Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

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In the long line of ancestors, in which he took pride, it was his maternal grandfather, Count Albert Apponyi, of whom he was most proud. It fell to him to lead the Hungarian delegation at the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919; on his shoulders rested the terrible burden of returning to Hungary with the dictated terms of the Treaty of Trianon. This instrument reduced the ancient kingdom of Hungary to a mere rump state.

Although Anna Sándor de Kénos never married, her name was linked for many years to a Transylvanian nobleman who also never married.Soon, a strange accommodation took root: Austro-Hungary was the de facto overlord, but the island’s inhabitants remained de jure subjects of the Sultan, who retained the island as his personal possession. When in 1903 a mosque was built on the foundations of a former Franciscan monastery, the Sultan himself paid for its 30-by-50-feet carpet. Ada Kaleh also kept such trappings of Ottoman governance as a Mudir (mayor) and a Kadir (judge), appointed by Constantinople. Between the Woods and the Water. On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. NEAR FINE COPY IN UNCLIPPED DUSTWRAPPER Dutch writer Jaap Scholten knows a good story when he hears one. In the early 1990s, when his Hungarian wife’s grandmother began telling him about life before communism, he was entranced. This was the beginning of the road to writing “Comrade Baron: A Journey Through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy,” Scholten’s first work of non-fiction and the first to be published in English, launched May 5th. The greatest of living travel writers…an amazingly complex and subtle evocation of a place that is no more." — Jan Morris

He arrived in Budapest on 1 April 1934. He could hardly have known then, that a mere 10 years later, much of what he saw in this ancient city would be greatly altered by the vicissitudes of war, but also by the brutality which was so often the handmaiden of communism.Count István Pálffy, who has died aged 89, stood as a candidate in the Hungarian parliamentary election in 2018 aged 85. Though he was not elected, he was immensely proud of standing in a constituency that his grandfather had represented from 1872 until he died in 1933. He stood for Momentum, a party of young people which rejected the Right-wing policies of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán. However, I could not connect with the characters. Maybe I had expectations for more depth/emotion or maybe it was just because of the pacing that I could not connect with them. Although it’s been over four decades since Ada Kaleh has been wiped off the face of the Earth, there is at least one mapmaker that still upholds its memory — good old Google. Type in the island’s name in Google Maps or Google Earth, and you’re transported to a stretch of Danube just as blue as any other, except for the pin labelled… Ada Kaleh. Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania, and into Romania...sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.”—Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review

Condition: Fair/Good. 1988 Penguin p/b edition. The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. The world building was interesting, the illustrations AMAZING, the romance was cute and the story was somehow trying to pass meaningful messages which I appreciated.

In 1867, the Ottomans evacuated Serbia. And following defeat in the Turkish-Russian war of 1877-78, the Sublime Porte was forced to grant independence to Romania, losing all its possessions north of the Danube. Following age-old tradition, the Austrians had taken advantage of the Ottoman retreat to re-occupy the island. But a funny thing happened during the Berlin Treaty of 1878 that formalized the new geopolitical reality: it simply forgot all about Ada Kaleh. BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER. On Foot to Constantiople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. There has been much talk in Budapest recently about the publication of the final installment of Leigh Fermor’s account of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. In the third volume The Broken Road he moves onward through Rumania and it is his favourable view of the old enemy that has irritated some amongst his admirers in Hungary. Presenting the Rumanian nobility as better read and more cosmopolitan than their Hungarian neighbours has not endeared him to some of the descendants of his former hosts. ‘No good deed goes unpunished’ is how one of them put it, at a recent event to mark the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. But despite this he is remembered with great affection in Budapest where his friend, writer and translator, Rudi Fischer, now in his 90s, still lives. It was whimsy and charming. The tale was as if I was in a Studio Ghibli film (And it is not just because of the lovely cover). It was full of innocence and sweetness. But also touched on harsh truths about humans and their affinities to power and politics as well as the dangers of self-imposed ignorance by people who believe themselves to be smarter than nature. On leaving Cambridge, Pálffy was at a slight loss as to how he might use a degree in Moral Sciences. A friend advised him to try advertising, “because that profession is not too fussy about degrees and probably considers Moral Sciences to be all about being a good person”. A few years spent in the advertising industry provided him with an income but little intellectual satisfaction.

Standing on Budapest’s Freedom Bridge some years ago, with a Turkish friend who comes from an old Ottoman family, I heard her exhale a long, almost doleful sigh. When I asked if everything was alright, she just stared down the Danube and said, “To think that this was once part of the frontier of our old Empire!” Budapest is that sort of city; a place with a capacity to easily unleash a myriad of complex historical emotions. In The Hare Kovecses is described as ‘a very large and very plain eighteenth century house (“a large square box such as children draw”…) set in a flat landscape of fields with belts of willows, birch forests and streams. A great river, the Vah, swept past, forming one of the boundaries of the estate…There was a swimming lake with fretted Moorish changing huts, lots of stables and lots of dogs.’ Trains stopped ‘at the tiny halt on the estate.’ The Hare includes several pictures of Kovecses. At the beginning of the 15th century, the island was occupied by Turks, who understood its remarkable strategical importance for the development of the river trade on the Danube, after the exit from Kazan region. In 1718, as a result of the treaty from Passarowitz (Pojarevat), the northern Serbia, Banat and Oltenia became possessions of the Austrians, as was also the case of Ada-Kaleh island which then bore the name New Orsova.I am indebted to David Turner for taking the time to convert this to digital and very successfully too – the sound quality is excellent! It was an
unusual undertaking because the pilgrimage is the highlight of the Catholic calendar in Transylvania and she was a devoted Calvinist. She told a friend that she did it because “anything that was banned under Communism must be good for the soul”. The first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, recounts Leigh Fermor's journey as far as the Middle Danube. 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 planned third volume of Leigh Fermor's journey to its completion in Constantinople, The Broken Road, was not completed in his lifetime, but was finally published in September 2013. [1] [2] He felt comfortable in England. His great-uncle, Count Albert Mensdorff, had been Austrian ambassador. István already spoke English fluently, and there was a ready-made group of Hungarian émigrés willing to welcome him. So you thought Turkey’s lightning-speed relocation of the Tomb of Suleyman Shah in Syria was the weirdest map story you heard this week? Wait until you hear about Turkey’s other exclave: Ada Kaleh — the Ottoman Empire’s last gasp, on an island since swallowed up by the Danube.