedding. Occasionally the scene would dissolve in vapour. The desertion of this winter world held a seldom-failing ravishment, a stilling of the nerves and a smoothing-out of mind. If my head were a small sun, and my glance its ray, how many miles would it have to travel through the veils that the sky suspended, before throwing more than the most unconvincing of watery shadows? Winter serenity, the peace of hibernation descended, when ideas and inspiration fall with the quietness of dew.”
So with The Broken Road we have the final word from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Byronic chronicler of Europe in the lee between the great wars, a last representative of the old guard of European Romantic intellectuals. The book ends fittingly, with an urging toward the future man that was to come to write these volumes we hold, that we can thankfully and respectfully turn open and begin Paddy’s adventures again, again, again…
”Later I could hear the deep plainsong chants, and strange Orthodox antiphony and, with the last streaks of daylight fading behind the cupolas and the red and white masonry of the chapel, I felt suddenly terribly sad. It was quite dark soon, with just the sombre outline of the mountain discernible. At such times I nearly always remember England, and London and the hooting of cars in Piccadilly, or soft English fields which (after a long absence) come so blessed in memory.”
May 6, 2020
The bravura passage we miss is a description of Istanbul – a capriccio of Constantinople's ruins...I like to imagine him taken up by the trilogy's culminating noctambulistic smart set, the highest-spirited and most sensuously erudite of the entire journey. After a day lazing in the host's library, hungover yet casually assimilating the corpus of orientalisme, especially relishing Gautier's and Nerval's accounts of the city, he joins and exhorts whiskey-sprung, lantern-lit hijinks in the spooky corridors and vast vaulted magazines of the ruinous seaward walls. He drinks raki with boatmen and learns their songs. Watches a yalı burn to the ground. Dines standing at a fish vendor, loiters on the Galata Bridge, leans from the rails as night falls, entranced by the ferry traffic, and Süleymaniye silhouetted on its hill. And I imagine the purple patch he might have based on that unearthed stretch of mosaic pavement – a mythological bestiary, griffons, centaurs, mixed with touching realistic scenes of hunting and husbandry – that once linked the ruined Seaside Palace to the unreachably buried Great Palace (it's under the Blue Mosque). Or the prose poem he might have made of the church of the Holy Savior in Chora, the jewel of Byzantine churches, its interior a glorious mosaic cinema of the genealogy, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ; it was the repository of the icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, which monks carried along the Land Walls during the final siege, to inspirit defenders. Neither the pavement nor the church had been excavated in 1935 – but this was a flight of fancy anyway.
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March 21, 2014
When I heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor's death three years ago, I felt a sense of loss -- not only because "Paddy" was the greatest travel writer of our time -- but because now he would never finish the trilogy that began with The Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Fortunately, I was wrong. His friends Colin Thubron (no mean travel writer himself) and Artemis Cooper took Paddy's notes and came up with The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos which continued the author's trek from the hook of Holland to Constantinople, mostly on foot.
Curiously, although Fermor made it to Constantinople, there is a curious silence about his experiences there. Somehow, he got the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople to write him a letter of introduction to the monks of Mount Athos in Greece. After spending a few weeks in the Turkish city, he left for Mount Athos in the middle of winter, where he spent several weeks trudging from one monastery to the other.
I had feared that, because of Thubron and Cooper's editorship, that the style would be all wrong -- and Paddy Fermor was, if anything, a superb stylist. Every once in a while, however, as if straight from the Gates of Paradise, I would read one of Fermor's enchanted passages, such as this description of what he saw in Romanian monasteries:
I think that The Broken Road will readily find its place among Fermor's other great works about his epic journey and his travels throughout Greece (Mani and Roumeli). Soon, I will have finished all his work and will have to start over. Something to look forward to!
Curiously, although Fermor made it to Constantinople, there is a curious silence about his experiences there. Somehow, he got the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople to write him a letter of introduction to the monks of Mount Athos in Greece. After spending a few weeks in the Turkish city, he left for Mount Athos in the middle of winter, where he spent several weeks trudging from one monastery to the other.
I had feared that, because of Thubron and Cooper's editorship, that the style would be all wrong -- and Paddy Fermor was, if anything, a superb stylist. Every once in a while, however, as if straight from the Gates of Paradise, I would read one of Fermor's enchanted passages, such as this description of what he saw in Romanian monasteries:
I was fascinated, and slightly obsessed, by these voivodes and boyars as they appeared in frescoes on the walls of the monasteries they were always piously founding -- crowned and bearded figures holding up a miniature painted facsimile of the church itself, with their princesses upholding its other corner, each with a line of brocaded, kneeling sons and daughters receding in hierarchical pyramids behind them. Still more fascinating, later portraits,hanging in the houses of their descendants ... showed great boyars of the princely divans, men who bore phenomenal titles, most of them of Byzantine origin, some of them Slav: Great Bans of Craiova, Domnitzas, Bayzadeas, Grant Logothetes, hospodars, swordbearers and cupbearers, all dressed in amazing robes with enormous globular headdresses or high fur hats with diamond-clasped plumes, festooned with necklaces, and jewel-crusted dagger hilts.Please let me swoon for a moment after this gemlike description of the Eastern Church as seen by a young man from England who had a thing for the East.
I think that The Broken Road will readily find its place among Fermor's other great works about his epic journey and his travels throughout Greece (Mani and Roumeli). Soon, I will have finished all his work and will have to start over. Something to look forward to!
July 4, 2020
Contains Spoilers Review is of the 2013, John Murray paperback edition
Since my first exposure to Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor he has been my # 1 candidate for the title The Worlds Most Interesting Man. Allow for his one attempt at a novel, he is a story teller. More than that he did one of those things we wish we could do and, in a time, and place when it was still possible to do it. Starting at age 18 he walked Europe, north to south, on to Constantinople and then to Greece. He began at age 18 during the last years of peace before World War II, and continued for over two years. He father sent him a bare minimum amount of money (5 Pounds Sterling) each month and he either made due or made friends. The Broken Road is the end of his travel trilogy.
The Broken Road is an unfinished manuscript. The editors cobbled it together from earlier drafts. In this volume it is also detailed that Paddy’s trilogy was begun decades after the trip and was made from memory, a badly worn map and the one surviving notebook. More so than either of the two earlier books we are reading what he was writing on the road. I found it satisfying that the personality of an ever curious, interested in everyone and everything Patrick is consistent with the earlier volumes. What is missing are the histories that usually accompanied his earlier travel stops. My suspicion is that the first two books include some well after the fact research.
The Broken Road ends as he travels from monastery to monastery around Mt. Athos in Greece. This could have been painfully repetitious, but his notes include so much about the people and personality of each community that he once again proves that by being interested in others he can be interesting. That this is the end of a wonderful travel adventure would be a bitter sweet moment except that there are more Fermor books, I will read them.
Since my first exposure to Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor he has been my # 1 candidate for the title The Worlds Most Interesting Man. Allow for his one attempt at a novel, he is a story teller. More than that he did one of those things we wish we could do and, in a time, and place when it was still possible to do it. Starting at age 18 he walked Europe, north to south, on to Constantinople and then to Greece. He began at age 18 during the last years of peace before World War II, and continued for over two years. He father sent him a bare minimum amount of money (5 Pounds Sterling) each month and he either made due or made friends. The Broken Road is the end of his travel trilogy.
The Broken Road is an unfinished manuscript. The editors cobbled it together from earlier drafts. In this volume it is also detailed that Paddy’s trilogy was begun decades after the trip and was made from memory, a badly worn map and the one surviving notebook. More so than either of the two earlier books we are reading what he was writing on the road. I found it satisfying that the personality of an ever curious, interested in everyone and everything Patrick is consistent with the earlier volumes. What is missing are the histories that usually accompanied his earlier travel stops. My suspicion is that the first two books include some well after the fact research.
The Broken Road ends as he travels from monastery to monastery around Mt. Athos in Greece. This could have been painfully repetitious, but his notes include so much about the people and personality of each community that he once again proves that by being interested in others he can be interesting. That this is the end of a wonderful travel adventure would be a bitter sweet moment except that there are more Fermor books, I will read them.
November 26, 2022
"There is something poignant about incomplete masterpieces. The pair of books that preceded the present volume - A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water -- remain the magnificient two thirds of an unfinished trilogy. They are unique among twentieth-century travel books. Forty and fifty years after their event, their journey -- and its prodigious feat of recall -- reads like the dream odyssey of every footloose student."
