An English Walker, A Greek House, And The Art Of Reading Slowly

In Jammu, I was supposed to be working. That was the premise. But the days softened into leisure, like overripe mangoes in late May. And in that leisure, a word that still raises eyebrows in India, I found myself reading Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Or more accurately, I found myself underlining, rereading, re-Googling, and, often, helplessly reaching for a dictionary to understand what in God’s name he meant by quatrefoil, kral, jocund, or baldric.

This was no idle travelogue.

Fermor’s trilogy—A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumously assembled The Broken Road—details a young man’s walk across 1930s Europe.

In December 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot from the Hook of Holland, reaching Constantinople in early 1935. Yes, he walked. Paddy, as friends and admirers call him, wandered through castles, haylofts, monasteries and the last embers of a pre-war Europe that didn’t yet know it was dying.

Why should an Indian read him?

Because India is too large, too ancient, too saturated with sensation to notice when something is quietly brilliant. Most Indian readers believe they've struck gold if a book offers either plot or politics. The idea of reading for the sheer texture of it is alien to a literary culture that privileges clarity over cadence.

Fermor doesn’t tell you where he’s going. He dances through Habsburg ruins, ancient epics, Transylvanian drinking songs, and classical Greek philosophy like an aristocratic honeybee. And yet, he never once asks for your approval. Quite the opposite. He is demanding.

At some point during this Fermorian detour, something mildly surreal happened. A Greek woman, middle-aged, with a soft smile and the unusually specific job title of Licensed Real Estate Agent Specialist in Historic and Second Homes, found me on LinkedIn. Not through politics or work, but because she had been searching for fellow admirers of Patrick Leigh Fermor. She described him, touchingly, as her “beloved author”.

She lived in Mani, the stark and dramatic Greek peninsula where Fermor had built his house and spent his final years. She invited me, quite matter-of-factly, to visit. She sent a link to the Leigh Fermor House, now a museum, and another to Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, as if to say, gently, that I should know what I was being invited into.

The whole exchange had the quiet strangeness of good fiction. Unlikely, unnecessary, oddly perfect. As if Fermor himself had conspired to prove that literary fellowship still outpaces geography, genre, and Google algorithms.

It is easy to mock this. Who reads obscure British travellers? Who walks across continents? Who even uses the word immure anymore? And yet, Patrick Leigh Fermor has his following. For good reason. He is the anti-Instagram traveller. He writes as if the world will never end, as if there’s all the time in the world to contemplate the particular hue of a Hungarian sunset. He reminds you what it is like to truly encounter the other. To be humbled by difference.

For Indians, who have made a national sport out of domestic tourism and a class statement out of foreign travel, Fermor offers an alternate route. One where you don’t just see places. You are changed by them. His books make a mockery of our self-congratulatory Instagram captions from Salzburg and Budapest. Fermor lived in these places, ate in their poorest kitchens, drank their harshest local brews, wooed their girls, studied their histories, and slept in their haystacks.

And consider this. He never went to university. He was expelled from The King’s School, Canterbury, for holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter. No formal education followed. No Rhodes Scholarship, no PPE, no Oxbridge pedigree to airbrush the rough edges.

There is a sentence in Between the Woods and the Water that layers history, sound, and evening light into a single breath:

“Dropping toward the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk.”

It begins as a sunset. It ends as a battle hymn. The churches of Cluj, Romania, are not marking time. They are re-enacting centuries of religious contest, each peal of the bell a declaration of precedence. It is history disguised as observation, and no one but Fermor would think to write it this way, let alone carry it off.

More than anything, Fermor’s books remind us that elegance is not the enemy of seriousness. Indians are suspicious of elegance. We mistake austerity for depth and efficiency for virtue. But Fermor has both style and substance.

Would I recommend Fermor to someone looking for “quick takeaways”? No. That would be like offering a cigar to someone with asthma. But if you are willing to be patient, to be challenged, to be occasionally humbled by your own ignorance, then Paddy is your man.

And for us Indians in particular, growing richer, more rooted, and consequently more anxious about our place in the world, he offers a tonic. He makes the case, through every florid, flocculent, fiercely intelligent sentence, that the world is worth knowing deeply. Not scanning, not documenting. Knowing. That is the gift of his time.

And it would be a shame if only Europeans accepted it.