I finished The Broken Road and loved it

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road, the final volume in his account of his walk aged 18 across Europe in 1934, is like feeling a fresh spring breeze. It reminds me of Aristotle's definition of happiness as bloom upon the cheek of youth.  It reminds me too of why I am in South-Eastern Europe and how much I love Romania and Bucharest, because after fifteen years here I am still a tourist. But let's start with Constantinople.

After taking over a year to walk there from the Hook of Holland, we now learn from The Broken Road that Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in the city he (rightly) always called Constantinople only ten days before setting off again for Greece, where he was to make his life. He said he never left Constantinople without a lightening of the heart. This is all the more telling because he saw it when it was still Constantinople, by which I mean still the Ottoman city made of wood and many Greeks still lived there. 

When I first saw the city in 1990 it was a great anticlimax. I arrived by train from Budapest and I had just seen and fallen in love with Romania. Hungary, where I had watched the red star being winched from the top of the Parliament building and Bulgaria were also fascinating though much less so than Romania. Istanbul was sort of Third World, but with Mars bars and Coca Cola, the International Herald Tribune and all mod cons it meant coming back to the West. 

Since then on many visits I  keep changing my mind about the place. I had a Lithuanian friend who lived there, in a flat facing the Golden Horn, who a long time said it was the most wonderful city in Europe. The last time I was with him there he said he had moved from hating it to complete indifference. I, on the other hand, on my last two or three visits, decided I loved it, despite the fact that it is no longer multiracial, has been rebuilt in concrete and the traffic is impossible. But I love it away from the tourist-crowded bits. I love working-class Fatih, full of barbershops, cafes where men sit eating falafel on little stools and wondrous mosques sans tourists.

Fermor's passion for mediaeval history and old churches and his knowledge of Ancient Greek gave him a great dislike of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Turkish rule destoyed the social structure and the upper classes of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, though Fermor speculates that paying heavy taxes to the Porte rather than being directly ruled by the Sultan might have done Wallachia and Moldavia just as much harm. It may well be that Turkish administration was even worse than administration by native princes, with rule by Phanariots being somewhere in between. I just don't know. On the other hand had Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece not liberated themselves the First World War would not have come about or at least not where and when it did. The First World War was the Third Balkan War. 

Fermor did not love Constantinople, but on the other hand he did love Bucharest, as do I, even after fifteen years here. Oddly enough though, the chapter on Bucharest is one of the weakest in the book. It does read at times, as he himself admits, like an article from The Tatler. Yet the chapter is terribly interesting for those of us who live in Bucharest; one cannot imagine a Tatlerish Bucharest now. How different Bucharest was in 1934 - not least in the upper class circles where he moved, after putting up by mistake for a few days at a bordello called Pisica Vesela, where the girls made friends with him.

On his first full day in Bucharest he enters a cafe on Calea Victoriei and feels a revulsion from the well dressed customers, who looked 

'shiny and commercial despite their rice-paper cheeks. I had the illusion that the talk of this gleaming and overupholstered Babylon consisted entirely of sneers.

That sounds like some Bucuresteni of the present day but Fermor has a remarkable gift for inspiring friendship in total strangers and in the cafe he meets a man who takes him to the opera and after that to a grand party and from then on he is lionised by the aristocracy. He also had many introductions from his time moving from castle to castle in Transylvania as described in the second volume of his travels. 

He says

there was a strong bohemian, anti-conventional and un-pompous strain in the section of the Romanian world in which I now found myself.

That describes quite a number of my close Romanian friends, but I have been very lucky indeed. Most Romanians are very different, very conventional, very unbohemian, sometimes even a little pompous. 

Of course he is describing a class most of which has gone now. Most of the 'historic centre' of Bucharest, i.e. the part built from 1880 to 1914, as a taxi driver reminded me the other day, was built by and for a class of people who left the country after the war if they could - not the upper classes only but the upper middle classes and the business class. Bohemiansim in 1934 in Romania and in England was confined to a minority of the upper classes and a tiny minority of metropolitan intellectuals. Since then it became much more common in England, but is very rare in Romania.