And that is the beautiful introduction to this third book in the trilogy, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, documenting the remarkable travels of eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor as he set out from the Hook of Holland in 1933 to walk to Constantinople. What is so compelling about Paddy's story is that although this journey was taken as a young man, it was almost fifty years before he published the first book of the trilogy, A Time of Gifts followed by Between the Woods and the Water. It is documented in this book how bad luck dogged his notes and sketches throughout the first legs of his journey because of theft or just the vagaries of the beginning of the war with the safekeeping of his journals often behind the Iron Curtain and lost to him.
This book was basically cobbled together from his diaries and notes by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, and travel writer, Colin Thubron. Without knowing all the reasons, Patrick Leigh Fermor, had struggled with the final book in this trilogy and while he had worked on it, when he died in his nineties in 2011, it was still unfinished. Although the intention and ultimate goal of the journey was to end his magnificent journey in Constantinople, his only writings on the city were diary jottings with no mention of the Byzantine or Ottoman splendor. The authors maintain that it was his intention to end his travels in Greece's heartland, the monastic state of Mount Athos. The book concludes with his diary entries from January and February 1935. As one who has always been fascinated with the monastic life, this was a good finish although perhaps not the intended goal. just a taste of his experience:
"The church was typically Byzantine, with a densely worked gold altar screen, the walls a mass of frescoes, all the figures having gilded haloes, shining among the fading paint and plaster. Candles twinkled in the half-dark with gold and silver ikons, before which the monks prostrated themselves, crossed and kissed, on entering the church. It was vespers, and I leant in my carved stall among the black-and-white bearded and veiled monks all with their elbows crooked on the armpit-high arms of their miserere seats. The office was all in plainsong, booming, mystical chanting, interespersed with the clang of censers, the blue smoke curling up through the colored but fading sunbeams. All the churches here have the same reek of old incense, burnt oil, and stale beeswax. Hundreds of little brass sanctuary lamps dangled from the scarcely discernible vaults overhead, and huge elaborate candelabra. To me there is something at once marvelously mystical, and a bit sinister and disturbing about the Orthodox liturgy."
February 4, 2021
I know I have read an excellent story when the tale comes to an end and I'm longing for more, and am sad that I will no longer be able to share in the author's world. This is especially the case when the story is true as is the case with Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor's adventure trekking across Europe. The Broken Road is the final volume of three recording his early adult adventure. Ironically it was the first of the trip to be captured in manuscript form, but the last to reach print towards the end of his life.
The Broken Road is a bit different from its preceding volumes. The majority of the book is written in a similar style to its predecessors with a running narrative of his encounters and descriptions of the environment interspersed with historical descriptions of the land. The final leg of his trip was never converted to manuscript form. The story ends in Bulgaria in the middle of a sentence - literally - but that is not the end of the book.
The remainder of the book is a transcription of his travel diary. The diary picks up after he had spent time in Constantinople and left for Greece. There is just over 30 days captured in these pages of his time at Mt. Athos spending time with many of the monasteries describing the monks he met, food he ate (much of it not to his liking), the winter weather including more than a little snow, and the beautiful environs of that special place. In this section of the book gone are the long historical diatribes that where inserted in his previous writings. We get pure writing of the daily events, which are different in style, yet just as engaging as his previous efforts.
I will miss traveling with Paddy to his Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Yet I am fortunate in that I can always travel with him again to the Iron Gates along the Danube, or the Transylvanian Alps, and walk the streets of pre-war Vienna. Reading and listening to Mr. Fermor's story is almost like reading a fantasy novel his world so different from ours today.
The Broken Road is a bit different from its preceding volumes. The majority of the book is written in a similar style to its predecessors with a running narrative of his encounters and descriptions of the environment interspersed with historical descriptions of the land. The final leg of his trip was never converted to manuscript form. The story ends in Bulgaria in the middle of a sentence - literally - but that is not the end of the book.
The remainder of the book is a transcription of his travel diary. The diary picks up after he had spent time in Constantinople and left for Greece. There is just over 30 days captured in these pages of his time at Mt. Athos spending time with many of the monasteries describing the monks he met, food he ate (much of it not to his liking), the winter weather including more than a little snow, and the beautiful environs of that special place. In this section of the book gone are the long historical diatribes that where inserted in his previous writings. We get pure writing of the daily events, which are different in style, yet just as engaging as his previous efforts.
I will miss traveling with Paddy to his Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Yet I am fortunate in that I can always travel with him again to the Iron Gates along the Danube, or the Transylvanian Alps, and walk the streets of pre-war Vienna. Reading and listening to Mr. Fermor's story is almost like reading a fantasy novel his world so different from ours today.
June 8, 2015
I was expecting the last book in our hero's great walk to be not as exciting as his previous tomes. In fact this was as riveting as any previous and I put that down to a need by me as the reader, to not only know what was happening next but again be dragged into the beautiful and romantic text. When we get cut of at mid sentence short of the intended target and then get only few diary excerpts of the intended destination I was taken aback. But, in what can be but a credit to the publishers, the day was saved by PLF's diary of his time at Mount Athos. Fascinating reading. What a wonderful trilogy by a truly remarkable individual.
May 17, 2015
A wonderfully interesting compilation of Fermor's carefully crafted memoir of this last section of his great walk, together with extracts from one of his surviving daily journals and introduced brilliantly by editors Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.
I preferred his journal entries: more direct, much less overwriting and capturing moments with shining intensity. Perhaps it is that these cover the time when he was visiting monasteries on Mount Athos, where the detailed record builds to give an unforgettable impression of the atmosphere and life in the ancient monasteries of the peninsula. I hadn't realized that there are multiple monasteries, and am immensely grateful that I could look them up by name on the web to see what they actually look like.
http://www.inathos.gr/athos/en/
Several weeks later: moving from Fermor to Gerald Brenan writing on his years living in southern Spain in the 1920s I have downgraded this to a 4 star. Brenan is the five star choice for me - much more information on the life of the area he writes about, and writing beautifully without the overblown passages of Fermor's work.
I preferred his journal entries: more direct, much less overwriting and capturing moments with shining intensity. Perhaps it is that these cover the time when he was visiting monasteries on Mount Athos, where the detailed record builds to give an unforgettable impression of the atmosphere and life in the ancient monasteries of the peninsula. I hadn't realized that there are multiple monasteries, and am immensely grateful that I could look them up by name on the web to see what they actually look like.
http://www.inathos.gr/athos/en/
Several weeks later: moving from Fermor to Gerald Brenan writing on his years living in southern Spain in the 1920s I have downgraded this to a 4 star. Brenan is the five star choice for me - much more information on the life of the area he writes about, and writing beautifully without the overblown passages of Fermor's work.
May 21, 2020
The necklace of bright lights dwindled in the distance with its freight of runaway lovers, cabaret girls, Knights of Malta, vamps, acrobats, smugglers, papal nuncios, private detectives, lecturers in the future of the novel, millionaires, arms manufacturers, irrigation experts and spies, leaving a mournful silence in the thirsty Rumelian plateau.
Such were Paddy Fermor's impressions of seeing the Orient Express speeding by, his own accomplishment obscured by his unkept experience. This is the incomplete section of the trilogy that Fermor hadn't finished before he died. I also think the writing is incredible, both poetic and muscular. He may have slept in too often during this last leg of the trek but his eye was always hungry for detail. He hoofs between Bulgaria and Romania before finally making his Turkish destination, which is largely left unsaid. He dwells then on efforts in Greece, which includes two harrowing accounts of first losing his flashlight while hiking on the shore and in the second he finds himself lost and slashes away at the brush while on his belly. I can relate to such episodes: there's always at least one where I'm concerned. There are political excursions and the world's most annoying seatmate and much like the horror of It Follows (2014) it is impossible to shake until a crime is committed.
The narrative appeared more humble in this raw form. there was considerable despair and doubt. There was also considerable reading. His 24 reading of Dostoevsky was one for the ages and how suitable companions both Lord Byron and Aldous Huxley proved.
