On Foot to Constantinople

One thing leads to another and, as so often happens, one book leads to another. After a recent re-read of Mary Norris's delightful Greek to Me, I took her suggestion and began reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts.

In 1933, Fermor, an eighteen year old English student, decided to leave his studies behind and to walk from Holland to Constantinople. (The book was written over forty years later, based on the journals he'd kept.) 

The prose is lush and delightful--a wonderous travelogue of Europe between WWI and II. It's a bygone world, where a young man can travel on foot and be greeted by hospitality at every turn--from the inn keeper who gives him a room because he looks tired to the town jail that will provide a warm, unlocked cell and breakfast to the workhouse run by monks, with its communal dormitory and breakfast provided after a stint of woodchopping.

It reminds me a bit of Richard Halliburton's popular travel books--I was quite enamored of them when I was young -- but Fermor is a much better writer as well as being a deeper thinker.

I'm reading the book slowly, pausing to look online for pictures of some of the places he describes--the Dutch polders and landscapes, the picturesque towns, the castles along the Rhine . . .we followed some of that same route back in '70 on our motorcycle trip and I could see it as he must have done from the barge that gave him a lift--without so much traffic and rather idyllic. 

But it was 1933-- in Germany "the town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter's shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika armbands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown up S.A. men..." There were pictures of the Fuhrer in various manly poses and the author recounts hearing a woman say, "What a beautiful man!" to which her companion agreed, adding that Hitler had wonderful eyes.

At the same time, Fermor encountered many who were openly opposed to the Nazi movement, "in different ways and for different reasons.  It was a time," he goes on to say, " when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany."

How familiar this all sounds. I can only hope our country continues to move away from the cult of personality that is destroying the GOP as a rational (and necessary) conservative voice. But I digress . . .

Meanwhile I'll keep traveling by way of this book of riches, secure in the knowledge that I have the second part of the v0yage standing by.