Patrick Leigh Fermor · 2013 · overland

The final volume of Leigh Fermor's walk, unfinished at his death and assembled afterwards from his manuscripts and the green diary he kept at the time. It runs from the Iron Gates through Bulgaria and over the Balkan range to the Black Sea, on to Constantinople - and then, in the diary itself, to the monasteries of Mount Athos.

1. 1
   The Iron Gates

   The road picks up at the Danube gorge where the second volume left him, and the country changes: Bulgaria and Romania, minarets and Orthodox bells, and a traveller who has now been walking for the better part of a year.

2. 2
   Rousse

   Along the Danube to Rousse and the Bulgarian bank, into a world of Turkish survivals, river ports and villages where an Englishman on foot is a genuine curiosity worth feeding and arguing with.

3. 3
   The Great Balkan

   Over the Stara Planina in bad weather - the range that gave the peninsula its name - through passes and monasteries, sleeping wherever he is taken in and writing it all down in a diary he later thought lost.

4. 4
   Varna

   Down to the Black Sea at Varna and south along the coast, in fishing villages and caves, among Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks - the most vivid writing in the book, because here it is the diary talking rather than the memoirist.

5. 5
   Constantinople

   He reaches Constantinople on New Year's Eve 1934, having walked from Holland - and characteristically says almost nothing about it, the pages covering the arrival being the ones that were never written.

6. 6
   Mount Athos

   The diary carries on past the destination to Mount Athos, where he goes from monastery to monastery on the holy mountain - and the trilogy, seventy years in the writing, stops there rather than ends.