In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot – from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (or Constantinople, as he insisted on calling it). A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary.
It is a book of compelling glimpses – not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world’s grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic.
After his walk across Europe, Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania and fought in Greece and Crete – living disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years organizing resistance activities. He was awarded the DSO and CBE, and a knighthood in the 2004 New Year Honours List. He died in June 2011, at the age of 96.
In Between the Woods and the Water we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.
The Broken Road remains unfinished but – edited and introduced by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper – completes an extraordinary journey.
A Great Adventure
In late December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot for Constantinople (as he anachronistically termed it). Recently expelled from school for the unpardonable crime of holding hands with a...
Read moreOff All the Standard Maps
The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew...
Read moreSiân Phillips reads from A Time of Gifts
About lamplighting time at the end of a wet November day, I was peering morosely at the dog-eared pages on my writing table and then through the panes at the streaming reflections of Shepherd Market,...
Read moreRobert Macfarlane: ‘When I first read A Time of Gifts I felt it in my feet. It spoke to my soles . . .’
Listen to Robert Macfarlane reading from The Gifts of Reading. Recorded especially for Adventures for Harriet: a 600-mile literary pilgrimage across Europe by foot.
Read moreIt was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland . . .
Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay. I hadn’t known that Rotterdam was a few miles...
Read moreLeave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores . . . Robert Macfarlane reads Petronius
One of the first things Leigh Fermor is given in A Time of Gifts is a book: the first volume of the Loeb edition of Horace. His mother (‘she was an enormous reader’) bought it for him as a...
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