Such were Paddy Fermor's impressions of seeing the Orient Express speeding by, his own accomplishment obscured by his unkept experience. This is the incomplete section of the trilogy that Fermor hadn't finished before he died. I also think the writing is incredible, both poetic and muscular. He may have slept in too often during this last leg of the trek but his eye was always hungry for detail. He hoofs between Bulgaria and Romania before finally making his Turkish destination, which is largely left unsaid. He dwells then on efforts in Greece, which includes two harrowing accounts of first losing his flashlight while hiking on the shore and in the second he finds himself lost and slashes away at the brush while on his belly. I can relate to such episodes: there's always at least one where I'm concerned. There are political excursions and the world's most annoying seatmate and much like the horror of It Follows (2014) it is impossible to shake until a crime is committed.
The narrative appeared more humble in this raw form. there was considerable despair and doubt. There was also considerable reading. His 24 reading of Dostoevsky was one for the ages and how suitable companions both Lord Byron and Aldous Huxley proved.
February 21, 2023
“The Broken Journey” is the third volume published posthumously of Patrick Fermor’s trilogy relating his journey from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Proceeding primarily on foot Fermor set out on 10 December in 1933. Fermor’s travels through Holland, Germany, Hungary and Romania are covered in the first two books of the trilogy.
“The Broken Journey” begins on 14 August 1934 when Fermor is on a boat in the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube, about to leave Rumania and enter Bulgaria. Fermor treats the reader to a fabulous account of his trek through Bulgaria. Fermor will arrive in Constantinople on 1 January 1935 but unfortunately, his surviving draft contains only six very lacklustre pages on this city with no descriptions of any of its remarkable sites (such as the Hagia Sophia or the Topkapi Palace).
To compensate for this lack of climax, the editors decided to include Fermor’s diary of his visit to Mount Athos which begins on 24 January 1935 and runs to 18 February 1935. This proved to be an inspired choice as the 113 pages of the diary absolutely sparkle providing a strong climax to Fermor’s epic tale. At the same time, the inclusion of the Mount Athos diary contributes to the overall structure of the trilogy.
In the first book, “A Time of Gifts”, Fermor writes brilliantly in a style similar to Ruskin about the great art of Western Europe. In other places he evokes the glories of German romanticism. His descriptions of landscapes remind one of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. His celebration of hiking has the spirt of Goethe’s “Wanderer's Nightsong" ("Der du von dem Himmel bist").
The second book “Between the Woods and the Water” is a powerful elegy for the aristocratic culture of Romania and Hungary which had been destroyed by the Treaty of Trianon which came at the end of World War I.
“The Broken Journey” pays homage to the peasant folk culture of Bulgaria and of the Slavic countries in general. The section on Mount Athos provides a superb reflection on Orthodox Christianity and monasticism.
Marcel Proust and Lord Byron are mentioned frequently in all three books. The trilogy as a whole is profoundly Proustian in that friendship is celebrated at every turn. Byron is also present throughout the the three books. The first reason is that Fermor chooses to to describe his journey in a way that reminders the reader of Childe Harald. Byron becomes even more prominent in “The Broken Journey” because as Fermor approaches the end of his trek he starts to meet Greeks who want to express their gratitude to an Englishman for Byron’s contribution to Greece’s war of independence.
I found Fermor’s trilogy to be quite sublime like Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” or Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. It could just as easily be argued that all three works are completely silly as on a basic level travel books are quite absurd.
“The Broken Journey” begins on 14 August 1934 when Fermor is on a boat in the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube, about to leave Rumania and enter Bulgaria. Fermor treats the reader to a fabulous account of his trek through Bulgaria. Fermor will arrive in Constantinople on 1 January 1935 but unfortunately, his surviving draft contains only six very lacklustre pages on this city with no descriptions of any of its remarkable sites (such as the Hagia Sophia or the Topkapi Palace).
To compensate for this lack of climax, the editors decided to include Fermor’s diary of his visit to Mount Athos which begins on 24 January 1935 and runs to 18 February 1935. This proved to be an inspired choice as the 113 pages of the diary absolutely sparkle providing a strong climax to Fermor’s epic tale. At the same time, the inclusion of the Mount Athos diary contributes to the overall structure of the trilogy.
In the first book, “A Time of Gifts”, Fermor writes brilliantly in a style similar to Ruskin about the great art of Western Europe. In other places he evokes the glories of German romanticism. His descriptions of landscapes remind one of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. His celebration of hiking has the spirt of Goethe’s “Wanderer's Nightsong" ("Der du von dem Himmel bist").
The second book “Between the Woods and the Water” is a powerful elegy for the aristocratic culture of Romania and Hungary which had been destroyed by the Treaty of Trianon which came at the end of World War I.
“The Broken Journey” pays homage to the peasant folk culture of Bulgaria and of the Slavic countries in general. The section on Mount Athos provides a superb reflection on Orthodox Christianity and monasticism.
Marcel Proust and Lord Byron are mentioned frequently in all three books. The trilogy as a whole is profoundly Proustian in that friendship is celebrated at every turn. Byron is also present throughout the the three books. The first reason is that Fermor chooses to to describe his journey in a way that reminders the reader of Childe Harald. Byron becomes even more prominent in “The Broken Journey” because as Fermor approaches the end of his trek he starts to meet Greeks who want to express their gratitude to an Englishman for Byron’s contribution to Greece’s war of independence.
I found Fermor’s trilogy to be quite sublime like Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” or Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. It could just as easily be argued that all three works are completely silly as on a basic level travel books are quite absurd.
August 7, 2015
It is not often that you encounter trilogies outside fiction, but this book is the final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey from the Hook of Holland to the exotic Constantinople. He begun the walk in 1933, just shy of his 18th birthday, but never actually got around to writing the first book in the 1970’s and the second volume in the mid 1980’s. He had started on the manuscript for this, the final book, but sadly died before it could be completed. Thankfully Artemis Cooper, friend and biographer, and the travel writer, Colin Thubron have been able to complete it from his notes.
The Europe of the 1930’s was very different to what we find today, northern Europe had been shattered by the first world war, but very little had changed in southern Europe when Fermor walked through it. By the end of the decade, this land would also be affected by the next war that would sweep across Europe.
I don’t know if it is his youth, bonhomie or gift for languages, but what comes across is his natural ability to get along with people from all levels of society, moving from palaces to shepherds huts, hovels to seedy hotels he observes the people and the places with a fresh and untainted eye. His engagement with the people and not just be an observer is what makes this book special too. He is the recipient of the local’s generosity too, from shelter and food and invitations to the parties and celebrations, or just the time spent smoking in others company. He also manages to survive on the budget of £1 a week too, an amount today that wouldn’t even get you change from an item out of a vending machine.
The final section is taken from his notes on his visit to Mount Athos. It is a Greek peninsula which is home to a number of orthodox monasteries. It is a time for reflection, and the monks are generous with their time, food and conversation with him.
Cooper and Thubron claim that the draft that they picked up and edited for publication has ‘scarcely a phrase that is not his’. That may or may not be the case, as it has the heart of a Fermor book, but compared to the first two volumes, it doesn’t quite have the soul. This is not entirely their fault as they are both fine authors; Thubron is one of my favourite travel writers. But the long process that Fermor took, along with the time gap between the events and the writing may not have helped.
That said, I am glad that they have made the effort to bring this to publication, because any book by Fermor is worth reading, and this is a worthwhile conclusion to his ‘great trudge’ across Europe.
The Europe of the 1930’s was very different to what we find today, northern Europe had been shattered by the first world war, but very little had changed in southern Europe when Fermor walked through it. By the end of the decade, this land would also be affected by the next war that would sweep across Europe.
I don’t know if it is his youth, bonhomie or gift for languages, but what comes across is his natural ability to get along with people from all levels of society, moving from palaces to shepherds huts, hovels to seedy hotels he observes the people and the places with a fresh and untainted eye. His engagement with the people and not just be an observer is what makes this book special too. He is the recipient of the local’s generosity too, from shelter and food and invitations to the parties and celebrations, or just the time spent smoking in others company. He also manages to survive on the budget of £1 a week too, an amount today that wouldn’t even get you change from an item out of a vending machine.
The final section is taken from his notes on his visit to Mount Athos. It is a Greek peninsula which is home to a number of orthodox monasteries. It is a time for reflection, and the monks are generous with their time, food and conversation with him.
Cooper and Thubron claim that the draft that they picked up and edited for publication has ‘scarcely a phrase that is not his’. That may or may not be the case, as it has the heart of a Fermor book, but compared to the first two volumes, it doesn’t quite have the soul. This is not entirely their fault as they are both fine authors; Thubron is one of my favourite travel writers. But the long process that Fermor took, along with the time gap between the events and the writing may not have helped.
