In the Footprints of Patrick Leigh Fermor

On December 9, 1933, an 18-year-old named Patrick Leigh Fermor said goodbye to his friends and boarded a ferry at Irongate Wharf, near the Tower of London. Waking at dawn the next day, having crossed the English Channel in his sleep, he disembarked at the Hook of Holland, near Rotterdam. Wearing hobnailed boots and a surplus army greatcoat, carrying some books and spare clothing in a knapsack, Leigh Fermor began to walk. His ambitious destination, 2,600 kilometres to the southeast, was today’s Istanbul – the city he called Constantinople.

Moving on foot from town to town, following signposts and riverbanks, he traversed Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Along the way he experienced the last days of an older Europe, a continent in the final years of uneasy peace before the destruction of the Second World War and the fragmentation of the Cold War. Leigh Fermor slept out in the open, in barns and haylofts, in hostels and taverns, in houses and monasteries, and even in a German workhouse where he chopped wood in exchange for a bed and a meal. But he also spent many nights in the elegant bedrooms of fading aristocratic families, each happy to host the curious and extroverted young traveller and then ease his way by sending letters of introduction ahead on his route. Leigh Fermor, at least in his own colourful telling, charmed nearly everyone he encountered, and built an ever-widening network of friends and benefactors as he walked.

Decades later, Leigh Fermor recounted his formative journey in a sprawling trilogy of successful autobiographical books: A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and The Broken Road (2013). The final book was delayed many years by writer’s block, and only published two years after his death at age 96. His writing was descriptive and meandering by today’s minimalist standards; he liked to use adjectives, tons of them, sometimes strung out in long lists. It was as if his enthusiasm for the things he saw could not be contained by one or two descriptors. A dictionary is a helpful companion to his books – does anybody know offhand what a scutcheon is? a rowel? a slughorn?1 – but his generous vocabulary only deepens the appeal of his narrative. Reading these books now is fascinating, but dispiriting: the continent Leigh Fermor so richly describes is familiar and alien at the same time. Europe changed so completely in the wake of the Second World War that many of us have no idea how much was lost. Leigh Fermor’s writings are a vivid reminder.

In 1930s Europe, at least outside the major cities, each town and region remained something of a self-contained world. Barely into Holland on the first day of his walk, only 200 miles from London, Leigh Fermor already noticed locals wearing wooden clogs – not tourists dressed in novelties from a souvenir shop, but people simply dressing as they had dressed for generations. Clothing styles changed with the geography, and some rural residents were still wearing clothing they’d sewn themselves, hand-spun and woven from the wool of their own sheep.

Each village and valley enjoined a different assembly of colours and styles: braids, tunics, lace, ribands, goffering, ruffs, sashes, caps, kerchiefs, coifs and plaits free or coiled: a whole array of details announced whether they were betrothed, brides, married, spinsters or widows.

Language and religion were also highly localized. Those living in adjacent valleys or on the opposite banks of a river might have difficulty understanding each other. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish worshippers interacted mostly with their own kind, and within these broad groupings were dozens of further subdivisions, the identity of a town’s population suggested by its church decorations and public festivals. Coexistence was amicable, but grievances were never far beneath the surface. Military conquests centuries in the past were still fresh in collective memories, and some of these historical grudges would soon be effectively leveraged by dangerous political forces. “They were fierce times in Eastern Europe; and they still are,” wrote Leigh Fermor, at a time when Hungary and Romania were still behind the Iron Curtain.

Regional languages and cultures are still alive in Europe today, even resurgent: in 2018, the Economist described a “mixed and mingled continent”. But the differences now feel more political than day-to-day, and the distinctive identities that raise spirits at the ballot box might easily be missed by an oblivious visitor ordering paella in Bilbao. Many Europeans speak multiple languages competently. As an English-speaking tourist in the 2020s I would need to make an extraordinary effort to find any European outpost where somebody didn’t understand at least a few words of English. My fumbling attempts to speak a local language in Europe are usually met with a restrained eye-roll and a switch to near-perfect English, no matter how many badges I’ve earned on Duolingo over the preceding months. Restaurant menus are not just bilingual, but multilingual, and if the list of languages grows unwieldy, I can just point at a photograph of the food I want and grunt in the dialect of my choice.