The Romania of the elite in 1934 had great style, we learn. Nowadays the elite - the rich and powerful, if they are the elite - are singularly lacking in style. In fact, Romania has so many wonderful charms but style is not one of them. Another reason why Romania should restore the monarchy. The peasants clad in costume are gone too but much about the countryside remains much the same or did until a moment ago. 

Apart from two chapters on Romania the book is about Bulgaria and very good indeed. I liked it all the more because even though I do not think I know Bulgaria very well I had been to all the places he visited. He describes Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo well and thinks Sofia a pleasant village. How lucky he was to get there in time - before modernity. 

Reading his Roumeli in memoriam just after he died has made me decide that Greece is still worth visiting, despite the affluence and tourism that have altered it out of recognition from the shepherd-strewn Balkan kingdom he knew. I shall try to find the profound Greece, if it still exists, far from motorways and airports. The profound Romania is everywhere and I must visit it much more before it too goes.



More on The Broken Road here.

Patrick Leigh Fermor at last reaches Bucharest

I am loving Patrick Leigh Fermor's chapter on Bucharest in The Broken Road. I find this city spell-binding and am pleased that he did so. I gave up hope that we would ever read his description, to set beside his description of Budapest in Between the Woods and the Water, Then after his death we were told that the final volume in his trilogy had almost been completed. In fact it is a very much unfinished and not at all like his finished work - which makes it much easier to read quickly. At least now we have it, although not in the final form which would have satisfied him.

I find I cannot put this book down. I emphatically do not agree with the man in my local English-language bookshop, who told me the other day that it should not have been published. I tend to agree with the friend last night who prefers it to the earlier two books. I find that because it is not finished it is easier to read. Reading Fermor's wonderful Ruskinian prose can sometime be, as Tennyson described reading Ben Jonson, like swimming in treacle.

Fermor arouses in me for the first time an interest in Bulgaria, whose gentle charm for me has been an acquired taste. I acquired it in the end but only now do I feel an interest in the place. Fermor at the time he travels through Bulgaria has never set foot in Greece, which is to be his great love, but we see his philhellenism prefigured in his liking for Bulgaria and his distaste for Turkey and Islam. Perhaps this is why, having walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, as he rightly always called it, he spent only ten days there before setting off for Greece and Mount Athos.

I enjoy reading Fermor because he makes me remember why I am living in Romania, which is because I fell in love with the country when I first came in the autumn of 1990. I still am in love with her, though it is a married love now, not a schoolboy infatuation. I am delighted that Fermor shared my enthusiasm for Romania and for Bucharest.

I also see that, like him, it is old churches that make me want to travel more than anything else. This is the reason why Burma a week ago did not move me as I had hoped. Pagodas and Buddhist temples are just not  so interesting or remotely so beautiful as churches, especially the monasteries of the Balkans. 

I have been telling family and friends for fifteen years to come to Romania before it is spoilt but I have not followed my own advice and have seen far too little of the provinces. From now on I shall stay around here.

Here 'The Broken Road' is reviewed by the wonderful Neal Ascherson and here by William Dalrymple, who is a writer comparable to Fermor.

I somehow missed reading Artemis Cooper's Life of Fermor which came out a year ago and which I shall hurry to get. Hardbacks seem scarce but I do not want to read it in paperback. I did read this intriguing review. I am not sure whether the reviewer knows much about Fermor though, as he says,

He sometimes slept rough in stables and barns but this was interspersed, we now learn, with sojourns in the castles and country houses of the eccentric, amusing, minor nobility. (My italics.)

Anyone who has read Fermor's books knew that. He himself likens his journey to Surtees' Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour.  Somerset Maugham apparently described him as "a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women". That might contain a scintilla of truth, unfortunately. A gigolo, though, if that is what he was, who was a prose stylist to compare with Sir Thomas Browne.

I write more about The Broken Road here.

