---
product_id: 199539
title: "The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (NYRB Classics)"
price: "€ 30.48"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.it/products/199539-the-broken-road-from-the-iron-gates-to-mount-athos
store_origin: IT
region: Italy
---

# The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (NYRB Classics)

**Price:** € 30.48
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (NYRB Classics)
- **How much does it cost?** € 30.48 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.it](https://www.desertcart.it/products/199539-the-broken-road-from-the-iron-gates-to-mount-athos)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Review: The capstone to one of the highlights of my reading career - One of the landmarks of travel literature is Patrick Leigh Fermor's three-volume account of his 1934 trek across Europe as a nineteen-year-old. To be sure, though, to characterize the books as "travel literature" may do them a disservice, both because they eclipse almost all other representatives of the genre and because they are much more than a travelogue. PLF mixes in history and ethnology in such an engaging and informative fashion that the books are sui generis. The first two volumes, which I have also reviewed on desertcart, are "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". The second one ended with PLF at the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River between Serbia and Rumania. In THE BROKEN ROAD, PLF resumes his journey through portions of Rumania and much of Bulgaria, crisscrossing that country three times. He travels mostly on foot, sometimes sleeping rough; sometimes staying with shepherds, gypsies, or farmers; sometimes with friends he makes along the way; and on a few occasions with the upper crust. One of the more memorable lodgings was at the "Savoi-Ritz" in Bucharest. When he came upon it, he thought it a small hotel, "about my level, in spite of its daunting name." It turned out to be a brothel and entertaining indeed is PLF's account of late-night, after-work dinner with the five girls of the establishment -- one from Bukovina, a Moldavian, a Transylvanian, a German from a town in the Carpathian passes, and a Gagauz from the Dobrudja ("I gazed at her with the reverence of an ornithologist at the glimpse of an Auckland Island merganser"). Another night was spent with six Bulgarian shepherds and four Greek fishermen in a cave along an isolated inlet of the Black Sea on the coast of Bulgaria. Against a crackling wood fire, PLF witnessed several soulful folk dances, fueled by the raki that PLF had carried in his rucksack. At the opposite end of the spectrum, while staying at the apartment of a German diplomat in Rumania PLF went to a dinner party for Artur Rubinstein, where the great pianist played Chopin after which there broke out "dancing and drinking at an uninhibited tempo". What helps make THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors special is that PLF wrote them, contemplatively, forty to sixty years after the journey itself, with the benefit of the intervening years of life lessons and much scholarship. This gives him greater perspective as well as the opportunity to interlace the story of his travels with fascinating information about the history and the peoples of the places he visits. One small example, this one of the hatred between the Bulgars and the Byzantines: "The hatred is epitomized on either side by the act of one Byzantine emperor, Basil the Bulgar-slayer, who totally blinded a captured Bulgarian army of ten thousand men, leaving a single eye to each hundredth soldier so that the rest might grope their way home to the [Bulgarian] czar: a spectacle so atrocious that the czar, when the pathetic procession arrived, died of grief and shock." PLF's prose is rather baroque in its intricacies, and his vocabulary is prodigious. He is prone to elaborate lists and flights of fancy, both of which are evident in his account of when, while trudging along a railway, the Orient Express suddenly appears out of the darkness and whisks past him, setting him to thinking about "its freight of runaway lovers, cabaret girls, Knights of Malta, vamps, acrobats, smugglers, papal nuncios, private detectives, lecturers in the future of the novel, millionaires, arms' manufacturers, irrigation experts and spies." PLF worked on writing the third volume of his pan-European journey off and on between 1990 and his death in 2011, at age ninety-six. He never finished it. It ends mid-sentence, with the youthful PLF still in Bulgaria, about 120 miles short of his goal, which was Constantinople (as he preferred to call the city). As a point of biography, PLF spent several weeks in Istanbul and then embarked on a tour of the Greek Orthodox monasteries on the rugged peninsula of Mount Athos. During that excursion he maintained a detailed diary, the eighty pages of which are appended to THE BROKEN ROAD. It is entitled "Mount Athos", and it can be skipped. The contrast between it and THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors is stark. As keen an observer as the youthful PLF was, the books written forty and more years later are so much richer and more engaging. They transcend travel literature; for me they are literature pure and simple, and they are among the highlights of my reading career.
Review: One of the best travel books of the last 100 years. - Part 3 of the trilogy by acclaimed Travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, of a journey on foot from the Netherlands to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1933-4 is a fantastic close to one of the best travel adventures of the last 100 years. Fermor flunked out of school in England, grew tired of constant and aimless partying and decided to strike out across Europe by foot. Financed by an allowance of an English Pound a week from his family, he took months gathering acquaintances and language facility as he went - mooching off of everyone he could on the way. Fermor's first book of the series, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics) , wasn't published until 1977, decades after the real events. Fermor relied on memory mostly, and some various diaries and manuscripts relating to the trip. The result was this masterpiece which I feel is the single best travel book of the 20th century. I'm not alone in that belief, by the way. Fermor's second book, published in 1986, wasn't as good for a variety of reason. Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics) This 3rd book was published after Fermor's death in 2011 and wasn't finished. However there were draft versions and variations that had been worked on by Fermor and it was almost finished, so don't think this is mostly non-Fermor. Fermor's biographer, Artemis Cooper Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure , and noted travel author Colin Thubron, successfully edited this book and it reads like vintage Fermor to the end. We get the benefit of an 18 year old starry-eyed wanderer with a glib tongue and a photographic memory superimposed on a much older and wiser author looking back through the years at people and places all too often destroyed in the coming WWII. And the journey is fantastic. A modern day Odysseus, Fermor immerses himself in the experience and as a solitary traveler finds himself out there mixing with royalty and thugs. Fermor shows a great depth of historical knowledge in the Balkans as well as facility with languages. And his descriptive prose puts you right into the scenes being described. I simply don't know enough superlatives to describe this. I think this 3rd book is actually closer to the first work of genius in this series and better than the second. Lately, we have found that many travel writers embellish or adjust or fabricate (read: lie) about their experiences. Chatwin, Morris, Kaczynsky and others have all admitted or been found to make up some of their "non-fiction". Fermor doesn't appear to suffer from this artificiality, as near as I can tell - not knowing the area nor the languages spoken there. This is an excellent book, entertaining, humorous, erudite, and just plain fun and adventurous. Why not 5 stars? The arrival in Constantinople was never fleshed out by Fermor. Still, I highly recommend it and also recommend you start with the first book and read them in order.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,318,571 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #179 in General Europe Travel Guides #333 in Travelogues & Travel Essays #18,265 in Memoirs (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 819 Reviews |