But a wandering traveller in the 1930s had the benefit of being a novelty. Many people Leigh Fermor encountered were not accustomed to meeting strangers that they could not easily categorize as religious pilgrims or itinerant workers. Rather than suspicion, the response to this unexpected young walker, who assigned himself the occupation of “student” on his passport, was genuine curiosity. In rural areas he met people who had never heard of England; their geographical mental maps might have included only a few nearby villages, and perhaps a vague nodding awareness of a few faraway cities they’d been told were important, like Rome and Constantinople. 

In countless situations Leigh Fermor received a welcome that seems astonishing in today’s more cautious world. Early in his journey, when a tavern keeper in Dordrecht saw he was tired, she charged him for his food but not for his bed in the room above, an act Leigh Fermor described as “a marvellous instance of a kindness and hospitality that was to occur again and again in these travels.” When he drank too much at the Nazi-infested Hofbräuhaus beer hall in Munich, strangers pushed him home in a wheelbarrow and let him sleep it off on their couch, sending him on his way in the morning with coffee and a glass of schnapps for his hangover. When he accidentally stumbled upon the same shepherd's house twice, after wandering the mountains for an entire day in an unintentional circle, the family celebrated his second arrival by sharing their meal of freshly-slaughtered hare.

The hospitality was also collective. In the town of Bruchsal, Germany, a brief visit to the mayor yielded a slip of paper good for a dinner, a beer, a bed, and a breakfast at the town inn – all for free. “It seems amazing to me now, but so it was, and there was no kind of slur attached to it; nothing, ever, but a friendly welcome,” marveled Leigh Fermor decades later, recalling that the custom “prevailed through all of Germany and Austria” for all poor travellers.

Today, tourism has ground down the good people of continental Europe. Visitors are no longer a novelty, they are a scourge, with increasing numbers of Americans, Canadians and Australians arriving year on year to jam the same narrow cobbled streets and take the same selfies. Chinese tour buses line the curb behind every major attraction, cruise ships loom over medieval skylines, and Brexit has not stopped Brits from flocking to the warmer and cheaper south each winter. Locals still offer rooms to weary travellers, yes, but now they are listed on Airbnb and the prices surge in times of high demand.

For Leigh Fermor, a heterogenous Europe of overlapping cultures was a wonderland. A lifelong polyglot, he exhibited a remarkable ability to communicate with almost anyone, whether Count, Countess, shepherd, or lumberjack. He picked up snippets of Dutch, German, Magyar, Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, and Romani, and steadily added these new words to his earlier schoolboy lessons in French, Latin and Ancient Greek. He filled notebooks with phonetically-spelled phrases, traced the etymology of words and place names, and made educated guesses such as “forming nouns by knocking the last syllable off the Latin” to approximate Romani. This linguistic skill, aided by some miming and a general extroversion, helped him not only communicate with the people he met, but also befriend them. This may have been the key to his journey. Leigh Fermor’s genuine desire to understand and absorb everything around him was clear to those he met and it opened doors, figuratively and literally.

Writing later in life, Leigh Fermor expressed some retroactive guilt about how easily he had accepted generous hospitality from the wealthier families he met on his trip. He had often lived comfortably for weeks in the care of people he had barely met; they included him in every aspect of their days, introduced him to their friends, and invited him to lavish celebrations. But to the reader, the relationships he described do not come across as one-sided or “parasitic,” as he self-deprecatingly described this part of his summer. Like any good conversationalist, Leigh Fermor seemed to understand that the best way to be interesting is to show a deep interest in others. Who would not want to proudly show off their language, their history, their customs, and their beautiful country to a wide-eyed visitor who is thrilled by each new reveal? Leigh Fermor also drew artistic portraits of some of the people he met along the way, especially the aristocrats.2 The recipients seemed genuinely touched. Maybe this was just a clever appeal to his sitters' egos! But offering something in return no doubt made their hospitality feel a bit less like charity.

It feels unfair to compare anyone to Leigh Fermor, a man who clearly possessed exceptional confidence and aptitude for languages. He was unusually independent, having been raised by a farming family in England while his parents lived in India, where his father was a government administrator. Later, Leigh Fermor learned to handle himself in various boarding schools, but chafed at the traditional expectations of his teachers. He proved to be a quick study and a voracious reader, but one with a strong desire to make real the sorts of adventures he’d read about. One exasperated housemaster described him as “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” and it was these qualities that eventually lured him away from classrooms and into the world.

