Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  On 27 August he left Sofia and headed south towards the great monastery of Rila. ‘Wore my fur kalpak, braid sash and dagger for the first time. Effect excellent.’4

  The monastery of Rila is set deep in the mountains of the Rilska Planina, which were steeper and more dramatic than the undulating Balkan range he had crossed on his way to Sofia. A hard day’s climb took him over the watershed into a burning wilderness of boulders and dried-up torrent beds; then a broad valley descended in a series of huge steps, tarns appeared among the rocks, deciduous trees overtook the conifers, a trail appeared, and he reached Rila at dusk. The effort was worth it. The monastery, which had been sacked and vandalized several times over the centuries, looked heavily fortified from the outside, with a forbidding perimeter wall and a fourteenth-century keep that rose above the shining silver domes of the church. Inside, was an inner courtyard ‘the size of half Trafalgar Square … half orthodox, half madrassa’.5 Surrounding the courtyard were three tiers of arcaded galleries, adorned with loggias and open stairwells.

  It was night by the time he arrived. He made his way to a little khanfn2 outside the walls of the monastery, where a party was in full swing: the Abbot was celebrating the arrival of a friend who had studied with him in St Petersburg. There was much singing and drinking, and Paddy spent the night in a big dormitory on a hard wooden bed. Over the next few days, the monastery courtyards filled with pilgrims coming to celebrate the feast of St Ivan Rilski, founder of the monastery and patron saint of Bulgaria.

  Paddy walked in the mountains to avoid the crowds, and on his return to the monastery two days later he met, among a group of students, a beautiful girl called Penka Krachanova, though Paddy preferred to call her Nadejda. They walked in the mountains, sat and talked and sang, with the monastery laid out beneath them. They spent the evening together, and all of the following day. ‘Lay in each other’s arms talking desultorily. Walked home in the sunset. One of the happiest days of my life,’ he wrote in his diary.6 She lived in Plovdiv, and he promised to look her up when he passed through.

  Returning to the Tollintons in Sofia, Paddy found a Byzantine congress in progress. Among the scholars was Thomas Whittemore, best remembered for his work in uncovering the mosaics of Haghia Sophia in Constantinople. Paddy met him first in the smart Café Bulgaria one evening, and before long they were deep in conversation about Byzantium, especially the monasteries of Athos, the Meteora and Anatolia. Over the next few days, Whittemore introduced Paddy to two other eminent scholars: Steven Runciman and Roger Hinks.

  They were impeccable in Panama hats and suits of cream-coloured Athenian raw silk and their bi-coloured shoes were beautifully blancoed and polished. Both were in their early thirties and they belonged much more to the deck of an Edith Wharton yacht or to the cypress-walk of a palazzo in Henry James than to this hot little Balkan capital. We met several times; their conversation was dazzlingly erudite and comic; then the end of the conference scattered them again.7

  Steven Runciman also remembered meeting Paddy in Sofia – ‘a very bright, very grubby young man’, he recalled.8

  Leaving Sofia Paddy set off south-east, across the plain that had once swarmed with invading armies. The Ottoman occupation of Bulgaria ‘started before the Wars of the Roses, and ended after the Franco-Prussian War’, wrote Paddy. It left desolation: ‘Everything is still impoverished and haphazard, and history in smithereens.’9 He spent the night in a Turkish khan, where families camped and cooked beside their mules and donkeys, and followed the river Maritza to Plovdiv – once known as Philippopolis: a city named after Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon.

  There he looked up Penka, the girl met at Rila. She lived with her grandfather in a house with an inner courtyard, in which grew a pomegranate tree. Paddy was presented to her frail grandfather, a Greek from Constantinople who spoke perfect French – Paddy remembered her kissing his hands in greeting.10 In ‘A Youthful Journey’, he spends happy hours with Penka in an airy room with divans around the walls at the top of the house. Here they dressed up in antique clothes from a huge chest, staged mock sword-fights, and he drew her portrait wearing Turkish clothes and smoking a chibouk. In his diary, there is nothing like such detail – though he does mention spending an afternoon at her house, ‘drowsy and amorous, she’s a grand girl’.11 He described her as his twin since they were born within a day of each other, and she gave him ‘all the fun and the lightness and ease that one had been missing since the banks of the Maros’12 – since his time with Xenia, that is. She also gave him a heavy silver medal bearing an image of St George, or possibly St Dimitri, slaying a dragon. He wore it on a leather bootlace round his neck, and lost it swimming in the Bay of Artemis by Lemonodassos two or three years later.

