Patrick Leigh Fermor: On Foot to Constantinople

On 8 December 1933, aged eighteen, Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk the length of Europe. In his pack were a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a Loeb volume of Horace's Odes. He had picked midwinter for the start, and Holland met him with snow; his book remembers those first hours in Rotterdam. The Hook is still a ferry port: boats to eastern England have sailed from its terminal since 1893.

Location precision: The sources name the Hook of Holland as the starting point, not a particular spot; the pin marks the village by the harbour.

Visitor guidance: Hook of Holland is a district of Rotterdam with a ferry terminal for eastern England.

In Stuttgart Leigh Fermor met a charming girl and ended up staying in her luxurious apartment. One night, leafing through a book on German history, he came across a picture of the knights of Maximilian I and admired it extravagantly. The scene sets a pattern for the whole walk: a strange new city, a chance meeting, a flight of aesthetic reverie, a hint of money and romance. He had meant to sleep in barns and shepherds' huts, and sometimes did, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into the country houses of Central Europe.

Location precision: The sources name the city but not the street; the pin marks the city centre.

Disaster struck at a youth hostel: his rucksack, with his journal inside, was stolen. Leigh Fermor took a letter of introduction to Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff, a White Russian, who invited him to stay at his castle at Gräfelfing, near Munich. The family replaced the rucksack and most of what had been in it, and gave him a small mid-seventeenth-century edition of Horace to put inside. They also introduced him to other castle owners, so that from then on his journey became a series of climbs to the top of society and drops to the bottom.

Location precision: The review names the village but not the castle; the pin marks Gräfelfing.

Melk is the high point of A Time of Gifts. Seeing the great Baroque monastery set Leigh Fermor off on a long excursus on how such architecture developed, and the abbey is called the metaphorical climax of his walking tour. It is a Benedictine house on a rocky outcrop above the Danube. The building he saw was raised between 1702 and 1736 to designs by Jakob Prandtauer, and it is now part of the Wachau Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site.

Visitor guidance: The abbey stands above the town of Melk, in Lower Austria.

In Vienna Leigh Fermor scraped coins together and slept in the quarters for tramps, where Konrad, a Frisian pastor's son much come down in the world, greeted him in an English learned from reading Shakespeare. In February 1934, while they were in the city, a socialist rising was put down at the Karl-Marx-Hof: insurgents barricaded themselves inside, and the army, police and paramilitaries bombarded the building until they surrendered. He later bitterly regretted misjudging the events. The Karl-Marx-Hof, 1,100 metres long, is one of the longest single residential buildings in the world.

Location precision: The tramps' quarters are not identified; the pin marks the Karl-Marx-Hof, the scene of the rising he was in the city for.

Visitor guidance: The Karl-Marx-Hof is a residential block in Heiligenstadt, the 19th district; view it from the street.

In Bratislava, with Hungary just across the Danube, Leigh Fermor found himself unable to resist a Czech friend's invitation to see Prague. He zigzagged round the city goggling at castles and bridges, relics and nightclubs, and he wrote of Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle, where the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel and higher to soar. The hall was used for large public events of the Bohemian monarchy and was big enough for knights to hold tournaments. Only after this digression did he turn south again to the Danube and his planned itinerary.

Visitor guidance: Vladislav Hall is inside the Prague Castle complex.

A Time of Gifts ends on the Mária Valéria Bridge, and the next volume begins with Leigh Fermor's crossing into Esztergom. He came over the Danube from Slovakia in spring 1934, just in time for a magnificent Easter service at the town's basilica, the largest church in Hungary. The bridge, some 500 metres long, had been cut in two by the new border in 1920 and completely reconstructed in 1926. It was blown up in December 1944 and reopened only on 11 October 2001; today there are no border controls on it.

Visitor guidance: The bridge joins Esztergom in Hungary and Štúrovo in Slovakia; there are no border controls.

Ada Kaleh was a small Turkish island in the Danube, a free port with a mosque, twisting alleys and a name as a smugglers' nest, where the islanders made Turkish delight, baklava and rose products. In August 1934 Leigh Fermor spent a night here, visited elderly inhabitants and took a ferry through the Iron Gates, the gorge on the Serbia-Romania border. He reached them at the end of his nineteenth summer, on the Feast of the Dormition. The island was submerged in 1970 by the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant, so the pin now marks open water.

In the late summer of 1934 Leigh Fermor was in Bulgaria, the stretch of the walk told in The Broken Road, which was edited from his diary and a draft written in the 1960s and published in 2013. In Plovdiv, a city that grew on seven syenite hills, he was charmed by the town and by a local woman named Nadejda. Bulgaria was also where, for the first time, he glimpsed a substantial number of Turks. Plovdiv keeps many Roman ruins, including its ancient theatre.

Location precision: The source says only that he visited the town; the pin marks the city centre.

Visitor guidance: Plovdiv has many preserved Roman ruins, including the ancient Roman theatre.

Leigh Fermor reached Istanbul on 1 January 1935, though as a romantic youth he insisted on calling it Constantinople. He had pictured its skyline since boyhood: slender towers and domes rising out of the sea-mist. Oddly, the surviving record of the long-awaited stay is only terse diary notes.

Location precision: The sources record only his arrival in the city; the pin marks Sultanahmet Square in the old city.