It is hard to imagine many people today growing up with the particular qualities that would equip them for a similar adventure. Most schools, for good reason, no longer focus on European history and Classical mythology, the subjects that sparked Leigh Fermor’s imagination. Musty books about crusading knights can’t be expected to thrill children in their formative years when there are superheroes, video games, and visits to Disney World competing for their attention. The generation now coming of age – riddled with mass anxiety fueled by social media, we are told, with their independence hobbled by a pandemic and their prospects doomed by economic forces beyond their control – hardly seems poised to strike out into the world with the confidence of a young Leigh Fermor. But his generation didn’t have it easy either, growing up in the social upheaval that followed the First World War. 

Laurie Lee, a contemporary of Leigh Fermor’s, described walking through an English countryside populated by what were then called tramps – slightly older men, many traumatized by their experiences in the trenches, trudging from town to town in a fruitless search for paying work. For Lee and Leigh Fermor, the catastrophe of that earlier war created a less rigid society, one that provided an opportunity for them to experience a new type of freedom. They took it. It remains to be seen, but so far the collective trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic does not seem to have yielded much beyond an insatiable urge to doom scroll.

The Europe Leigh Fermor traversed was a place of small roads, stone buildings, horse-drawn carts, and narrow trails through mountain passes. For one leg of the journey he was loaned a horse named Malek, which he rode with great enjoyment across the Great Hungarian Plain before bidding an emotional farewell. Cars were around, but they were still something of a toy for the wealthier classes, bumping along on roads that were not built for them, and breaking down frequently. “No mechanical vehicle except ours desecrated the quiet of these byeways,” wrote Leigh Fermor about a side trip with new friends in rural Hungary, which was delayed at least once by a punctured tire. “For miles we met only cattle and a cart or two drawn by sturdy local horses.”3

But these were not the Dark Ages. Leigh Fermor stayed in touch with the outside world as he travelled, even if communication was delayed. He eagerly anticipated reaching post offices in major towns, where he hoped there’d be envelopes containing some much-needed one pound notes waiting for him, along with letters from family and friends. He wrote to his mother weekly, a correspondence designed both to keep her informed and serve as an extra journal. (She gave him all the letters on his return, and he was despondent when they were later lost in transit during the war.)

Leigh Fermor’s journey was enriched further by his access to the extensive private libraries of the aristocrats he stayed with. He wrote enthusiastically of one such library in Transylvania.

I longed to plunge deeper in German and began by reading all the rhyming couplets under the marvellous drawings of Max und Moritz and Hans Huckebein in a large volume of Wilhelm Busch. Elated by this and aiming higher, I moved on to Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig and made a slow start, looking up every other word and seeking Ria’s help when I got stuck. But I did manage to finish it in a couple of weeks, and considering I had only started German five months before, this seemed a big jump forward.

Although these libraries provided mostly dictionaries and historical tomes, he was able to use these resources to expand his understanding of the places he was travelling through, and to help him learn the languages he was already piecing together by ear. With no English newspapers to read, world events mainly reached him by word of mouth. Ominous stories regarding the rise of Nazi Germany, such as the Night of the Long Knives executions, were topics of conversation with his hosts.

Aside from these occasional outside interruptions, Leigh Fermor was entirely absorbed by the places he found himself. Because he did not have the dubious luxury of wallowing in the news and culture of home, his brain was left free to compose intricate and accurate descriptions of each mountain, hill, tree, river, church, tavern and person he encountered. In a way, his adjective-heavy journals might betray some of the same instincts that now compel us to fill our smartphone cameras with images of every single thing we see in a foreign place. But the amount of effort expended to capture the experiences could hardly be more different: Leigh Fermor’s written descriptions required deep, concentrated observation and interaction, whereas our cameras hardly require us to glance towards our targets of momentary interest. At any scenic viewpoint or historic site today, the majority of visitors will be looking through a camera screen instead of with their eyes. The resulting photos won’t just capture an experience – the photos will be the entirety of the experience. I have often found myself in this trap, focused on capturing a place rather than being there. It is only in the moments when I’ve put my camera away that a deeper appreciation for my surroundings sinks in.

Google maps, instant translators, online reviews, rideshare hailing: today these tools make getting around almost anywhere a trivial task; but they also make avoiding interacting with locals extremely simple. Why fumble with speaking broken Hungarian at the train station when you can buy your e-ticket online in advance? Why squint at a tiny map in a Lonely Planet guidebook when your phone will tell you which way to walk, and how many steps you are from your destination? Why stare out a train window when you can spend an entire trip on your phone reading news from your own country, streaming new episodes of your favourite show, and chatting with all your friends?