  Paddy spent five days in Plovdiv. He recalled the metal-workers, saddle-makers, wool-carders and tobacco-sorters whose workshops lined the cobbled alleys. He saw Turks, the first since Ada Kaleh, and Pomaks: Bulgarians who had converted to Islam. Listening hard, he caught at the languages that flowed all around him: Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Romany, and – from the Sephardic Jewish quarter – Ladino, a form of fifteenth-century Castilian Spanish.

  He decided to leave on 24 September. ‘Rather sentimental tonight,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as I have decided to quit tomorrow.’13 Years later, he was not so emotionally brisk.

  The whole itinerary was a chain of minor valedictions … But when, through some natural affinity … these encounters plunged deeper and spread their quick roots of friendship, affection, passion, love – even if it were no more than the unavowed electrical flicker of its possibility – these farewells became shattering deracinations; as they had been in Transylvania and as they were now. Voilà l’herbe qu’on fauche, in the words of Banville that I had been listening to so recently, et le laurier qu’on coupe.14

  The Turkish border was now only about a hundred and forty kilometres away, if Paddy had followed the Maritza valley south-east from Plovdiv. But he did not want to leave Bulgaria without seeing the Byzantine treasures that lay in and around the ancient city of Tirnovo, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north. From there he planned to return to Rumania, visit as yet unseen Bucharest, and eventually make his way down the Black Sea coast to Constantinople. It would add several hundred miles to the journey but Paddy was in no hurry; travelling had become a way of life.

  Karlovo was far more Turkish than Bulgarian, both in its inhabitants and its architecture. He saw a Turkish wedding procession – ‘Flute, bagpipes, tambourine … bride unveiled … Flowers stuck on cheek, kissing the elders’ hand. Sweets. Scrabble. Caught one.’ In a mosque, he attended prayers for the first time: ‘obeisances, standing, squatting, touching floor with foreheads … watched it all, fascinated.’15

  He walked north-eastwards, following the line of the Stara Planina mountains that rose abruptly from the plain. His destination was the monastery that had been built on the Shipka Pass, where he arrived long after dark after an exhausting walk. The monastery looked magical in the moonlight, but he was not allowed in. There was no choice but to curl up in his coat under an oak tree. He woke ‘feeling like death, cold and still, aching in every joint, with a coating of dew on my clothes’.16

  Walking down the hill to the hospital part of the monastery, he took breakfast with a group of people who, from their shirts, boots and peaked caps, he saw to be Russian refugees. One of them, a Captain Yanoff, though dressed in rags, was educated, well travelled, and spoke both English and French: he gave Paddy a detailed account of the Battle of Shipka Pass, in which the Russians and Bulgarians defeated the Turks in 1877–8.

  The way to Kazanlik lay south-east through a walnut forest, where a band of gypsies were beating the branches with poles to release the nuts. Their children swarmed round Paddy, whining and begging till he waved his stick and swore at them in English, ‘which shut them up like a box’.17 He had often passed bands of gypsies as he travelled through eastern Europe, and their brazen mockery made him feel uncomf
ortable. Near Esztergom, gypsy boys had tried to sell him bunches of dead weasels, stoats and rats, which they had chased out of their holes with buckets of water. Pips Schey told him that when they buried a dead horse on the farm at Kövecses, the gypsies would dig it up for meat. The authorities hated them for they refused conscription and census alike, but they were highly skilled musicians. ‘The songs they play’, wrote Paddy, ‘are wild and intoxicating … and some of the airs … are so melancholy and touching that it is hard to keep the tears from one’s eyes when hearing them.’18

  Kazanlik, the centre of the rose-oil industry, was a sad little town where Paddy had an introduction to Mr Barnaby Crane. This faded Englishman had come from Lancashire in his youth to work in the textile trade, and had married a Bulgarian girl. He did not miss England, and told Paddy he would ‘breathe his last in Bulgaria’,19 which Paddy – prone to bouts of severe homesickness – found very depressing. But Mr Crane treated him to a good dinner, and gave him 250 levas after breakfast the following morning. Paddy accepted it gratefully, as he was almost out of money.

