The Broken Road

The Broken road verteld het verhaal van Leigh Fermor en zijn voettocht van Hoek van Holland naar Constantinopel.

At the age of 18 Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). He set off on 8 December 1933 with a few clothes, several letters of introduction. He slept in barns and shepherds’ huts, but was also invited by gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way.

Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), cover this journey, but at the time of his death, a book on the final part of his journey remained unfinished. This was edited and assembled from Leigh Fermor’s diary of the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. It was published as The Broken Road by John Murray in September 2013.

The final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic travelogue takes him though Rumania and Bulgaria, along the Black Sea coast to Istanbul, and on to the Greek monastery island of Mount Athos. Still unfinished at his death in 2011, it has been sensitively completed, using extracts from his ‘Green Diary’, by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, and does not disappoint: Fermor’s powers of evocation are as magical as ever.

Patrick Leigh Fermor is hailed as the greatest travel writer of his generation.