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.