## Images

![The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (NYRB Classics) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61IH+Lp08GL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The capstone to one of the highlights of my reading career
*by R***N on May 10, 2017*

One of the landmarks of travel literature is Patrick Leigh Fermor's three-volume account of his 1934 trek across Europe as a nineteen-year-old. To be sure, though, to characterize the books as "travel literature" may do them a disservice, both because they eclipse almost all other representatives of the genre and because they are much more than a travelogue. PLF mixes in history and ethnology in such an engaging and informative fashion that the books are sui generis. The first two volumes, which I have also reviewed on Amazon, are "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". The second one ended with PLF at the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River between Serbia and Rumania. In THE BROKEN ROAD, PLF resumes his journey through portions of Rumania and much of Bulgaria, crisscrossing that country three times. He travels mostly on foot, sometimes sleeping rough; sometimes staying with shepherds, gypsies, or farmers; sometimes with friends he makes along the way; and on a few occasions with the upper crust. One of the more memorable lodgings was at the "Savoi-Ritz" in Bucharest. When he came upon it, he thought it a small hotel, "about my level, in spite of its daunting name." It turned out to be a brothel and entertaining indeed is PLF's account of late-night, after-work dinner with the five girls of the establishment -- one from Bukovina, a Moldavian, a Transylvanian, a German from a town in the Carpathian passes, and a Gagauz from the Dobrudja ("I gazed at her with the reverence of an ornithologist at the glimpse of an Auckland Island merganser"). Another night was spent with six Bulgarian shepherds and four Greek fishermen in a cave along an isolated inlet of the Black Sea on the coast of Bulgaria. Against a crackling wood fire, PLF witnessed several soulful folk dances, fueled by the raki that PLF had carried in his rucksack. At the opposite end of the spectrum, while staying at the apartment of a German diplomat in Rumania PLF went to a dinner party for Artur Rubinstein, where the great pianist played Chopin after which there broke out "dancing and drinking at an uninhibited tempo". What helps make THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors special is that PLF wrote them, contemplatively, forty to sixty years after the journey itself, with the benefit of the intervening years of life lessons and much scholarship. This gives him greater perspective as well as the opportunity to interlace the story of his travels with fascinating information about the history and the peoples of the places he visits. One small example, this one of the hatred between the Bulgars and the Byzantines: "The hatred is epitomized on either side by the act of one Byzantine emperor, Basil the Bulgar-slayer, who totally blinded a captured Bulgarian army of ten thousand men, leaving a single eye to each hundredth soldier so that the rest might grope their way home to the [Bulgarian] czar: a spectacle so atrocious that the czar, when the pathetic procession arrived, died of grief and shock." PLF's prose is rather baroque in its intricacies, and his vocabulary is prodigious. He is prone to elaborate lists and flights of fancy, both of which are evident in his account of when, while trudging along a railway, the Orient Express suddenly appears out of the darkness and whisks past him, setting him to thinking about "its freight of runaway lovers, cabaret girls, Knights of Malta, vamps, acrobats, smugglers, papal nuncios, private detectives, lecturers in the future of the novel, millionaires, arms' manufacturers, irrigation experts and spies." PLF worked on writing the third volume of his pan-European journey off and on between 1990 and his death in 2011, at age ninety-six. He never finished it. It ends mid-sentence, with the youthful PLF still in Bulgaria, about 120 miles short of his goal, which was Constantinople (as he preferred to call the city). As a point of biography, PLF spent several weeks in Istanbul and then embarked on a tour of the Greek Orthodox monasteries on the rugged peninsula of Mount Athos. During that excursion he maintained a detailed diary, the eighty pages of which are appended to THE BROKEN ROAD. It is entitled "Mount Athos", and it can be skipped. The contrast between it and THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors is stark. As keen an observer as the youthful PLF was, the books written forty and more years later are so much richer and more engaging. They transcend travel literature; for me they are literature pure and simple, and they are among the highlights of my reading career.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the best travel books of the last 100 years.
*by U***N on July 13, 2017*