That said, I am glad that they have made the effort to bring this to publication, because any book by Fermor is worth reading, and this is a worthwhile conclusion to his ‘great trudge’ across Europe.
December 30, 2021
"I Wonder When I Shall Be Here Again?"
An unassailable enigma... no other words for this posthumous conclusion to Patrick Fermor's Journey across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople. Like his life, its the ending that is silent. He never got the events that occurred in Constantinople down on paper. The book is deeply melancholic at times, and even bittersweet, knowing as you do that these are words with which he could never make peace before his death. This third book was completed using his incomplete manuscript and his journals. But, in the space between arriving at Constantinople and departing there for Mount Athos in Greece, his trail of thoughts languish. It is only to be imagined how he felt about the city.
Along the way in his long journey, he spoke of the wildlife, birds, the people, the architecture, the castles, etc. In Bucharest, we get a foretaste of his response to a large city. He spoke of the gloom of the plains in Rumania and the fact that he went back there several times throughout the following years. So, he really enjoyed the country. Yet, it was apparent he suffered some depressing scenes around that time. At any rate... I did enjoy seeing his sparse entries at the end. And, the rest of the journey throughout this book was fascinating.
From mishap, to adventure, his journey's conclusion in Rumania and Bulgaria take up most of the book. Then, after Bucharest, he took a train back through Bulgaria along the Black Sea to Varna. This section was quite enjoyable. The final section about his pilgrimage to Mount Athos was a bit drier, with a few more mishaps. But, all in all it was a fascinating conclusion to a spectacularly memorable journey.
I read this from a hardback edition, and will probably find myself rereading passages in the years to come. As usual, I often researchd many of the locations mentioned, as well as the books and people. I highly recommend his journey in trilogy to anyone interested in European history and geography, and travel. Mr. Fermor's writing is incomparable.
An unassailable enigma... no other words for this posthumous conclusion to Patrick Fermor's Journey across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople. Like his life, its the ending that is silent. He never got the events that occurred in Constantinople down on paper. The book is deeply melancholic at times, and even bittersweet, knowing as you do that these are words with which he could never make peace before his death. This third book was completed using his incomplete manuscript and his journals. But, in the space between arriving at Constantinople and departing there for Mount Athos in Greece, his trail of thoughts languish. It is only to be imagined how he felt about the city.
Along the way in his long journey, he spoke of the wildlife, birds, the people, the architecture, the castles, etc. In Bucharest, we get a foretaste of his response to a large city. He spoke of the gloom of the plains in Rumania and the fact that he went back there several times throughout the following years. So, he really enjoyed the country. Yet, it was apparent he suffered some depressing scenes around that time. At any rate... I did enjoy seeing his sparse entries at the end. And, the rest of the journey throughout this book was fascinating.
From mishap, to adventure, his journey's conclusion in Rumania and Bulgaria take up most of the book. Then, after Bucharest, he took a train back through Bulgaria along the Black Sea to Varna. This section was quite enjoyable. The final section about his pilgrimage to Mount Athos was a bit drier, with a few more mishaps. But, all in all it was a fascinating conclusion to a spectacularly memorable journey.
I read this from a hardback edition, and will probably find myself rereading passages in the years to come. As usual, I often researchd many of the locations mentioned, as well as the books and people. I highly recommend his journey in trilogy to anyone interested in European history and geography, and travel. Mr. Fermor's writing is incomparable.
May 27, 2015
Not as beautiful as the first two volumes, which Fermor had written in full and lovingly remembered detail. This book has been pulled together from some earlier work he had done on this last part of the journey to Istanbul, but then put aside, breaking off in mid sentence. The last 100 pages or so are from his diary describing his time on Mount Athos in Greece, which was interesting to read but were the notes of a very young man written at the time, rather than the polished memories of the mature man.
The early part of the book still contains wonderful passages. My favourite is this, which gives a good idea of his style:
"A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the lane, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy beast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing beyond, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and at last, a furlong away slowing pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us."
(Page 62-3 of the ePub version - the passage I referred to in my progress report, though somehow the page numbering changed.)
Definitely worth reading, but as the last part of the trilogy rather than as a stand-alone book.
The early part of the book still contains wonderful passages. My favourite is this, which gives a good idea of his style:
"A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the lane, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy beast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing beyond, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and at last, a furlong away slowing pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us."
(Page 62-3 of the ePub version - the passage I referred to in my progress report, though somehow the page numbering changed.)
Definitely worth reading, but as the last part of the trilogy rather than as a stand-alone book.
November 13, 2013
Some books are so beautiful that one's reading pace is slowed to make the pleasure last the longer. One such book, The Broken Road, stands alone from the rest of Patrick Leigh Fermor's work, and Paddy hesitated to finish it not slowed by pleasure but by the enormity of working with seven decades of memory. Paddy's other work I have read often, at least twice, given to pausing by the sheer density of the material. This book is different. The scholarship, the elegant turn of phrase, the crafted picture be it of scene or character, yes all is here as always, but now includes so much of Paddy that, although it may be unintentional both on the part of Paddy and of his brilliant editors, Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron, the reader is 'taken up' (to use Paddy's own phrase) by the author to walk each step with him.
One senses the excitement of the contrasting cities of architectural elegance or aged and strange curiosities, the challenge of untamed plains and glorious mountains, the beauty of a Europe pre-WW2, pre-communist restrictions, then one feels the depression of storms and soggy valleys, challenging mountain passes and a billet in a peasant's hovel. The chance encounter of Paddy, Greek fishermen and Bulgarian shepherds and the ensuing party and dancing in a vast cave is a classic. This is Europe but one few have experienced, and although I could say happily history has left a Rumania and Bulgaria in part still recognisable from PLF's talented description it is in reality a world which was thought vanished and which lives again through these pages.
The book is in two distinct parts, the larger part drawn PLF's memories, although he had been reunited with his Green Diary and he had already written "A Youthful Journey", the building blocks for The Broken Road, they were never collated together by the author or by his editors. The raison d'ȇtre for the walk to reach Constantinople (never Istanbul) from the Hook of Holland was achieved but curiously Paddy's thoughts on reaching his goal were scarcely recorded. The epilogue, so to speak, is a word for word inclusion of a diary written as he walked between monasteries on Mount Athos in the depths of winter. This last masterpiece has less descriptive prose, undoubtedly that would have been achieved had Paddy had the strength to complete the work to his satisfaction; as a woman I would have loved more intricate detail on the frescoes and architecture of the monasteries; but given this diary was never intended for publication the chapter is a gem.
One senses the excitement of the contrasting cities of architectural elegance or aged and strange curiosities, the challenge of untamed plains and glorious mountains, the beauty of a Europe pre-WW2, pre-communist restrictions, then one feels the depression of storms and soggy valleys, challenging mountain passes and a billet in a peasant's hovel. The chance encounter of Paddy, Greek fishermen and Bulgarian shepherds and the ensuing party and dancing in a vast cave is a classic. This is Europe but one few have experienced, and although I could say happily history has left a Rumania and Bulgaria in part still recognisable from PLF's talented description it is in reality a world which was thought vanished and which lives again through these pages.
The book is in two distinct parts, the larger part drawn PLF's memories, although he had been reunited with his Green Diary and he had already written "A Youthful Journey", the building blocks for The Broken Road, they were never collated together by the author or by his editors. The raison d'ȇtre for the walk to reach Constantinople (never Istanbul) from the Hook of Holland was achieved but curiously Paddy's thoughts on reaching his goal were scarcely recorded. The epilogue, so to speak, is a word for word inclusion of a diary written as he walked between monasteries on Mount Athos in the depths of winter. This last masterpiece has less descriptive prose, undoubtedly that would have been achieved had Paddy had the strength to complete the work to his satisfaction; as a woman I would have loved more intricate detail on the frescoes and architecture of the monasteries; but given this diary was never intended for publication the chapter is a gem.
December 2, 2015
And so we reach the end: Patrick Leigh Fermor, fetching up at the British Consulate at Burgas, a stone's throw away from his stated goal of Constantinople, reeking of pastourma (basically, highly spiced camel jerky), the part of his journey most "amply covered in the intermittent journal so strangely recovered, two and a half decades after I had lost it and long after embarking on this book."; and here the narrative ends, in mid-sentence, as the nonagenarian Leigh Fermor finally runs out of stamina, many decades later, on his Greek island. Apparently, the surviving journal of his time in Istanbul was cursory; perhaps the end of his journey was anticlimactic. Appended to this fragment is the journal he kept of the three or so weeks he spent visiting the various monasteries of Mount Athos, in which we get a fascinating glimpse of the 19 year old Leigh Fermor, unredacted by his older, more experienced self.