Earliest humans revealed by DNA

According to John Hooper, the Basques are the oldest race in Europe and so old are they that some have speculated that they might be descended from Neanderthals rather than homo sapiens. When I mentioned this on Facebook, one or two people instead of finding it funny, as I intended, accused me of repeating 19th century racist ideas. Oh dear. Neanderthals and another mystery species are in the news today but not in the Basque country.

Romanians make good immigrants

Admitting a million Poles, even though in good manners, industry, church attendance and many other ways they put many of the British to shame, was certainly a mistake on the part of the UK. We know this because ministers said they expected tens of thousands to come. Still, if Britain and other Western European countries have decided that they need immigrants, and they have, they should be very grateful that the EU has a supply on hand of Romanian immigrants who share a European culture and will fit in easily. 

Probably no immigrants in the world assimilate as quickly as Romanians who seem not to stay together in clusters like other immigrant groups. There are various explanations for this. A cynical one was supplied to me by a Romanian friend who had lived in Paris in the 1980s.

'We are individualists but not like the Irish are individualists - the Irish are a race of geniuses - we just can't stand one another.'

Bearing in mind the numbers of immigrants who have settled in the UK recently (one million in 2011 and 2012) it is understandable that the British press worry about an influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after January 1 2014. What is odd is that, a couple of days after David Cameron said he wanted to persuade the EU to change the rules, he said on a visit to India that:

"There is no limit on the number of students who can come from India to study at British universities, no limit at all. All you need is a basic English qualification and a place at a British university. What’s more, after you've left a British university, if you can get a graduate-level job there is no limit to the amount of people who can stay and work, or the time that they can stay at work."

This dichotomy does seem hard to explain. I suspect that one reason why British journalists are complaining about an influx of Romanians and Bulgarians next month is because they are white. If they were Asian the papers might be much more worried about being accused of racism. And yet the fact that Romanians are Europeans is a reason why they make good immigrants.

Romanians were disappointed, but not in the least surprised, by the noisy British reluctance to let them settle in the UK without restrictions before 2014. As far as Romanians are concerned, they blame this reluctance on confusion abroad between Romanians and Roma. (Roma is the modish term for gypsies.) It is no use saying to Romanians that Romanian gypsies are both Romanian and Roma. ‘Romanian’ is understood here as an ethnicity not a citizenship.

Romanians come from a Balkan, Orthodox and Latin culture, unlike the Poles, who are Catholics and Central Europeans, but like the Poles they bring with them so many qualities that the British used to have. Like all people from post-Communist countries, and this is what makes them most different from the British, they come from a part of the world where the 1960's social revolution never happened. When I moved here in 1998 the Romanian standard of living was that of Britain in 1959 and many of the ways of thinking were late 1950's too.

Things have changed a lot since then, but by no means out of recognition.

Romanians have virtues that some in Great Britain have lost. Romanian women are womanly (and very often beautiful), Romanian men are virile even if they seem quite otherwise at first sight. Romanians are family minded and esteem education. They are old-fashioned, clean-cut, self-reliant, sceptical of authority and they believe in freedom. I might have expected Romanians to be disappointed by the reality of violent crime, binge drinking, feminism and innumerable rules. Romania, where people smoke in bars and say whatever they like about most things, is a much freer country these days. But no, Romanians usually love England and so they should. Things work in England and people are kind and honest, though the trusting nature of the English provokes wonder and seems naive. Britain is still a wonderful country and London is the only big city in Europe which is not a museum. 

The Romanians who return to Romania after working abroad will create the Romania of the future. They are the candidates I most value as a recruiter. On the other hand, inevitably, the great majority will not return and this is a huge, irreparable loss to Romania. 

The earth was warmer in Roman and mediaeval times

"Les savants ne sont pas curieux" (Anatole France)

Very good news! The earth was warmer in Roman and mediaeval times, according to a
study. It is clear that the global warming myth is exactly that, a myth. Like many other
myths our rulers believe in. 

Meanwhile Egypt has had her first snowfall in a hundred years this weekend.

Tony Blair and Rosia Montana

The Sunday Telegraph today says that at Nelson Mandela's interminable funeral Tony Blair introduced Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta, whom the paper called Mr. Blair's prospective client, to Mr Obama.