Part 3 of the trilogy by acclaimed Travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, of a journey on foot from the Netherlands to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1933-4 is a fantastic close to one of the best travel adventures of the last 100 years. Fermor flunked out of school in England, grew tired of constant and aimless partying and decided to strike out across Europe by foot. Financed by an allowance of an English Pound a week from his family, he took months gathering acquaintances and language facility as he went - mooching off of everyone he could on the way. Fermor's first book of the series, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics) , wasn't published until 1977, decades after the real events. Fermor relied on memory mostly, and some various diaries and manuscripts relating to the trip. The result was this masterpiece which I feel is the single best travel book of the 20th century. I'm not alone in that belief, by the way. Fermor's second book, published in 1986, wasn't as good for a variety of reason. Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics) This 3rd book was published after Fermor's death in 2011 and wasn't finished. However there were draft versions and variations that had been worked on by Fermor and it was almost finished, so don't think this is mostly non-Fermor. Fermor's biographer, Artemis Cooper Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure , and noted travel author Colin Thubron, successfully edited this book and it reads like vintage Fermor to the end. We get the benefit of an 18 year old starry-eyed wanderer with a glib tongue and a photographic memory superimposed on a much older and wiser author looking back through the years at people and places all too often destroyed in the coming WWII. And the journey is fantastic. A modern day Odysseus, Fermor immerses himself in the experience and as a solitary traveler finds himself out there mixing with royalty and thugs. Fermor shows a great depth of historical knowledge in the Balkans as well as facility with languages. And his descriptive prose puts you right into the scenes being described. I simply don't know enough superlatives to describe this. I think this 3rd book is actually closer to the first work of genius in this series and better than the second. Lately, we have found that many travel writers embellish or adjust or fabricate (read: lie) about their experiences. Chatwin, Morris, Kaczynsky and others have all admitted or been found to make up some of their "non-fiction". Fermor doesn't appear to suffer from this artificiality, as near as I can tell - not knowing the area nor the languages spoken there. This is an excellent book, entertaining, humorous, erudite, and just plain fun and adventurous. Why not 5 stars? The arrival in Constantinople was never fleshed out by Fermor. Still, I highly recommend it and also recommend you start with the first book and read them in order.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Intriguing though unfinished work
*by T***T on February 15, 2025*

This volume was left unfinished and unedited by PLF, but it is just as well written and interesting as the previous two. And it’s almost a fitting end that his journey ends in ambiguity. The scene of him walking through the Bulgarian mountains with a stray dog, and then along the craggy Black Sea coast and venturing upon a group of Greek fisherman, are up there with the greatest and most memorable scenes of this whole trilogy. I’d recommend reading his other works next, which unfortunately contain less of a personal element.

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.it/products/199539-the-broken-road-from-the-iron-gates-to-mount-athos](https://www.desertcart.it/products/199539-the-broken-road-from-the-iron-gates-to-mount-athos)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Italy*
*Store origin: IT*
*Last updated: 2026-05-15*