Isn't Alan clever?

The Vagabond and The Princess: Paddy Leigh Fermor in Romania (2017) by Alan Ogden

• Q. Can I walk?
• I can!
• Q. Have I walked?
• I have!
• Q. Have I gone on and On and ON about my walks?

But I am The Page to Wenceslas when compared to Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Peter Fleming or Patrick Leigh Fermor and their earlier long-distance treks. I had indeed read all their walkie-books before I ever put one foot in front of the other.

Travel books are more, and better, than journals or diaries; because travel broadens the mind walking transforms the soul. The Buddhists of school of Plum Village practice walking meditation where they try [not tooo hard, mind] to become one with their breath . . . foot on the earth . . . other foot . . . breathe. But I'm not on that page. This here Page walks day after day until the blisters stop coming and peace settles on the shoulders. Fermor walked from Hoek van Holland to Constantinople in the mid-1930s, made friends, lost his cherry, encountered The Other and was never again at home in England. He kept a diary but lost it and relied on his memory to write up his journey 40 years afterwards. It is nostalgic, colourful, and exotic. It is not a journal but it does document a time and place which was swept into the dustbin of history by WWII and Yalta.

Aaaand 40 years after the publication of A Time of Gifts, a jobbing author with some knowledge of Romania (and the SOE in which Fermor served with success and panache during WWII) decided to write an in the footsteps of book about Fermor's Transylvanian adventures. Which could be wonderful and I got it out of the library on foot of being a Fermor Fanboi. There is some interesting info about the multi-lingual melting-pot aspects of Central Europe in the before times. I like the inclusive practice of using Romanian place-names but also tagging their Magyar and Deutsch identities, at least in the first instance. Thus Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg). We've encountered this before in Breßlau /Wrocław. But Author Ogden has a really annoying tendency to nit-pick about the failures of Fermor's memory:

Ogden 1 : Fermor 0!
on the prev page ' . . . slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion at each corner'.  The bastions are not circular but polygonal and Paddy makes no mention of the prominent ravelins at each corner of the rectangular plan.
Ogden 2: Fermor 0!!
Fermor died in 2011 so he can't fight back. Slow triumphal hand-clap.

I learned a bit more about MittelEurop's ethnicities from the book but also from follow-ups on Wikipedia: 

• Székely maybe related to Attila's huns, they achieved a level of autonomy within the various empires into which they were subsumed and continued to speak a variety of Hungarian / Magyar. Ceded to Romania by the 1920 carve-up Treaty of Trianon, they were returned to Axis Hungary in WWII and then back to Romania. I have no idea whether they were sufficientlly endogamous to retain DNA distinction through 1,000 years in Transylvania surrounded by attractive Roma, Saxons and 
• Aromanians aka Vlachs are from further South into the Balkans but they speak a vulgar-Latin derived Eastern Romance Language not unlike the regular Romanian of Romania.
• Saxons are Germans, mainly from the low-countries encouraged East with various Ostsiedlung East-settlement schemes their lingo is like Luxembourgish. Saxony = Freistaat Sachsen is the Southernmost division of the DDR = East Germany. The Anglo-Saxons? they come from a non-contiguous part of Germania called Niedersachsen = Lower Saxony: a Land wedged up against the Northsea convenient for jumping to the first substantial island off the coast of NE Europe.

Diversity rocks!