Back in the summer, when Mr. Blair flew to Bucharest to dine with Mr. Ponta, I heard that Rosia Montana Gold corporation is Mr. Blair's client, which is why he met Mr. Ponta.  

It does seem some thing ignoble that former first ministers of the British crown make money in this way in matters completely unrelated to British interests. 

Nor is it necessary. Former prime Ministers have plenty of money. Mr. Heath lived in style on the money he accumulated over twenty years from his salary as cabinet minister, leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. Mr. Callaghan saved enough from his pay to buy a farm. But Mr. Blair has always been fascinated by the very rich and aspires to be very rich himself. As Mr. Callaghan said of Mr. Blair when he first saw him at the  1983 Labour Party Conference,

I don't know what that young man is but he is not Labour.

This will probably be the puzzled judgement of history, with the caveat that not being Labour does not mean not being left-wing, if left-wing means promoting egalitarianism, along with marked inequalities of income, and a powerful state. Mr. Blair created a new kind of left that combines admiration for the rich and powerful with internationalism, enthusiasm for the EU and social liberalism. It should fit in well with Victor Ponta's ideas, and those of the PSD - a socialist party run by millionaires - except for the social liberalism, which will come to Romania only under pressure from the E.U. There are no votes in it.

The Great Cham died on this day in 1784

The greatest Englishman after William Shakespeare, died on this day in 1784. I used to have a copy of a print of this hanging in my house in England.




 Dr. Johnson would have been unsurpassable on twitter with tweets like this:

Jacques Chirac on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square ?

I supposed they would put Nelson Mandela on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, which seems to me absurd. I would give it to Jacques Chirac, though I have in general a very low opinion of him, simply because he pleaded with England and America not to go to war with Saddam in 2003.

But it seems I am out of touch and Mandela's statue is in Parliament Square not far from that other revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, erected from his own money by Lord Rosebery to pacify the Noncomformist vote - at the cost of, understandably, angering his allies in the Irish Home Rule Party. Washington for some reason is in Trafalgar Square.

Chirac, unlike Washington, tried to prevent war.

Squire Haggard's Journal

I want to reread Squire Haggard's Journal which I found precis-ed thus by Amazon: 

Haggard's typical entries begin with some notation of the invariably miserable weather (typically "Fog," "Sleet," or "Gales") followed by itemization of recent deaths, either by exotic disease, like "Bloating of the Bowels," or by some witless human act, such as drinking a pail of ale in one continuous swallow. Haggard then plunges into his own affairs in his inimitable style, abbreviating freely and capriciously. Sometimes the squire has his slow days: "Lay on my bed nearly all day, shootg. at tradesmen who approached the Hall with bills and succeeded in damaging a particularly obnoxious grocer." 

The Silence of Colonel Bramble

I was a very bookish child and my parents worried that I would live life at second-hand. I wonder if I did. Anyhow, when I was fourteen one of my favourite books was The Silence of Colonel Bramble, a very funny and charming book, or so I thought when I was 14. It is one of only two or three books that I tried to read in French. Now when I mention André Maurois people correct me and say you mean Andre Malraux. 

I have just found it on the net and recommend it to you. Dipping into it, its charm has not diminished for me.

' We are a curious nation," said Major Parker. ' To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honour is at stake. To interest an English- man in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire." 

" It is the Hun's fault," said the colonel sadly, " that war is no longer a gentleman's game." 

" We never imagined," continued the major, " that such cads existed. Bombing open towns is nearly as unpardonable as fishing for trout with a worm, or shooting a fox." 
"You must not exaggerate, Parker," said the colonel calmly. * They are not as bad as that yet." 

And:

 " But don't you find yourself, Aurelle," went on Major Parker, " that intelligence is over-estimated with you? It is certainly more useful to know how to box than how to write. You would like Eton to go in for noth- ing but learning? It is just like asking a trainer of racehorses to be interested in circus horses. We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy. We are like the young Persians Herodotus talks about, who up to the age of twenty only learnt three sciences: to ride, to shoot and to tell the truth."  

