In December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 18, set out to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’, the antique toponym of contemporary Istanbul, carrying The Oxford Book of English Verse and a translation of Horace's poetry in his rucksack. Following in the footsteps of young aristocrats embarking on the Grand Tour on the cusp of adulthood, he craved a dramatic change of scenery, in contrast with ‘the dissipated nocturnal ramblings’ shared among London Bohemian circles. The transformative power of a trip towards the East, beyond the confines of the known and the familiar, was intimately bound to the choice of pedestrianism that involved a multisensory initiation into the untranslatable:

Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey across Central Europe conjures up, as Charles Forsdick has argued, ‘nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying’, exemplified by the frugal travails of medieval monks and wandering scholars. Eager to ‘travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps’, the young traveller nonetheless spent several months in baroque castles and country houses in the company of barons and counts, ‘talking of art, culture and history […], discovering the treasures of ancient libraries’. But he did not relinquish his initial commitment to walking as a prime means of locomotion that facilitated direct engagement with places and people.

This contribution will investigate the effects of walking on the sensory apprehension of boundary-crossing – whether symbolic or territorial – and on intercultural encounters in Leigh Fermor's travel narrative. Indeed, as we are reminded by Manfred Beller, ‘there is no such thing as a pristine encounter’, and in A Time of Gifts, the confrontation with the unfamiliar is frequently mediated through the lens of cultural analogies, conjuring up Brueghelian landscapes and Shakespearean Bohemia.