Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar, soldier, and polyglot who is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer in the English language — a claim that rests primarily on two books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), which together recount his walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, undertaken when he was eighteen years old in 1933–1934. The books — published more than forty years after the walk — combine youthful adventure with mature learning, and their prose style — exuberant, digressive, densely allusive, rhythmically magnificent — has no equal in modern English travel writing.

Life and Career

Fermor was born in London to a geologist father who worked in India and a mother of Anglo-Irish descent. He was expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, for holding hands with a local girl, and his headmaster’s report noted: “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.” At eighteen, with no prospect of university, he decided to walk across Europe — a journey that shaped the rest of his life.

He set out from the Hook of Holland on 9 December 1933, carrying a rucksack, a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse, and a volume of Horace. Over the following year he walked through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, sleeping in barns, castles, monasteries, and the country houses of the Central European aristocracy — a world that would be destroyed within a decade by the war. The journey gave him both his great subject and his great regret: the manuscript and notebooks he kept during the walk were lost, and when he came to write about it in the 1970s, he was reconstructing from memory.

During World War II, Fermor served with British intelligence in occupied Crete, where he organised resistance operations and, in April 1944, led the kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander of the island — one of the most celebrated commando operations of the war. He and his team spirited Kreipe off the island by boat to Egypt, an episode later recounted in W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1950, filmed in 1957) and in Fermor’s own Abducting a General (2014, posthumous).

After the war Fermor travelled extensively in Greece, the Caribbean, and Central America. The Traveller’s Tree (1950) — about a journey through the Caribbean — was his first book. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958) and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966) are his finest completed works of travel writing before the walk trilogy: learned, atmospheric, and infused with a deep affection for Greece and its people. He and his wife, Joan, built a house in Kardamyli, on the Mani coast of the Peloponnese, where he lived for most of the rest of his life.

The Walk Trilogy

A Time of Gifts (1977) covers the walk from the Hook of Holland to the middle of the bridge at Esztergom, on the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Between the Woods and the Water (1986) continues from Esztergom through Hungary and Transylvania to the Iron Gates of the Danube. The Broken Road (2013, posthumous, edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper) completes the journey through Bulgaria and into Constantinople.

The trilogy’s achievement is not narrative — the story is simple (a young man walks across Europe) — but linguistic and perceptual. Fermor’s prose is among the most sumptuous in English: he writes long, cascading sentences that pile up subordinate clauses, historical associations, architectural descriptions, and linguistic observations into paragraphs of extraordinary density and beauty. He was a compulsive polyglot (fluent in Greek, French, German, Romanian, and with reading knowledge of several more languages), and his prose is shot through with foreign words, etymological excursions, and the pleasure of naming things precisely.

Jan Morris called the trilogy “the most beautiful books of prose produced in our time.” Colin Thubron described Fermor’s prose as “a kind of controlled intoxication.” The books are not merely travel writing: they are an elegy for a vanished Central European civilisation, a portrait of the artist as a young man, and a demonstration of what English prose can do at its most ambitious.

Critical Standing

Fermor is a writer’s writer who also commands a devoted general readership. He was knighted in 2004 and received the DSO for the Kreipe operation. His influence on subsequent travel writers — Thubron, Chatwin, Rory Stewart, Robert Macfarlane — is acknowledged and immense.

Key Works

• Mani (1958)
• Roumeli (1966)
• A Time of Gifts (1977)
• Between the Woods and the Water (1986)
• The Broken Road (2013)

Collecting Fermor

The Traveller’s Tree (1950, John Murray) — his first book — in fine condition with dust jacket brings $200–$600. Mani (1958, John Murray) brings $100–$300. A Time of Gifts (1977, John Murray) brings $80–$200. Between the Woods and the Water (1986, John Murray) brings $50–$150. Fermor signed for friends and at events; signed copies appear at auction but command significant premiums.