The main fragment, which Leigh Fermor was going to title "A Youthful Journey", and which was the first part of his travels which he started to cobble together in book form, takes him through western Bulgaria, on a digressive journey through the Balkan Mountains north up into Romania. He fetches up in Bucharest, where he spends a captivating time among the slightly louche, Francophile smart set of the Romanian upper crust, very different from the Hungarian gentry amongst whom he spent time in the Transylvanian part of Romania. He then proceeds south along the Euxine coast, where he has a transformative encounter in a cave shared by Bulgarian shepherds and Greek fishermen. Thus we witness the inception of his life-long affinity for the cultures of both Romania and Greece.
The main fragment, which Leigh Fermor was going to title "A Youthful Journey", and which was the first part of his travels which he started to cobble together in book form, takes him through western Bulgaria, on a digressive journey through the Balkan Mountains north up into Romania. He fetches up in Bucharest, where he spends a captivating time among the slightly louche, Francophile smart set of the Romanian upper crust, very different from the Hungarian gentry amongst whom he spent time in the Transylvanian part of Romania. He then proceeds south along the Euxine coast, where he has a transformative encounter in a cave shared by Bulgarian shepherds and Greek fishermen. Thus we witness the inception of his life-long affinity for the cultures of both Romania and Greece.
November 19, 2015
Final third of narrative of walk to Constantinople ends in mid-sentence, half-way down the Bulgarian coast. He never completed it; this copy was created from dusty notes. One can tell the point about half way though where PLF stopped revising--requiring his literary executors to print a only rough draft. Interesting--but by no means on par with volumes one and two. What's especially missing are the romances that so spiced up earlier books (though there's at least one hint). But what's especially good is the sense that PLF was the last visitor to a society long dead--plowed-under by Communism, Nazism and sometimes both.
Last fifth of book is a day-by-day diary of his visit to the "holy Mount Altos" (he repeats the phrase several times) in Greece. Apparently, he went to the famously misogynistic peninsula of monasteries directly after arriving in Istanbul on New Year's Day. Spiritual, yadi yadi--but, as for the numerous monks he meets, PLF is no more discerning than: "He is a delightful old chap, and extraordinary kind." Might be a useful description for women who, to this day, are barred from Mount Altos.
Last fifth of book is a day-by-day diary of his visit to the "holy Mount Altos" (he repeats the phrase several times) in Greece. Apparently, he went to the famously misogynistic peninsula of monasteries directly after arriving in Istanbul on New Year's Day. Spiritual, yadi yadi--but, as for the numerous monks he meets, PLF is no more discerning than: "He is a delightful old chap, and extraordinary kind." Might be a useful description for women who, to this day, are barred from Mount Altos.
January 30, 2018
Finishing Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road was a melancholy experience for me. I so enjoyed all three books of this wonderful trilogy, and of which Broken Road is the last, that I felt like I was taking leave of a dear friend. It is not just that both Leigh Fermor and the world he tramped through in the mid 1930s are irrevocably gone, it is also that I fear his mode of erudite description and gentle observation are gone too. In a review of Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters Ben Downing recently observed:
"Fortunately, Leigh Fermor did struggle, some of the time. The result is a body of prose—travel books, mostly—radiant with his brilliance and unique experience but also with his exuberance and warmth. Especially in his magnum opus, a three-volume account of walking as a teenager from Holland to Istanbul, his erudition and descriptive skill are balanced by simple likability—never, one feels, has so much riveting detail been so beautifully served up by such an irresistible person." (Wall Street Journal, 12/01/2018.)
Before my discovery of PLF I think the only travel book I had ever read was James Michener’s Iberia, in preparation for my first trip to Spain. Now I am looking to the great travel writers to see which might reside in the same league as PLF.
"Fortunately, Leigh Fermor did struggle, some of the time. The result is a body of prose—travel books, mostly—radiant with his brilliance and unique experience but also with his exuberance and warmth. Especially in his magnum opus, a three-volume account of walking as a teenager from Holland to Istanbul, his erudition and descriptive skill are balanced by simple likability—never, one feels, has so much riveting detail been so beautifully served up by such an irresistible person." (Wall Street Journal, 12/01/2018.)
Before my discovery of PLF I think the only travel book I had ever read was James Michener’s Iberia, in preparation for my first trip to Spain. Now I am looking to the great travel writers to see which might reside in the same league as PLF.
Want to read
February 14, 2018Put into context and admiringly reviewed by Daniel Mendelsohn at NYRB: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/...
"Precisely because its author didn’t have time to bring his text to its usual level of high and elaborate polish, this final work—plainer, more straightforward, less elaborate, and more frank than its predecessors—provides some intriguing retrospective insights into Leigh Fermor’s distinctive tics and mannerisms, strengths and weaknesses."
Once done with that you must read William1's review as well: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"Precisely because its author didn’t have time to bring his text to its usual level of high and elaborate polish, this final work—plainer, more straightforward, less elaborate, and more frank than its predecessors—provides some intriguing retrospective insights into Leigh Fermor’s distinctive tics and mannerisms, strengths and weaknesses."
Once done with that you must read William1's review as well: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
June 5, 2023
This is the final of Fermor’s trilogy describing his journey on foot across Europe in 1934 when he was just 18. Unfinished and published posthumously, but paradoxically I found it to be the most accessible of the three, because in fact Fermor began this in the sixties, then put his notes aside and didn’t return to start writing the first volume A Time of Gifts for well over a decade.
Here you can experience his essential joy of travel with far less of his later post-middle-aged musings on ethnic origins and the like, which I found especially tiresome in the second volume Between the Woods and the Water. The writing is simply brilliant, with an engaging way of questioning (29 years after his journey) whether he in fact remembers events the way he describes them. It’s all very fresh. Through Bulgaria and Romania with some hilarious and pithy, but also affectionate, observations on characters he meets; and on to Turkey, but he never did write about the end of his journey in Istanbul.
Instead, the editors completed this volume with Fermor’s account – directly from his diary - of a further month’s travel in Mount Athos, a Greek peninsula containing some 20 monasteries with such a loopy fear of Girl Germs that not only are women (still) prohibited from the whole region but so are all female domestic animals. Yep.
It’s not clear whether Fermor had any religious transformation there, the monasteries’ legendary hospitality and solitude seeming to be the main draw, and it is an absolute delight to read.
Fermor was working on revisions to this in his nineties, and there is evidence here and there of an old man’s impenetrable prolixity – one particular 12-page description was almost unreadable … far better, I have to say, to have left it in its original form. So 4.5 stars, deducting half a star for that!
Here you can experience his essential joy of travel with far less of his later post-middle-aged musings on ethnic origins and the like, which I found especially tiresome in the second volume Between the Woods and the Water. The writing is simply brilliant, with an engaging way of questioning (29 years after his journey) whether he in fact remembers events the way he describes them. It’s all very fresh. Through Bulgaria and Romania with some hilarious and pithy, but also affectionate, observations on characters he meets; and on to Turkey, but he never did write about the end of his journey in Istanbul.
Instead, the editors completed this volume with Fermor’s account – directly from his diary - of a further month’s travel in Mount Athos, a Greek peninsula containing some 20 monasteries with such a loopy fear of Girl Germs that not only are women (still) prohibited from the whole region but so are all female domestic animals. Yep.
It’s not clear whether Fermor had any religious transformation there, the monasteries’ legendary hospitality and solitude seeming to be the main draw, and it is an absolute delight to read.
Fermor was working on revisions to this in his nineties, and there is evidence here and there of an old man’s impenetrable prolixity – one particular 12-page description was almost unreadable … far better, I have to say, to have left it in its original form. So 4.5 stars, deducting half a star for that!
February 6, 2020
And so it ends - after reading A time of gifts, and Between the woods and the water, it was with some sadness that I finally finished this, the third and last instalment describing Fermor's 1934 walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.
Fermor famously spent many years honing the prose for this magisterial trilogy, with - almost as famously - writer's block allegedly stopping him from finishing this third and final instalment. So what we have here is a blessing, and a very interesting insight into Fermor's development as a writer.