It’s now possible to travel thousands of miles with your brain still at home. It would be extremely difficult for most of us to replicate the immersive experience of a journey like Leigh Fermor’s while carrying a smartphone. But traversing airports, arranging accommodations, or buying museum tickets without this technology is becoming harder with each passing year. Even if we stubbornly resist technological change, others may not accommodate our eccentricity, and we might be left standing at the check-in gate.

And even as travellers have changed, so has Europe, a place that selfishly refuses to sit quaintly frozen in time awaiting our visits. Those small and walkable roads have been overlaid with expressways and autobahns that cannot be safely travelled on foot. One particularly evocative stopover in Leigh Fermor’s journey, the small island of Ada Kalah, no longer exists at all, having been sunk beneath the waters of the Danube during construction of a hydroelectric dam in the 1970s.

Leigh Fermor would no doubt have a very different experience today if he was to visit any of the overcrowded European destinations where tourists are now merely tolerated as a necessary source of income, or even cynically exploited. He was warned about bandits he never met (his sole instance of theft came at the hands of a fellow backpacker in a hostel4) but the public transit pickpockets and online scam artists who target distracted or confused tourists today are all too real.

Global chain shops and restaurants have made the main shopping districts in modern Amsterdam or Vienna only superficially different from those in New York City. Clothing and food trends spread worldwide on TikTok. Everyone dresses the same, eats the same, listens to the same music, and decorates their homes and short-term rentals with the same IKEA furniture. Even the most determinedly open-minded traveller cannot experience local cultures that no longer exist. Travel is easier now, but also shallower. 

We cannot go back. Patrick Leigh Fermor was the right person, at the right time, in the right place. Nobody can truly plan for that. People still embark on ambitious journeys, of course. Beginning in 2015, Tom Turcich walked around the world, and he has now written extensively about his seven-year-long experience.5 Dean Nicholson set out in 2018 to cycle around the world, and adopted a feline companion along the way. Like Leigh Fermor, these are exceptional people who made enormous sacrifices to fulfil a dream. Also like Leigh Fermor, their focus was on the journey, not the destination (Leigh Fermor did successfully reach Constantinople, by the way – and then hardly bothered to write about it at all). Despite the necessary modern trappings of sponsors and social media followings, these contemporary travels were also intensely personal and transformative. They feel very different in spirit from the sort of bucket list ambition that drives others to risk life and limb to be the 6,666th person to climb the world’s highest mountain, or to spend thousands on plane tickets so they can brag about having set foot in every country on the globe.6

But what about the rest of us, workaday travellers looking to escape our routines for a few weeks each year? Can we extract any lessons from Leigh Fermor’s famous walk to make our own travels more meaningful? I think so. But those lessons are ones we already know and often ignore. We should pack light, travel slowly, turn off the smartphone, and keep a written journal. We should talk to people, even if that means embarrassing ourselves in another language. We should make an effort to learn deeply about the places we visit, before, during, and after our trips, so they can become more than just pretty scenery. And we should remember that the rewards are often proportional to the effort: a night in a tent or on a hard hostel mattress won’t kill us. But, then again, neither will a week in a magnificent Transylvanian kastély, surrounded by leather-bound books and idyllic views.

References

Leigh Fermor, P. (2013). A Time of Gifts. John Murray. (Original work published 1977)

Leigh Fermor, P. (2004). Between the Woods and the Water. John Murray. (Original work published 1986)

Leigh Fermor, P. (2014). The Broken Road. Hodder.

Lee, L. (2014). As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Penguin Modern Classics. (Original work published 1969)

The Economist: The resurgence of regionalism in Europe

Travel World: We're full! Europe's fight against overtourism

European Travel Commission: European tourism recovery continues into 2024

Finder: Where do Brits go on holiday?

Guardian: What’s up with Generation Z?

UN Treaties Collection: United Nations Declaration on the construction of main international traffic arteries, Geneva, 16 September 1950

Daily Sabah: Ada Kaleh: A Turkish island in the Danube River

FTC: Avoid Scams When You Travel

Guardian: The man who walked around the world: Tom Turcich on his seven-year search for the meaning of life

Riviera Buzz: A Tale of Love at First Ride

High Adventure Expeditions: How Many People Have Climbed Mount Everest?

Against the Compass: Why you shouldn’t visit all the countries in the world