A Return to Patrick Leigh Fermor - in the Trans-Carpathian forests

I want to take you back once again to Patrick Leigh Fermor. 

If you've read this blog before, you'll know that Fermor is a Titan in my canon.  His 1977 book, A Time of Gifts, which I read a few months ago, is quite literally a gift to the reader.  With an abundance of medieval history, art history, linguistics, and travelogue writing jewels, this is one of the best, one of the most beautiful, one of the most interesting books I've read in a long, long time.

I'm including in today's post excerpts from the book for your enjoyment, your education, and your empowerment, along with some pictures to help illustrate where he's talking about and what he's talking about.

And so we begin...

[While hiking along a stretch of the River Danube in Austria, about 16 miles from the current Slovakian  border, Fermor approaches the town of Petronell.  And so we learn of the The Miracle of the Thundering Legions.]

Arch of Titus

"...as I approached the little town of Petronell, by wondering what a distant object could be that was growing steadily larger as I advanced.  It turned out to be a Roman triumphal gateway standing in the middle of a field like a provincial version of the Arch of Titus; alone, enormous and astonishing.  

Petronell-Carnuntum, Austria

The vault sprang from massive piers and the marble facings had long fallen away, laying bare a battered and voluminous core of brick and rubble.  Rooks crowded all over it and hopped among the half-buried fragments that scattered the furrows.  Visible for miles, the arch of Carnuntum must have amazed the Marcomanni and the Quadi on the opposite side of the bank.

A Marcomanni warrior (second century A.D.)

The Quadi (second century A.D.)

Marcus Aurelius wintered here three years, striding cloaked across the ploughland amid the hovering pensees, alternately writing his meditations and subduing the barbarians on the other side of the Danube.  His most famous victory--fought in a deep canyon and celestially reinforced by thunder and hail--was known as the Miracle of the Thundering Legions." (p. 234) (See the end of the post for an explanation of the Miracle of the Thundering Legions.)


The Edge of the Slav World

[Fermor wanders into a "lively drinking-hell" in rural Czechoslovakia.]

"...Enmeshed in smoke and the fumes of plum-brandy with paprika-pods sizzling on the charcoal, they were hiccupping festive dactyls to each other and unsteadily clinking their tenth thimblefuls of palinka: vigorous, angular-faced, dark-clad and dark-glanced men with black mustaches tipped down at the corners of their mouths.  Their white shirts were buttoned at the throat.

They wore low-crowned black hats with narrow brims and high boots of shiny black leather with a Hessian notch at the knee.  Hunnish whips were looped about their wrists.  They might have just dismounted after sacking the palace of the Moravian kral."  (p. 242)


[ On the next day, and down the street Fermor was in another tavern...]

"...the tow-haired Slovaks drinking there were dressed in conical fleece hats and patched sheepskin-jerkins with the matted wool turned inwards.  They were shod in canoe-shaped cowhide moccasins.  Their shanks, cross-gartered with uncured thongs, were bulbously swaddled in felt that would only be unwrapped in the spring.  Swamp-and-conifer men they looked, with faces tundrablank and eyes as blue and as vague as unmapped lakes which the plum-brandy was misting over.  But they might just as well have been swallowing hydromel a thousand years earlier, before setting off to track the cloven spoor of the aurochs across a frozen Trans-Carpathian bog."  (p. 242) 

Prague Under Snow

Church of St. George

[Fermor takes a tour of the Hradschin, the citadel that dominates the capital city of Prague.  Within the citadel's walls, one finds the church of St. George.]

"They separated, converged again, and crossed each other and as they sped away, enclosed slender spans of wall like the petals of tulips; and when two ribs intersected, they might both have been obliquely notched and then half-joggled together with studied carelessness.  They writhed on their own axes and simultaneously followed the curve of the vault; and often, after these contorted intersections, the ribs that followed a concave thrust were chopped off short while the convex plunged headlong and were swallowed up in the masonry.  The loose mesh tightened as it neared the rounded summit and the frantic reticulation jammed in momentary deadlock. 

Inside the cathedral at Hradschin

 Four truncated ribs, dovetailing in rough parallelograms, formed keystones and then broke loose again with a wildness which at first glance resembled organic violence clean out of control.  But a second glance, embracing the wider design, captured a strange and marvellous coherence, as though petrifaction had arrested this whirling dynamism at a chance moment of balance and harmony,"  (p. 257)

Inside the Trans-Carpathian forest (Hungary, Romania, Ukraine)

Fermor, Patrick Leigh.  A Time of Gifts, New York: New York Review Books, 2005.

[The Miracle of the Thundering Legion:  The story is that the Romans, entangled in a defile, were suffering from thirst. A sudden storm gave abundance of rain, while hail and thunder confounded their enemies, and enabled the Romans to gain an easy and complete victory. This triumph was universally considered at the time, and for long afterwards, to have been a miracle, and bore the title of "The Miracle of the Thundering Legion." The pagan writers ascribed the victory to the magic arts of an Egyptian named Arnuphis who prevailed on Mercury and other gods to give relief, while the Christians attributed it to the prayers of their brethren in a legion to which, they affirmed, the emperor then gave the name of "The Thundering." (Courtesy of NNDB Mapper)]