  He made his way back to the Shipka monastery and from there set off northwards, along the old Turkish way that climbed up the mountain to the pass itself. Soon the monastery’s glinting domes were out of sight; and as he climbed, the folds of the mountains rolled out below him covered with golden beeches. Further up, a mist gathered till he could hardly see, and soon came ominous rolls of thunder. The rain fell in torrents, and for three quarters of an hour he stumbled on, soaked to the skin, till he came upon a little khan. Inside were the owner, and four or five whiskery shepherds in fur kalpaks.

  The owner made him take off his wet things and set them to dry before the stove; and sitting him down in pyjamas and a sheepskin overcoat, the kind man gave him a drink of hot brandy and water, followed by a plate of boiled mutton and potatoes. Paddy spent the rest of the evening ‘yarning with the peasants, the rain beating on the windows and the wind rattling them and the thunder crashing outside … I won’t ever forget it; it was one of the jolliest evenings I have ever spent.’20

  In Gabrovo he looked up another compatriot: a young English woman in her twenties called Mrs Pojarlieff, married to a Bulgarian. Paddy stayed the night with her and her husband, who played the violin, and they gave him some books – Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion and Pygmalion, and Balzac’s Contes drolatiques; but the whole visit was tinged with sadness, for it was obvious that Mrs Pojarlieff was very ill.

  Tirnovo, the old capital of the Bulgarian tsars, is built in a series of steps on the edge of a spectacular canyon, at the bottom of which roars the river Yantra. It was already dark when Paddy reached it, on the evening of 4 October. He found a little khan full of peasants who had come to town for market day. The owner spoke German, and told Paddy he could sleep there. In the morning he explored the tangled network of busy streets and steps. ‘Moccasins, scarlet sashes and sheepskin hats crowded the steps and intermingled with flocks, donkeys and mules, climbing and descending the steep thoroughfare like the traffic of Jacob’s ladder.’21

  The man who owned the khan also had a grocer’s shop; and his son, whose name was Georgi Gatschev, decided to take the young Englishman under his wing. This was lucky, for Paddy was down to his last few pence and there was nothing waiting for him at the post office. Georgi taught Paddy some Bulgarian songs, and Paddy taught him some English and German ones in return.

  On 9 October, while he was still anxiously awaiting the arrival of money from England, Tirnovo erupted into a fierce celebration on hearing the news that Alexander I of Yugoslavia had just been assassinated by a Bulgarian nationalist. The Bulgarians had a particular loathing of the Greeks and Serbs, who had gained territory at their expense at the end of the Balkan wars. To punish Bulgaria for joining the wrong side, the peace treaties of 1919 decreed that the province of Macedonia be divided between Greece and the newly-formed Yugoslavia. It was a bitter loss, which the Bulgarians now felt had been avenged.

  Paddy noted the assassination in his diary, but wrote almost nothing at the time about the reactions of those around him. But years later he described how the town went wild. In a restaurant he visited that evening everyone was jubilant, laughing and hugging each other and calling for more wine and slivo as they sung ‘Shumi Maritza’, the Bulgarian national anthem. ‘The tinkle of a thrown slivo glass on the dance floor evoked a cheer. Soon they were whizzing and smashing all over it …’22 People got to their feet and, throwing their arms round each other’s shoulders, began to dance, grinding the smashed glass under their heels while the band tried to keep up. Georgi joined a particularly rowdy set, who were pulling the tablecloths off the laid tables, while – to the manager’s dismay – another group threw an entire table, fully laden, over the railing and into the ravine.

  Paddy did not elaborate further on the festivities, having come across a German traveller with an English mother called Hans Franheim, with whom he found he had several friends in common. Paddy and Hans spent the next few days together, visiting the Preobazhensky monastery, a Turkish cemetery, a mosque, and wandering about the town. They took their meals together, went drinking and dancing – sometimes joined by Georgi, sometimes not. For Paddy, the company of the well-read, cultivated Hans was a relief from that of Georgi and his boisterous circle.

