- Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive/ National Library of Scotland
- Patrick Leigh Fermor in Bulgaria, 1934
In 1933, expelled from school and having nothing better to do, Patrick Leigh Fermor, an 18-year-old Englishman, set off from London determined to walk across Europe from “the hook of Holland” to Istanbul, which, romantically, he always referred to as Constantinople. He wore a pair of hobnailed boots and carried with him a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a flashlight, a notebook, and the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace’s Odes. He had a travel allowance from his parents of one pound a week.
(The story of the journal is more interesting than its contents. A year after his epic walk, Leigh Fermor returned to Romania and fell in love with a princess named Balasha Cantacuzene and lived with her for several years. When World War II broke out, he went back to England to enlist. Cantacuzene somehow held onto his journal through the war and the rise of communism when she and her family, like all aristocrats, had to vacate their estate with just a few minutes’ warning; she managed to return it during a clandestine meeting in 1965.)
(How could someone who wrote this exquisitely in a draft consider his work not ready for publication?)
——-