Although The broken road is a description of the final part of Fermor's journey, most of this book was actually written well before he began the other two: Fermor was asked to write about his Bulgarian experiences for a magazine, and when he started writing, the words flowed and flowed and he soon realised he had much more than an article on hand. Fermor then decided to write the whole journey, and what we have here is this earlier writing, skilfully edited.
The difference in tone between this volume and the first two is no doubt due to it being written earlier - so it was not necessarily a case of writer's block that denied us this book while Fermor was alive, but more a case of an inability (for whatever reason) to revise what, in great part, already existed.
The broken road is fascinatingly different to the first two volumes of Fermor's travels. Written in the early 1960s, Fermor had yet to solidify how he actually wanted to write about his travels - the erudite, elegaic style of A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water is not as obvious here - there is more personal input, more questioning of how he is to write his story using just his memory and his map (having no access to any of his diaries at the time of writing), and much more included of the ups and downs of the travelling life - there is more misery and disappointment in this instalment (which might of course also be due to travelling in the colder months).
This difference however, is actually refreshing after the first two books: the reader gets more insight into Fermor's character and personality through this book than in the previous two, and gets more of an idea of what it's like to travel on foot for long distances. There are passages describing in detail the pain of a dodgy boot, the fear of getting lost in the dark, the misery of a cold wet night, and the dismay at being rejected when seeking help. These of course are balanced out by the opposite situations: wonderful days in the mountains in glorious weather, the kindness of local peasants, and Fermor's seeming natural ability to make friends that turn out to be very helpful to him in his travels.
As the book moves further on, the reader can see Fermor developing the style that stood him in such good stead for the later (earlier) volumes, with more discursions on the history of the locations through which he was travelling. The travelling itself describes a lost world of peasants and gypsies, aristocratic students, Jewish quarters, diplomatic parties and peasant hovels, all of which Fermor experiences in joyous wonder most of the time - never, it seems, with a worry about finding somewhere to eat (and drink!) and lay his head.
Most of this book describes Fermor's big detour - after travelling through Rumania, he finds Bulgaria poorer, and certainly much more Turkish in custom and population. Getting to Plovdiv - almost realising his dream of reaching Constantinople - he turns North on the advice of some new friends and re-crosses into Rumania and Bucharest, before heading to the Black Sea and travelling down to Turkey from there. Fermor's ability to be hobnobbing with Ambassadors one day, carousing with students the next and then spending the next night in a cave with shepherds and fishermen, charming all and sundry and noting everything, is what makes him such compulsive reading, and what we get more of in this third volume is a sense of Fermor's youthfulness, with it's attendant energy and wonder.
It all comes crashing to a halt on the Black Sea. Fermor's manuscript ends here, frustratingly short of his goal. Thubron and Cooper add a mere handful of pages of raw diary from Constantinople, which are frustratingly incomplete and inconsequential. The editors suggest that Fermor may have been too overwhelmed by reaching his goal to write coherently, or that he didn't actually like Constantinople much. This may be true, as shortly after his arrival he left for Greece, and the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos. The final 80 pages of this book are Fermor's diary of his month spent travelling the monasteries of the Holy Mountain: possibly spurred to go there by Robert Byron's earlier visit, he wanders from monastery to monastery, gradually falling under the spell of the life of the monks and of the Orthodox services. There are, as always with Fermor, some fine character portraits and descriptive writing.
Three years after beginning this series of books, turning the last page was saying goodbye to someone who had become my friend over the journey - something that Fermor himself did many times, often never to see his new friends again. Fortunately for me I can revisit these books often, which I will assuredly do.
Another must read from Fermor.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
Fermor famously spent many years honing the prose for this magisterial trilogy, with - almost as famously - writer's block allegedly stopping him from finishing this third and final instalment. So what we have here is a blessing, and a very interesting insight into Fermor's development as a writer.
Although The broken road is a description of the final part of Fermor's journey, most of this book was actually written well before he began the other two: Fermor was asked to write about his Bulgarian experiences for a magazine, and when he started writing, the words flowed and flowed and he soon realised he had much more than an article on hand. Fermor then decided to write the whole journey, and what we have here is this earlier writing, skilfully edited.
The difference in tone between this volume and the first two is no doubt due to it being written earlier - so it was not necessarily a case of writer's block that denied us this book while Fermor was alive, but more a case of an inability (for whatever reason) to revise what, in great part, already existed.
The broken road is fascinatingly different to the first two volumes of Fermor's travels. Written in the early 1960s, Fermor had yet to solidify how he actually wanted to write about his travels - the erudite, elegaic style of A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water is not as obvious here - there is more personal input, more questioning of how he is to write his story using just his memory and his map (having no access to any of his diaries at the time of writing), and much more included of the ups and downs of the travelling life - there is more misery and disappointment in this instalment (which might of course also be due to travelling in the colder months).
This difference however, is actually refreshing after the first two books: the reader gets more insight into Fermor's character and personality through this book than in the previous two, and gets more of an idea of what it's like to travel on foot for long distances. There are passages describing in detail the pain of a dodgy boot, the fear of getting lost in the dark, the misery of a cold wet night, and the dismay at being rejected when seeking help. These of course are balanced out by the opposite situations: wonderful days in the mountains in glorious weather, the kindness of local peasants, and Fermor's seeming natural ability to make friends that turn out to be very helpful to him in his travels.
As the book moves further on, the reader can see Fermor developing the style that stood him in such good stead for the later (earlier) volumes, with more discursions on the history of the locations through which he was travelling. The travelling itself describes a lost world of peasants and gypsies, aristocratic students, Jewish quarters, diplomatic parties and peasant hovels, all of which Fermor experiences in joyous wonder most of the time - never, it seems, with a worry about finding somewhere to eat (and drink!) and lay his head.
Most of this book describes Fermor's big detour - after travelling through Rumania, he finds Bulgaria poorer, and certainly much more Turkish in custom and population. Getting to Plovdiv - almost realising his dream of reaching Constantinople - he turns North on the advice of some new friends and re-crosses into Rumania and Bucharest, before heading to the Black Sea and travelling down to Turkey from there. Fermor's ability to be hobnobbing with Ambassadors one day, carousing with students the next and then spending the next night in a cave with shepherds and fishermen, charming all and sundry and noting everything, is what makes him such compulsive reading, and what we get more of in this third volume is a sense of Fermor's youthfulness, with it's attendant energy and wonder.
It all comes crashing to a halt on the Black Sea. Fermor's manuscript ends here, frustratingly short of his goal. Thubron and Cooper add a mere handful of pages of raw diary from Constantinople, which are frustratingly incomplete and inconsequential. The editors suggest that Fermor may have been too overwhelmed by reaching his goal to write coherently, or that he didn't actually like Constantinople much. This may be true, as shortly after his arrival he left for Greece, and the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos. The final 80 pages of this book are Fermor's diary of his month spent travelling the monasteries of the Holy Mountain: possibly spurred to go there by Robert Byron's earlier visit, he wanders from monastery to monastery, gradually falling under the spell of the life of the monks and of the Orthodox services. There are, as always with Fermor, some fine character portraits and descriptive writing.
Three years after beginning this series of books, turning the last page was saying goodbye to someone who had become my friend over the journey - something that Fermor himself did many times, often never to see his new friends again. Fortunately for me I can revisit these books often, which I will assuredly do.
Another must read from Fermor.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
December 31, 2017
It's some months now since I finished the third part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy about walking across Europe and I've been trying to get to do a review ever since. This was a re-reading, and I was prepared this time not to enjoy it as much as I did the first two books. PLF didn't finish editing it; he laid it aside years ago and left it for other people to fit together after he died. Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper have done what they could, piecing together uncorrected text written in the sixties and an original diary account of a stay on Mount Athos written immediately after PLF completed his journey to Constantinople. There's a break - the broken road - where there are no more than a few fragments of the climax to his journey, the arrival at last in Constantinople. It's frustrating for the account to end like that, after the compelling descriptions of lands traversed earlier.