  This put Georgi into a very irritable mood, as did Paddy’s plan of leaving Tirnovo and heading north for Bucharest. All Rumanians were cheats, liars and thieves, and the very fact that Paddy wanted to visit them was a betrayal, Georgi said. Paddy tried to tell him that politics were of little interest to him: he wanted to know what people were like, to learn about their history and what they ate and wore and sang. Georgi refused to understand. In his world-view there was no room for innocent bystanders, and if Paddy was Georgi’s friend, then he should feel like a Bulgarian. A slight chill settled over his last few days in Tirnovo, and not only from Georgi: his friends, too, seemed to be giving Paddy the cold shoulder. Georgi said it was because they thought he was a spy. Paddy scoffed at the idea, and Georgi evidently thought better of it too. Paddy promised to visit him in Varna on his return from Bucharest.

  He left Tirnovo on 15 October, heading north for Rustchuk (now Ruse), on the Bulgarian side of the Danube. His allowance had still not arrived, but Georgi lent him three hundred levas that Paddy promised to pay back. At Trambes there was a fair, after which he fell in step with a man with a dancing bear. That night, after much carousing and dancing to gypsy music in a tavern, Paddy and the bear-owner were told they could sleep on the balcony. His companion slept with his arms round the bear, ‘which snorted and grunted all night’.23

  Arriving in Rustchuk, he made his way with pounding heart to the post office where, to his intense relief, money and letters were waiting. After sending the money he owed Georgi, Paddy sat down in a café with a pile of newspapers and read all about the assassination of King Alexander. He crossed the Danube into Rumania on 23 October, and the following evening, he was in Bucharest.

  ‘Bucharest amazing town,’ wrote Paddy in his diary, ‘almost like London or Paris, not like Sofia … Wandered around ages, soaking it in. Lights, cars, everything. Lovely town.’24 He also noticed the horse-drawn cabs, driven by stout figures in long blue caftans with tiny eyes, soft skin and a strangely high-pitched voice. He later discovered they were Russian and belonged to the Skopzi, a religious sect spread across Bessarabia and southern Russia. The adult males, having married and sired one or two children, castrated themselves to achieve a closer union with God.

  Thanks to Tibor and Bertha Berg, Elemér von Klobusitzky, Count and Countess Jenö Teleki and others, Paddy arrived in Bucharest well armed with telephone numbers and letters of introduction. Among the first people to scoop him up were Count Ambrose O’Kelly and his wife Elena Filipescu. He spent the weekend with them in their villa in the mountain resort of Sinaia, where King Carol had a summer palace bristling with towers and finials. Everyone spoke French, and Paddy was enchanted by the sophistic
ation and beauty of the women.

  He had been invited to stay with Josias (‘Joey’) von Rantzau, a German diplomat whom he had met in Transylvania. His new lodgings were close to perfection: Josias begged him to help himself to drinks, cigarettes and cigars – ‘We get them practically free’ – while his flat was filled with books on Rumania and various encyclopedias. Josias’s Rumanian mistress, Marcelle Catargi, came from a great boyar family; and together they introduced Paddy to the cream of Bucharest society. Evenings passed in a whirl of cocktail parties, dinner parties and nightclubs, and often ended with late-night talking sessions with his host over a bottle of brandy. Rantzau once asked Paddy: ‘Do you believe in the phrase, my country right or wrong?’25 He was deeply troubled by the rise of Nazism.

  The Nazis did not cast much of a shadow over Paddy’s glamorous life with the beau-monde of Bucharest, nor the flirtation he was enjoying with a woman called Angy Dancos: ‘Sweet Rumanian type – enormous eyes, long lashes, very red mouth, perfect figure, very chic Parisian.’ Paddy did not like her husband: ‘think he suspects I’ve designs on his wife (he’s right, too).’26 Angy was part of what Paddy saw as Bucharest’s bohemian circle, while Josias’s mistress, Marcelle Catargi, belonged to the society set.

  Staying with Josias Rantzau opened several diplomatic doors. Paddy lunched and dined not only at the German Legation with Rantzau, but also at the Polish Legation, and the British Legation with the minister Michael Palairet (who was later Ambassador in Athens). There were shooting parties and visits to the opera, and he became great friends with Constantine Soutzo and Nico Chrissoveloni, with whom he got drunk and went ‘on the prowl’. It is surprising that he had any time for books at all, but he mentions reading Harold Nicolson’s Some People, R.W. Seton-Watson’s History of the Roumanians, and a play: Noël Coward’s The Vortex.