Patrick Leigh Fermor was regarded by many as one of the greatest travel writers of his generation, as evidenced in his two finest works, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Some facts about the incredibly awesome Fermor, a man the BBC once described as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene”:
- His mother joined his father (a geologist working in India and the first president of the Indian National Science Academy) within several months of Fermor’s birth, leaving him in England with a farmer’s family.
- He was expelled from King’s School, Canterbury for holding hands with a local greengrocer’s daughter. His housemaster wrote him up as “a dangerous mix of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.”
- In 1933, when he was 18, he set off across the English Channel to wander Europe with only a backpack and a copy of Horace’s “Odes.” He traveled on foot, by train and automobile, even on horseback, bunking with strangers that included “Orthodox Jewish woodcutters in Transylvania, Hungarian Gypsies, White Russian exiles, German barons, French-speaking monks in Austria, and Romanian shepherds along the Danube.” His journey finally ended in January 1937, when he reached Constantinople.
- During World War II, he joined the Irish Guards and was chosen for a Special Operations unit created by Winston Churchill to “wage war by unconventional means.” In an attempt to lead a Greek resistance to German occupation in the Aegean, he lived disguised as a shepherd on the island Crete for over a year until he kidnapped the island’s German commander. The feat earned Fermor the Distinguished Service Order and inspired the film Ill Met by Moonlight.
- Fermor’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was published in 1953, was turned into an opera in 1966 by the Australian composer Malcolm Williamson.
- He finally accepted a knighthood in 2004, after having turned it down in 1991. The Greek government awarded him its highest honor, the Commander of the Phoenix, in 2007.
For more on Patrick Leigh Fermor and other amazing lives, buy The Obits: The New York Times Annual 2012, the best of The New York Times obituaries from the previous year.
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