Perhaps I enjoyed this third book less also because the infectious enthusiasm that carries the first two books along seems tempered by his sojourn in Bulgaria, except for his relationship with Nadejda. His friendship with Gatcho has a sour note, with instances in Gatcho's circle of what PLF describes as "irredentism" - aversion to surrounding nations, prejudice and even hatred. It was in Bulgaria that he came across, for the first time, people who expected money for giving him a lift in a cart. He also fell in with the incredibly awful Ivancho, who pursued him doggedly. The time in Bulgaria had an entirely different tone from the journey through other countries - perhaps also because there are intimations of what lay ahead for Eastern Europe in conflict and oppression. My interest picked up when PLF gave in to temptation and crossed back into Romania, which he loved (as I did in the short holiday I spent there) and there is a hugely entertaining account of him ending up in a Bucharest brothel by accident, and being looked after by the girls.
I found the Mount Athos section interesting but somewhat repetitive, as he visits several monastries one after the other, though each was different in origin and denomination. This part is the original diary account, so no editing was done to it. It feels like an add-on because Constantinople is missing.
Of course the book has many of the hallmarks of Patrick Leigh Fermor's engaging style and awe-inspriring knowledge - incidents full of life and humour, and an unusual section where he describes an episode of boredom and depression, the down-side to his dominant energy and passion. The last edited chapter, "Dancing by the Black Sea" has an almost mystical strangeness, following what was probably the lowest point in his struggle through a coastal wilderness in the depths of winter. The book felt a bit disjointed, which was only to be expected given the later editing, but of course it's worth reading, because it's Patrick Leigh Fermor, because it's still that epic walk across Europe, and perhaps it's another chance to walk a little in the shadow of this fascinating man.
Perhaps I enjoyed this third book less also because the infectious enthusiasm that carries the first two books along seems tempered by his sojourn in Bulgaria, except for his relationship with Nadejda. His friendship with Gatcho has a sour note, with instances in Gatcho's circle of what PLF describes as "irredentism" - aversion to surrounding nations, prejudice and even hatred. It was in Bulgaria that he came across, for the first time, people who expected money for giving him a lift in a cart. He also fell in with the incredibly awful Ivancho, who pursued him doggedly. The time in Bulgaria had an entirely different tone from the journey through other countries - perhaps also because there are intimations of what lay ahead for Eastern Europe in conflict and oppression. My interest picked up when PLF gave in to temptation and crossed back into Romania, which he loved (as I did in the short holiday I spent there) and there is a hugely entertaining account of him ending up in a Bucharest brothel by accident, and being looked after by the girls.
I found the Mount Athos section interesting but somewhat repetitive, as he visits several monastries one after the other, though each was different in origin and denomination. This part is the original diary account, so no editing was done to it. It feels like an add-on because Constantinople is missing.
Of course the book has many of the hallmarks of Patrick Leigh Fermor's engaging style and awe-inspriring knowledge - incidents full of life and humour, and an unusual section where he describes an episode of boredom and depression, the down-side to his dominant energy and passion. The last edited chapter, "Dancing by the Black Sea" has an almost mystical strangeness, following what was probably the lowest point in his struggle through a coastal wilderness in the depths of winter. The book felt a bit disjointed, which was only to be expected given the later editing, but of course it's worth reading, because it's Patrick Leigh Fermor, because it's still that epic walk across Europe, and perhaps it's another chance to walk a little in the shadow of this fascinating man.
August 28, 2014
Do you ever hear of something and think 'I wish I could of done that?' I had exactly such a moment when I first heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and it has lived with me ever since. In 1933 at the age of 18 he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Many years later he wrote about his experiences, first in A Time of Gifts (1977), then in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) which took his journey to the Bulgarian border. And then a long silence, for Leigh Fermor was a perfectionist who never quite managed a book a decade amd slowed down as he got older. When he died in 2011 it seemed that one of the great works of travel writing was to remain unfinished. Thankfully his biographer and literary executor have edited earlier drafts and a diary to complete what is a remarkable story. The third volume is not of the same standard as the first two - the rough edges show - but it would have been a crime not to complete the journey., and the five stars should be considered a reflection on the trilogy as a whole.
There are many things which are just fantastic about these books (the second of which inspired me to visit Transylvannia). The author's encounters cut across all strata of society - sometimes sleeping in barns, sometimes being taken up by the aristocracy. Moreover he is writing about two world's which no longer exist - pre war Europe, and his own youth - and there is a haunting but understated nostalgia that runs throughout the books.
There are some things which some people are not going to get on with about the books. You will have noted that the author has three names when the general prejudice runs in favour of two. He is undoutedly posh and seems to think nothing of reciting large amounts of Latin and Greek poetry. Ocassionally there are long descriptive passages, especially of architecture, that I find hard to follow. Some of the history also now looks very outdated. But for all this it becomes impossible not to like the author. He is an English person with a great interest and feel for languages. He has a great curiousity about everything he encounters. He is clearly some combination of good looking and charming becuase he never lacks female company (although remains modest throughout). When he was at school he was described as having 'a dangerous combination of sophistication and recklessness' (this was meant and as criticism!) and during the war he fought with special operations behind German lines in Crete, disguising himself as a German soldier to help kidnap a general.
To put it simply the man is a legend and the trilogy is the high water mark of English travel writing.
There are many things which are just fantastic about these books (the second of which inspired me to visit Transylvannia). The author's encounters cut across all strata of society - sometimes sleeping in barns, sometimes being taken up by the aristocracy. Moreover he is writing about two world's which no longer exist - pre war Europe, and his own youth - and there is a haunting but understated nostalgia that runs throughout the books.
There are some things which some people are not going to get on with about the books. You will have noted that the author has three names when the general prejudice runs in favour of two. He is undoutedly posh and seems to think nothing of reciting large amounts of Latin and Greek poetry. Ocassionally there are long descriptive passages, especially of architecture, that I find hard to follow. Some of the history also now looks very outdated. But for all this it becomes impossible not to like the author. He is an English person with a great interest and feel for languages. He has a great curiousity about everything he encounters. He is clearly some combination of good looking and charming becuase he never lacks female company (although remains modest throughout). When he was at school he was described as having 'a dangerous combination of sophistication and recklessness' (this was meant and as criticism!) and during the war he fought with special operations behind German lines in Crete, disguising himself as a German soldier to help kidnap a general.
To put it simply the man is a legend and the trilogy is the high water mark of English travel writing.
July 1, 2014
the third in fermor's famous trilogy of walking from uk to turkey in 1933-35. though he actually wrote most of this 3rd one first (see the fascinating introduction by colin thubron and artemis cooper) and this portion of his walk, bulgaria, rumania (north to north moldavia?), back to bulgaria, finally finally to 'istambul", then to the 'holy mountain' athos in greece for an extended stay in many of the monasteries there (this taken from his only surviving journal, not the actual book he was writing [when he was 96!] about his original walk) .
has all fermor's trademarks: long paragraphs, long subordinate sentences, good cheer, unstoppable energy, occasional depressions, quite a bit of luck, some real trials, and no sense whatsoever of the coming cataclysm of wwii (though as he was re-writing this again after 50 years or so, he does slip in poignant statements, mainly that of all the people he met in all the countries, from the richest princesses to the lowliest shepherds, none survived, or survived in a radically different world than that of 1934).
has two maps and one picture of young fermor at rila .
some of the best travel writing ever made.
has all fermor's trademarks: long paragraphs, long subordinate sentences, good cheer, unstoppable energy, occasional depressions, quite a bit of luck, some real trials, and no sense whatsoever of the coming cataclysm of wwii (though as he was re-writing this again after 50 years or so, he does slip in poignant statements, mainly that of all the people he met in all the countries, from the richest princesses to the lowliest shepherds, none survived, or survived in a radically different world than that of 1934).
has two maps and one picture of young fermor at rila .
some of the best travel writing ever made.
February 17, 2014
Finally after waiting over 30 years the final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor great three volume epic of his walking from Belgium to Istambul in 1933-4. Not as good as the other two volumes which the author had polished to his satisfaction. The last volume was held back by writers block or maybe publishing block. It was pieced together after his death from his manuscripts and old versions of the story. So not as gripping as Time of Gifts or Between Woods and Waters but still a great read.
May 6, 2015
Transported me to a place and time that is no longer possible to visit anywhere else but in works such as this. Patrick Leigh-Fermor is the master. The chapter Dancing By The Black Sea is as good as anything he ever wrote. I could hear the music, see the dancers feel time stand still with Paddy as the Mangas-inspired fisherman danced rebitiko. It was with a deep sense of loss that I closed the book after reading the last page; no more new PLF to experience. Let the re-reading commence.