"That may be' said Aurelle, "but just see, major, how inconsistent you are. You despise learning and you quote Herodotus. Better still, I caught you the other day in the act of reading a translation of Xenophon in your dug-out. "

A wonderful funny and inspiring book and a handbook for how England should be.

Me nationalism

I met a very nice Hungarian in Mercurea Ciuc who told me his two names were both Hungarian warrior names (one was Levente, the other I forget). I asked him if he were therefore a Hungarian nationalist and he said, 'No. I am a me nationalist, a me and the

The Bucharest I love

Bucharest used to be mostly shops like this fifteen years ago. I have watched the advance of progress here with dismay. Acknowledgements to Bucurest Saizecist and Bucuresti Realist, whose wonderful page I recommend.

Pasajul Englez

Oddly, a couple of hours after seeing this picture on the Bucharest Realist Facebook page and hearing of Pasajul Englez, I accidentally found and walked down Pasajul Englez  - for

Belgium

"I've come here more times as prime minister than I've been anywhere other than Belgium." 

- David Cameron , New Delhi , November, 2013 ...

" ... if India should go ... England, from having been the arbiter, would sink into the inglorious playground of the world. Wondering pilgrims would come to see us just as they climb the Acropolis or inspect the Nile... A congested population would lead a sordid existence with no outlet for its overflow, no markets for its manufactures ... swallowed up in a whirlpool of American cosmopolitanism ... our aspirations defined only by a narrow and selfish materialism ... England would become a sort of glorified Belgium."

- Lord Curzon , Birmingham, December, 1907 ...

"In the seventies we tried being Belgium and we didn't like it."

Julie Burchill, sometime in the 1980s


(Acknowledgments to Julian Craig for bringing the first two quotations to my attention.)

Getting bored with Islam

I'm beginning to get bored with reading about Islam in the news every day. Do others feel this way? Interesting though the subject was for a long time. 

This thought was provoked by reading this sad article in The Spectator. Not only are tomb robbers rife in Egypt today but Muslim fanatics trying to destroy ancient Christian and much older monuments for being un-Islamic. This makes me wish we could reconvert Egypt to Christianity, though it reminds me of the fanaticism of the Iconoclasts and the 16th century Protestants. A friend of mine, an American who lives in Nazareth and is trying to encourage conversions of Jews and Muslims, says that many Muslims in the region are converting to Christianity. Far, far more Christians, though, are fleeing the region. Canada beckons and the multiracial post-Christian West.

When I was at university - and I was better read than any undergraduate I met - I did not know anything about Islam or Hinduism or have any idea what the difference between the
two was. I am  pretty sure I did not know that Muslims were circumcised, did not eat pork and did not drink. 

I asked a financial journalist friend when I was in my late 20s, 

'You know the Jews have the sabbath and Christians have Sunday, do the Muslims have a holy day?'

and I remember my amour propre being hurt that she knew that they did and it was Friday. I felt very proud of myself, entering my first mosque, the Blue Mosque, aged 28, because I knew that you have to take your shoes off entering a  mosque. 

I suspect that Macaulay's omniscient schoolboy (to whom, as an annoyingly well-informed child, I in some ways approximated) would nowadays know all these things. Times change and we change with them but, although I want people to be as well informed as possible about the humanities (I don't give a fig for the sciences, of course) this increase in knowledge does not elate me.

I am much more interested in Yazzidism, since I visited Lalish the centre of the Yazzidi faith, in Iraq.

A mystic solidarity with the land of one’s birth

I just found this quotation from Mircea Eliade. This is probably from his semi-fascist early phase but still it is good.

“Until recently there persisted among Europeans the obscure awareness of a mystic solidarity with the land of one’s birth. It was not a commonplace love of

Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?

"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language." 

