A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I just finished reading A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Fermor, a 1977 book about the author's travels on foot from coast of Holland to Eszetergom, Hungary over the winter of 1933-34 when he was 19. The book ends with the author standing on this bridge watching the people entering the basilica for Easter services. A second book continues his journey to Constantinople. It is an amazing tale of a journey through Europe between the world wars, told by a man in his sixties about a journey he took over 40 years earlier. His memories of his travels through Holland, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia as a young man, telling of the people he meets and the places he sees at the beginning of the Nazis rise to power and before the destruction of Europe by World War II, is tempered by his mature knowledge of these places and what has happened over the intervening 40 years.