April 26, 2017
This conclusion to the three part saga of Fermor's epic walk across Europe forms a fitting tribute to the late writer. Like the previous two parts (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) it is an entertaining mixture of picaresque adventure and erudite travelogue. Although the book was incomplete at the time of Fermor's death, what remains is in keeping with the earlier books.
May 13, 2025
Βαθύς σεβασμός για τη φρεσκάδα της γραφής, την ευρυμάθεια και.. το κουράγιο του σερ Πάντι. Ακόμα κι ο -όχι αμελητέος- εστετισμός του δεν με χάλασε καθόλου. Ο καθένας μας μπορεί να ενσαρκώσει έναν φαντασιακό Λόρδο Βύρωνα, σε τελική ανάλυση.
Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ, ο ταξιδιωτικός μου πράκτορας.
Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ, ο ταξιδιωτικός μου πράκτορας.
December 29, 2024
Εκπληκτικό μυαλό,απίστευτη ενέργεια,πρωτοποριακό πνεύμα.Μεγάλος άνθρωπος,αγάπησε την Ελλάδα αφού γύρισε όλη την Ευρώπη κυρίως με τα πόδια!!!
March 14, 2019
I am unaware of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s other exploits or writings outside of the context of this trilogy, enabling me to review it in a vacuum; advantageous for clarity’s sake but perhaps a little distorted in perception to those familiar with the bigger picture of his life.
I arbitrarily picked up ‘A Time of Gifts’, the first volume in the series, several years ago in a local bookstore. My first attempt reading it I foundered in the thesaurus-enthused proliferation of flowery language that accompanies PLF’s embarkation from London. If I had known that the language would relax and that that overdevelopment was almost metaphorical for the excitement, of the physical departure in the story and the literary departure several years later, I could have pushed through. I still would have been unprepared for the subjects of architecture, history, and religion that resound throughout the trilogy; embraced through very specific language and references, requiring some additional research by the reader to fully comprehend. You could possibly read it and pass over what you don’t understand (as I did for my first read-through of ‘A Time of Gifts’ and spottily throughout the rest, I admit), but you’d be losing out on some of the best qualities of PLF’s narrative, which is that it’s all set in a grand contextual embrace of these subjects. The benefit of writing long after these events have passed is that the journey is nestled in between both the past and future events surrounding the geographic extent of his trip.
The second attempt at reading harnessed the momentum of the first and carried me through. It still was no mean feat to muddle through portions of the book (there’s a several page architectural diversion around Munich or somewhere which was grueling) but I was left at the other end with a sense of awe and charmed at what had been accomplished so far. This was crystallized over another reading the better part of a year later (all of the first title, I hadn’t even made it into Hungary!) – And this, for me, is really where this trilogy excels. The writing is refined, the subject is charming (it’s a bildungsroman of the most captivating variety), and the sheer optimism and success of the entire venture is sincerely baffling. I don’t think it could have happened post WWII, or pre-WWI, and I’m left wondering if it’s the other people PLF meets or PLF himself who carries the whole thing off. The consistency with which he meets success suggests the latter, but he does an excellent job of placing the action/driving force onto others; The goodwill, generosity, and sheer-caricaturesque nature of some of the people, and events for that matter, produce gems buried throughout the text.
Each portion of the trilogy was written at wide intervals, which separates each text enough to make it distinct while still maintaining continuity. It will take a re-read prior to solidifying these opinions, but the second installment, ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ is the least captivating of the set. However, it has some of my favorite moments from the entire trip. The general pacing of the book falls short or the subject matter slightly more monotonous due to PLF’s indulgence in manor houses, favored over progress on his journey. He still adds the characteristic charm and delight and erudition of the first title but the base material he has to work with feels less inspired.
The third title, ‘The Broken Road’, is second best, aided again by the momentum of the author and the juxtaposition of his time spent between peasant hovels and country estates. It also features moments of the lowest morale (possibly due to a less refined text, being unfinished), and the author coming the closest to death with a cliff-side scramble through the dark and a friend, in a bi-polar fit threatening him with a knife. The text cuts off, very jarringly, short of the objective and you don’t really have the moment of triumph upon reaching Constantinople as anticipated. In a way this is a parallel to what PLF himself felt as all of the textual clues and journal entries themselves seem to convey a vague sense of further restlessness or disappointment at achieving the goal. His time in the city itself is dealt with over a paragraph or two due to no record of the author’s time there and then jumps to his journal entries of his time on Mt. Athos among the monasteries there. This, as ever in my humble opinion, is a questionable inclusion. I believe it was provided as some sort of tonic to the disappointment of not having the resolution that the end of the journey would have provided. However, the tone of these travels, the pacing, everything, is starkly juxtaposed with what came before; it should be treated as an afterward more clearly than it is. It’s the beginning of ‘A Time to Keep Silence’, not the end of ‘The Broken Road’. This does nothing to mar the overall credit of the trilogy, which I would strongly recommend to many. Just be aware that it’s no walk in the park.
I arbitrarily picked up ‘A Time of Gifts’, the first volume in the series, several years ago in a local bookstore. My first attempt reading it I foundered in the thesaurus-enthused proliferation of flowery language that accompanies PLF’s embarkation from London. If I had known that the language would relax and that that overdevelopment was almost metaphorical for the excitement, of the physical departure in the story and the literary departure several years later, I could have pushed through. I still would have been unprepared for the subjects of architecture, history, and religion that resound throughout the trilogy; embraced through very specific language and references, requiring some additional research by the reader to fully comprehend. You could possibly read it and pass over what you don’t understand (as I did for my first read-through of ‘A Time of Gifts’ and spottily throughout the rest, I admit), but you’d be losing out on some of the best qualities of PLF’s narrative, which is that it’s all set in a grand contextual embrace of these subjects. The benefit of writing long after these events have passed is that the journey is nestled in between both the past and future events surrounding the geographic extent of his trip.
The second attempt at reading harnessed the momentum of the first and carried me through. It still was no mean feat to muddle through portions of the book (there’s a several page architectural diversion around Munich or somewhere which was grueling) but I was left at the other end with a sense of awe and charmed at what had been accomplished so far. This was crystallized over another reading the better part of a year later (all of the first title, I hadn’t even made it into Hungary!) – And this, for me, is really where this trilogy excels. The writing is refined, the subject is charming (it’s a bildungsroman of the most captivating variety), and the sheer optimism and success of the entire venture is sincerely baffling. I don’t think it could have happened post WWII, or pre-WWI, and I’m left wondering if it’s the other people PLF meets or PLF himself who carries the whole thing off. The consistency with which he meets success suggests the latter, but he does an excellent job of placing the action/driving force onto others; The goodwill, generosity, and sheer-caricaturesque nature of some of the people, and events for that matter, produce gems buried throughout the text.
Each portion of the trilogy was written at wide intervals, which separates each text enough to make it distinct while still maintaining continuity. It will take a re-read prior to solidifying these opinions, but the second installment, ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ is the least captivating of the set. However, it has some of my favorite moments from the entire trip. The general pacing of the book falls short or the subject matter slightly more monotonous due to PLF’s indulgence in manor houses, favored over progress on his journey. He still adds the characteristic charm and delight and erudition of the first title but the base material he has to work with feels less inspired.
The third title, ‘The Broken Road’, is second best, aided again by the momentum of the author and the juxtaposition of his time spent between peasant hovels and country estates. It also features moments of the lowest morale (possibly due to a less refined text, being unfinished), and the author coming the closest to death with a cliff-side scramble through the dark and a friend, in a bi-polar fit threatening him with a knife. The text cuts off, very jarringly, short of the objective and you don’t really have the moment of triumph upon reaching Constantinople as anticipated. In a way this is a parallel to what PLF himself felt as all of the textual clues and journal entries themselves seem to convey a vague sense of further restlessness or disappointment at achieving the goal. His time in the city itself is dealt with over a paragraph or two due to no record of the author’s time there and then jumps to his journal entries of his time on Mt. Athos among the monasteries there. This, as ever in my humble opinion, is a questionable inclusion. I believe it was provided as some sort of tonic to the disappointment of not having the resolution that the end of the journey would have provided. However, the tone of these travels, the pacing, everything, is starkly juxtaposed with what came before; it should be treated as an afterward more clearly than it is. It’s the beginning of ‘A Time to Keep Silence’, not the end of ‘The Broken Road’. This does nothing to mar the overall credit of the trilogy, which I would strongly recommend to many. Just be aware that it’s no walk in the park.
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