Travel Blog

Patrick Leigh Fermor, the greatest living travel writer, turns 94 today.

In 1933, the teenage Leigh Fermor took a boat from England to the Hook of Holland and proceeded to walk to what was then Constantinople. His account of this peregrination takes up two volumes, A Time of Gifts (arguably the greatest travel book title, as well as the greatest travel book) and Between the Woods and the Water (also in contention for best travel book).

Written decades after the fact (with the help of a journal), both books capture - in fervent, erudite, often baroque prose - the grand sweep and the hard-earned joys of travel, as well as a Europe that was soon to disappear forever. The young Englishman was alive to everything: languages, customs, topography, architecture, flora and fauna, history, literature, politics. Planning to travel rough, he made an early connection with some landowners who gave him letters of introduction to use along the route. So when he wasn't bedding down in barns he was sleeping in castles.

Leigh Fermor eventually settled in Greece - disguised as a Cretan shepherd, he captured a German general during World War II - and wrote two excellent books about the country: Mani, where he lived, and Roumeli. His book The Traveller's Tree is probably the best travel book ever written about the Caribbean. He is one of the few travel writers to write both itinerant (traveling through) and sedentary (settling down) travel books.

The account of his youthful walk across Europe is his great, and sadly unfinished, masterpiece. Fans have been waiting patiently for the final volume, which would take him triumphantly into Constantinople, but the fear is that it may never see completion.

Of all the writers I admire, there are only two whom I can reread and feel instantly changed. A few sentences by Nabokov will make me see the world with greater clarity (like getting new glasses), and a paragraph by Leigh Fermor unfailingly heightens my enthusiasm for life's infinite richness.