Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

This is the sequel to Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts. In 1933, the very young Leigh Fermor set out to travel by foot from Holland to Constantinople. Written many years after this adventure, Between the Woods and the Water describes Leigh Fermor's travels in Hungary and Transylvania. He had the good fortune to make some aristocratic connections and spent a good part of the trip being passed from country house to country house and town to town within an extended family network of the Hungarian aristocracy. The Hungary and Transylvania Leigh Fermor describes had already changed greatly under the impact of the First World War, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Great Depression. Many, if not all of the aristocratic figures from whom Leigh Fermor received hospitality, were living lives of genteel poverty on much reduced estates. Still, he describes a world that would be swept away by the events of WWII, the installation of communist states and the postwar industrialization of much of Eastern Europe. The Hungary and Transylvania through which Leigh Fermor travels is very rural, dominated by a peasantry still coexisiting with the aristocracy. Transylvania in particular was ethnically diverse with significant populations of ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, and Gypsies. These populations were divided also by a variety of languages and faiths. The awareness on the part of the author and readers of fate of these peoples gives much of this book an elegiac quality. Wonderfully written with superb historical digressions and some outstanding descriptive writing about the landscapes, this is book is just a treat. The natural comparison is with the predecessor volume. I think this is the better of the two. This volume was published in the mid-80s with Leigh Fermor promising a sequel that would cover the final segment of the journey. Sadly, this has never been published and given Leigh Fermor's advanced age, it is unlikely to be completed. A real pity.

Fermor's journey begun in A TIME OF GIFTS continues in this companion volume. Like its predecessor, it is an exhausting, at times frustrating, demanding read, and equally worthwhile. The reader is cautioned that he or she must be prepared every few paragraphs to look up words the reader has never heard of before, or to look up words used in ways the reader has never used in the same way before; to trace Fermor's topographical references on outside maps, since none are provided by the book; and to have access to outside sources to comprehend Fermor's references to frequently unexplained, or cursorily explained, peoples, places and events. (If I may lodge any criticism about both A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, it is that Fermor assumes the reader to be intimately familiar with the arcane. Because that assumption may be inaccurate, the uninitiated reader might profit from the creation of an additional volume, a guide, that is, to both books that consists of maps, a glossary, annotations, and a bibliography. Readers who make the effort to keep up with Fermor should not constantly be made to feel he is about to leave them behind in a cloud of dust as he speeds down some remote Rumanian highway lost in his remarkable thoughts.) BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER differs only slightly from A TIME OF GIFTS in that fewer architectural treasures are encountered and commented upon. But, like the latter, it is the beauty and quiet of the earth, the common people, an endearing cast of lovable, clueless aristocrats, and the colorful histories that surround them all, that are the stars of the show. And it is Fermor's fascinating inner life and winsome personality that make these books the joy and the education they are.

Fermor's second installment of his trilogy (I assume the third volume remains unfinished?) focuses on Hungary and Transylvania, and is an easier read than his first volume that described largely the German/Austrian stint of his long hike/hitchhike. I encountered fewer characters this time, due to his longer stays with people, and, as Fermor admits, he tended to keep to the company of the gentry more than the peasants and Gypsies he originally anticipated. As in the first volume, vignettes stand out: he nevertheless manages to find a Gypsy encampment, Hasidim among lumberjacks deep in the Carpathians, a count who mutters in language out of Robbie Burns about his butterfly collection, and the romance with Angela, discreetly but poignantly narrated. My favorite scene is just before his great romance, when a briefer "roll in the hay" becomes exactly that in the company of Safta and Ileana.Fermor's allusions to his later Crete exploits are tempting--I only wish he had had time to related these too in more detail. His comparisons to 1980s Europe and what transpired to some of his friends later on make for thoughtful and instructive entertainment--the mark of the best writing.

The book opens with the author as a young man setting out from the small town of Estergom in Hungary in 1934 on a journey which will take him through the sweeping vistas of the Great Hungarian Plain, the Carpathian Mountains and Transylvania. Descriptions of such places is only rivalled by the brilliant characterisation lent to the protagonists throughout. Added to this is the poignant reminder that so much of this was to be destroyed by the occupying Nazi forces only a few years later. The variety of experiences written with supremely masterful imagery makes this book a must for those who have an interest in this part of Europe.