The Broken Road (Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper) (2013 (from 1930s travels))

(349 pages)

This is the third of Fermor's now-famous trilogy in which he writes - much after the fact - about his 1930s walk from Holland to Constantinople (or thereabouts).  I really liked all three; perhaps this best of all notwithstanding its unusual provenance.  In this book Fermor is traveling from the "Iron Gates" (on the Danube along the Serbian-Romanian border) to Constantinople; then onto Mt. Athos (Greece).

Here's an overview of book one; here's an overview of book two.  They're quite wonderful.

For book three, Fermor had more source material available (most of his 1930s notebooks were lost - pretty much everything relating to books one and two).  Fermor started this book, then set it aside . . . returned much later . . . but never finished.  The last portion (on Mt. Athos) is more directly taken from a diary - different style.  The two editors did their best, and it's quite good.

I keep feeling that Fermor was unusually gifted in seeing it, taking it in, and then succeeding in describing it; upper-class Brit perspective but not failing to see by feeling superior or judgmental.  Unusual in that he experienced all this as very young and inexperienced; then he wrote it up decades later - trying to filter out later experiences and knowledge, but I think possession of just that (ultimately unfilter-able) made the writing more interesting.  Not provable one way or the other.

Also the 1930s are inherently interesting - this a last glimpse of a pre-industrial world in many of these areas; preceded the vast WWII changes; areas absorbing, more or less, WWI changes - again, described with post-WWII knowledge - this approach works.

This part of the world is totally interesting to me - largely unknown; reading a lot but barely scratching surface.  I get the impression that things somehow run deeper for the local populace - not sure how to express this idea - their history goes way back, they have been overrun by conquerors so often (with attendant suffering) - Fermor's descriptions of the the sounds of the music, the instruments, the voices; hmmm.

And then the variations of Christianity introduced here, often competing, the depth of the icons and the ceremonies, again perhaps spurred by the regular, and awful, invasions.

Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Macedonia.

Moldovia Wallachia became Romania mid 19th century, acquire Transylvania from Hungary after WWI; Hungarians with long memories about this.

Many dog-eared pages.  The episode where he is lost and spends the night in a cave with shepherd-outlaws - seems to take place in a different world, one thinks of Odysseus and the Cyclops.

Etc.  Highly recommended.