A Time of Gifts

A Time of Gifts (1977) is a travel book by British author Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published by John Murray when the author was 62, it is a memoir of the first part of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (officially Istanbul) in 1933/34. A Time of Gifts, whose introduction is a letter to his wartime colleague Xan Fielding, recounts Leigh Fermor's journey as far as the Middle Danube. A second volume, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), begins with the author crossing the Mária Valéria bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and ends when he reaches the Iron Gate, where the Danube formed the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania. The final volume, The Broken Road, completes his journey to Constantinople; drawing from his diary and a draft that he wrote in the 1960s, it was edited by Artemis Cooper and published in 2013.