...if you're not familiar with this fine book by the legendary Patrick Leigh Fermor then nip off now and make yourself so acquainted at once. This post will still be here when you return!
It is a wonderful evocation of a grand time in a young man's life as he travels largely, though not exclusively, on foot through pre-War Hungary and Romania; the largest portion of it being time spent among the glorious mountains and peoples of Transylvania.
Eastern Europe was to me a lost place when I was but a growing boy, locked into eternal dull captivity behind the wall of the Iron Curtain. Half my continent was gone. It has now come back to me and to itself, of course, it never left. But of it, its history, its struggles and its beauties I knew little if anything. An single relentless communist grey land.
But reading PLF one learned that there was magnificent life there before the War. Tremendous bottomless hospitality, deep held customs and beliefs, passions for politics, for life and for love, stupendous vistas and darn near perfect - because now half-decayed - castles and keeps. Families whose ancestry receded into the time of the Roman legions - by myth at least if not provable fact - loyalties to creeds and cultures that would shame a 'modern' country that lets slip the ways of a past generation before they are cold in their tombs.
Written some fifty years after the events, Paddy allows himself the occasional regret for something missed - though much was not. One such regret was the necessary overshooting of Sibiu, a glorious city in the very heart of the place.
It seem only then fitting that someone should now volunteer to rectify that omission.
I leave tonight then for the very heart of Transylvania. Time methinks indeed for such a glorious adventure. I shan't be walking there though. PLF, bless him, trod that way. I shall fly.
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