Hilaire Belloc

Religion underlies economics, not vice versa as the Communists thought. This is true at all times and in all places, including our own as Roger Scruton shows here, talking about the

Sweden and the decline of the West

On October 1, four candidates to be Archbishop of Uppsala, the highest position in the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden, were interviewed by church officials in front of the media and, among other questions, were asked, “Does Jesus provide a truer picture of God than Muhammad?” Only one of the candidates said that He does. (This candidate came second.)
The woman who got the job, Antje Jackelén, answered:

“One cannot reduce the whole of religious theology, that is to say the question of how different religions relate to one another, to a yes-and-no question. It
amounts to doing violence to a wealth of knowledge and experience that can be found there.”

I would have thought the question could easily have been answered skirting the subject of Muhammad altogether and talking about the divinity of Jesus. Even Hans Kung would agree that Jesus is essential to salvation.

The Archbishop-elect of Uppsala is not to be confused with the Bishop of Stockholm, who is a lesbian, lives with her woman priest partner and is the world's first openly active
homosexual bishop. I am not making this up.

As it happens, I saw my first ever woman priest in 2007 in Stockholm Cathedral. It was a surprise to see a woman priest but I was astonished to see that she was an absolutely beautiful blonde. I hadn't expected that. This seems to me an additional reason to think women cannot be clergy. However, women have been ordained in the Swedish state church for fifty years.

Despite its strongly feminist public culture, Sweden, once a very law-abiding country, has the worst rape figures in Europe. Many rapes are committed by immigrants. The conservative Norwegian blogger Fjordman wrote this very interesting essay, which deserves reading, on the subject of Swedish attitudes to what I call sex but is now called gender.

A day after writing this comes fresh news from Sweden: they are going to introduce ratings to warn about sexism in films.

My take on the Middle East

I wish Libya, Egypt and Iraq were still pro-British monarchies and I think Eisenhower's sabotage of the UK over the Suez intervention is the reason the Middle East is such a mess. 

It would be better yet if the whole Middle East were all still in the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine. The Ottoman Empire after the Young Turks took over in 1908 became a parliamentary state. King Abdullah I of Jordan was before the First World War the freely elected MP of Mecca in the parliament in Constantinople. A democratic federal Ottoman Empire would have all the oil and ideally would be a confederation with Greece but if such a confederation had joined the EU it would, of course, be bankrupt now.

Instead we have the situation we have, and Israel, a transplant that has not taken. Israel is in a strong position but the strength of the Arabs is the strength of their huge anger.

The Left nowadays hate Israel (it wasn't so, thirty years ago) and not only for the bad things but also for the good things about the country, such as it being an ethnic state and being an outpost of Western civilisation, what Theodor Herzl called

"a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism".

The  bad things, on the other hand, start with the fact that Israelis are squatting on land to which they do not have a very good claim - in many cases literally as well as figuratively - though they have acquired squatters' rights. In fact, they acquired those rights at the latest in 1948, when the Arab countries expelled their Jews who found refuge in Israel. The numbers of Arabs who fled Israel and Jews who were expelled from the Arab lands were roughly equal. This does not excuse the Jews' behaviour up to 1948.

The bad things continue with the way in which Israeli Jews are colonising the West Bank. 

The Arabs in Israel have the best conditions in the Arab world but they have nevertheless suffered a great injustice in what is now Israel and to visit the country is to feel this strongly. But the same is true of the Turks and Greeks who ethnically cleansed each other. So did Pakistan and India. 

People are right to sympathise with the Arabs but the Israelis are pilloried in large part because they are seen as white, not because they have a wicked regime by the standards of the world we live in. Ironically, after being hated for centuries for being Asiatic, Jews are now hated for being European. 

I am delighted Israel exists, by the way, love the country, love going there, yet certainly regret its existence too. I think this position is not illogical, but it only seems to make me enemies.

Please click here to see what people told me in Jerusalem when I was there this summer.

Was Winston Churchill a great man?

The short answer is yes, of course. The quotations and the books show a man comparable to the Pitts, Fox, Disraeli or Dr. Johnson. He was a very great war leader who led the UK to victory, but was it a Pyrrhic victory? What if anything was his lasting achievement?

On his last birthday, Churchill said to his daughters:

I have achieved much to have achieved nothing at all.