---
product_id: 4106342
title: "Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics)"
brand: "patrick leigh fermorjan morris"
price: "VT9700"
currency: VUV
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.vu/products/4106342-between-the-woods-and-the-water-on-foot-to-constantinople
store_origin: VU
region: Vanuatu
---

# Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics)

**Brand:** patrick leigh fermorjan morris
**Price:** VT9700
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics) by patrick leigh fermorjan morris
- **How much does it cost?** VT9700 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.vu](https://www.desertcart.vu/products/4106342-between-the-woods-and-the-water-on-foot-to-constantinople)

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## Description

Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Extraordinary portrait of a largely vanished world
  

*by C***O on Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2011*

On the one hand, there is a young Anglo-Irish romantic expelled from school, possessing uncommon charm, an astonishing facility for languages, and an interest in everything under the sun & moon.  His collaborator is an urbane & erudite autodidact with the benefit of further research and a half century of hindsight.  The young man is 19-year-old Paddy Leigh Fermor, who set out to walk across Europe when Hitler had just come to power.  The mentor is the older Paddy, an authentic war hero, distinguished writer, and confidante of the old and new nobility.  The result is a brilliant travel memoir, of which this volume is the middle part (the first is A Time of Gifts, the third alas was not published before his death in June 2011) covering Hungary and Romania.  It suggests a bildungsroman as the young man exults in the wooded hills and tributaries of the Danube, sleeping rough, befriending peasants, laborers, and the last remnants of a dying class of landed nobility.  The narrative wanders, like the author, around linguistic traces mirroring the flux of various peoples across the plains of central Europe.  He chronicles remnants of a vanishing way of life as he passes from one Count to another, one estate to the next, and a succession of private libraries that illuminate the historical context.Fermor is an exceptional literary stylist, which facet builds upon his gift for observation to describe the natural world, the constructed world, and personalities.  As one traverses Transylvania today, a modern traveler realizes that the age of landed gentry is long past, as Fermor recognized when he revisited many years later.  But some of the natural landscape is still evident, and some of the architecture remains.  A visitor can alternate between Fermor's text and the actual object (in this case a World Heritage fortified church) and find the book still a reliable guide:"At the heart of each village, sturdy churches reared squat, four-sided steeples with a tough, defensive look. ...  Pierced by arrow-slits, the walls rose sheer, then expanded in machicolations; and above these, rows of short uprights like squat pillars formed galleries that hoisted pyramids of steeple.  They were as full of purpose as bits of armour and the uprights between steeple and coping gave the triangular roofs a look of helmets with nasal pieces and eye-slits."Both Fermors had catholic interests, and this happy characteristic helped the younger man to find common ground with almost everybody.  He camped with Roma (gypsies) and shepherds, stayed with a Habsburg Count and many others of that class, communicated by sign language with swineherds, spoke French with a housekeeper, Latin with a Franciscan monk, German with loggers, and memorably befriended a Rabbi by showing interest and a little facility in Hebrew scripture.  He provided a wonderful rhyming translation of the tragic-mystic Romanian poem Mioritza.Besides poetry, he picked up tales of fairies, werewolves, and vampires (which, along with the historical figure Vlad Tsepesh, nurtured the invention of the Dracula story) and descântece, metrical witches' spells.  He delighted another host, a famous entomologist, with a riddle on the most entomological of Shakespeare's plays ("Antennae and Coleoptera").This is the grandest sort of travel book, depicting geography and monuments, interwoven with history and linguistics and natural history, describing the lives of vanishing peoples, told from the perspectives both of a neophyte seeing undeservedly obscure parts of the wide world with fresh eyes, and a wonderfully knowledgeable scholar of action, all transmuted into elegant prose of great descriptive power.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Travel Books
  

*by C***Y on Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2011*

Between the Woods and the Water, along with Time of Gifts, must rank in the top 10 travel books of all time (including Colossus of Maroussi,etc.), for several reasons.  First, Pat Fermor bridges two period legacies - the slow stately moving time of Old World nobility and comfort, from the Baron's oak, leather and velvet encased library to the yeoman's deer headed, giant stone fireplaced, stained glassed and snow surrounded pub, and the modern world (where not 5 years later, he was to parachute into Crete and lead a band of Cretan partisans against the Nazi occupation). One can tell from Patrick's desciptions that he feels what is coming, but prefers not to face it quite yet.  Secondly, referring to my last remark, the time of history is epochal, right before the second World War, when the millenia-long midafternoon of finally settled European nations had become, after the First World War, an evening of nostalgic longing for a better time; all the appearances and architectural glories were still in place, but the deep diapasson of world change was already rumbling underground. Fermor catches all of this in his writing - does not make a point of it, but you can feel it in the air - therefore, the book is also a description of history on the move.  Thirdly, Patrick is not even twenty years old yet, a very young man traveling on foot alone at a time when nobody in any country set out to do what he succeeded in doing.  The welcomes he received and the myriad tales and experiences he encountered would be available only to one so young, treated as a younger son to whom gifts and assistance would invariably be given.  Someone older, wealthier ,and traveling by vehicle would never have experienced what he did.  Lastly, he is a spectacularly good descriptive writer, with regard to his own encounters and thoughts, and the world around him.  Since he bridged both the older and the modern epochs, his education far surpassed almost anyone of his age today, so his ability to link what he saw and the past the preceded it is fantastic.  I recommend this book as highly as it possible so to do.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Sturdy Sequel
  

*by K***C on Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2011*

Budapest... the Hungarian Plains... Romania... Transylvania.  Sound capital-R Romantic?  It's that and more in the adept hands of Patrick Leigh Fermor.  This continues the story of his 1934 travels through Europe as a 19-year-old.  And if anything, the pastoral settings of Eastern Europe suit his descriptive hand even better than this book's predecessor, A TIME OF GIFTS.  Here is a glimmer of Fermor's writing as he describes the Carpathian Uplands:"These great forest chambers, bounded by mingled stretches of hardwood and underbrush, slanted uphill and out of sight in a confusion of roots.  Freshets channeled the penumbra, falling from rocky overhangs into pools that could be heard from afar, or welled up through husks and dead leaves and turned into streams.  There had been two hoopoes in the lower woods and bee-eaters, with an eye to the hives perhaps, perched on twigs near the harvesters' clearing; golden orioles, given away by their black and yellow plumage and the insistent shrill curl of their song, darted among the branches.  But every so often invisible flocks of wood-pigeons plunged everything under a spell so drowsy, it was hard, sitting down for a smoke, to keep awake; then a footfall would loose off a hundred flurried wings and set them circling in the speckled light of one of the forest ballrooms like Crystal Palace multitudes calling for Wellingtonian hawks."It resembles an idyll, the way his pen lends itself to descriptive passages of nature, and the wild beauties of this more mysterious corner of Europe comes to life because of it.  Part III of this book has yet to be published, though they say Fermor completed most of it before his recent death in June of 2011.  Until then, if you are a devotee of travel writing or nature writing, you owe yourself a look at Fermor's delightful tandem, A TIME OF GIFTS followed by BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER.

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*Store origin: VU*
*Last updated: 2026-02-10*