Peter Costello
Patrick Leigh Fermor is the justly famous author of some of the best travel books of the last century.
This book is the final part, published posthumously, that rounds out his recreation of walking across Europe in the 1930s, begun in The Time of Gifts and The Way Through the Woods. His destination was supposed to be Constantinople, but as the title reveals he ends in Mount Athos.
This place of retreat seems a very fitting conclusion, for the author was in love, not so much with Byzantium and ancient imperial glory, but in the eternal verities of Greece itself, in life, art, philosophy and religion. Written oddly enough before the other books but never completed due to a catastrophic writer’s block that marred his last years, it now appears to the delight of all readers interested in understanding something of the Europe we have lost.
