Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO , OBE (born February 11, 1915 in London - † June 10, 2011 in Worcestershire ) was a British writer and SOE agent. In 1944 he was one of the key figures in the kidnapping of the German commander in Crete, Heinrich Kreipe .

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Life

Patrick Leigh Fermor's father, later ennobled Lewis Leigh Fermor , was a geologist and went to India for work with his family in 1918, while Patrick initially stayed with a foster family in England. By the age of eighteen, Fermor had been expelled from numerous schools, including the King's School in Canterbury , and in December 1933 he decided to go on a hike to Constantinople . His main work tells of this hike in two volumes: The time of gifts and Between forests and water . Fermor wrote these two books long after the trip: Part 1 was published in 1977, Part 2 in 1986. In 2006, it became known that Fermor, who had previously written everything by hand, had now learned to type with a machine at the age of 90, to include Part 3 of his Writing travelogues on the machine. In 1937 he returned to London for a period with his first partner, a Romanian noblewoman, but then stayed in Paris and Romania.

During the Second World War, Fermor was in the service of the Special Operations Executive . The SOE deployed Major Fermor in occupied Crete, among other places . There Fermor lived underground, organized the resistance against the German occupiers and finally kidnapped Heinrich Kreipe, the German major general and commander of the German occupation forces in Crete, together with his comrade officer William Stanley Moss . He was awarded two medals for this and made an honorary citizen of Heraklion . This incident was filmed in 1957 by Michael Powell with Dirk Bogarde in the role of Fermors under the title Ill Met by Moonlight . The writer Klaus Modick added the kidnapping of Kreipes to the plot of his 2005 novel The Cretan Guest , which deals with the Cretan resistance against the German occupation forces.

After the war, Patrick Leigh Fermor traveled to the Caribbean, where he wrote his book The Traveller's Tree and his only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques , published in 1953 . In the 1960s he and his wife, the photographer Joan Monsell (1912-2003), settled in Kardamili ( Mani Peninsula ) in the Peloponnese , where they lived in a house he designed on Kalamitsi Bay. Both were childless.

Dumbleton, grave of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor
Fermor's villa on Kalamitsi, Kardamyli.
Fermor's office

Appreciation and awards

Fermor is one of the great stylists of the English language. He was one of the ten "Companions of Literature" appointed for life by the Royal Society , including Nobel Prize winners V. S. Naipaul and Seamus Heaney .

He was an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) since 1943 and a member of the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) since 1944

He was also an honorary citizen of Heraklion , Kardamyli and Gythio . In 2004 he was raised to the British nobility. In 2007 Fermor received the Greek Order of the Phoenix .

Fonts (selection)

  • The violins of Saint-Jacques . German by Manfred Allié . Dörlemann Verlag , Zurich 2004. ISBN 3-908777-08-9
  • The time of the gifts - On foot to Constantinople: From Hoek van Holland to the Danube . The first part of the journey. German by Manfred Allié , Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2011. ISBN 978-3-908777-71-7
  • Between forests and water - on foot to Constantinople: From the middle Danube to the Iron Gate . The journey part two. German by Manfred and Gabriele Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2006. ISBN 3-908777-18-6
  • Three letters from the Andes . German by Manfred Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2007. ISBN 978-3-908777-29-8
  • The time of the gifts / Between forests and water . The first and second part of the journey and an episode from the third part A cave on the Black Sea . German by Manfred and Gabriele Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2009. ISBN 978-3-908777-49-6
  • The interrupted journey. From the Iron Gate to Mount Athos. The third part of the journey , edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, from the English by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié (original title The Broken Road), Dörlemann Verlag Zürich, ISBN 978-3-908777-95-3 .
  • The Traveller's Tree. A trip through the Caribbean . German by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2009. ISBN 978-3-908777-45-8
  • Mani. Travel in the southern Peloponnese . German by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié, Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2011. ISBN 978-3-908777-73-1
  • Rumeli. Travel in northern Greece . German by Manfred and Gabriele Allié, Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2012. ISBN 978-3-908777-72-4
  • Romania - Travel to a country before darkness fell.
  • The interrupted journey . From the Iron Gate to Mount Athos. The third part of the journey. Eds. Colin Thubron, Artemis Cooper. Translated from the English by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-908777-95-3 . 464 pp.
  • Abducting A General - The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete . London: John Murray, 2014
    • The kidnapping of the general . Translated from the English by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Dörlemann, Zurich 2015
  • In the mail! An adventurous life in letters . Edited by Adam Sisman (original title Dashing for the Post: the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor ). Translated from the English by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2020. ISBN 978-3-03820-071-0

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Travel writing great Patrick Leigh Fermor dies aged 96 at guardian.co.uk, accessed June 11, 2011
  2. ^ Special Forces Obituaries: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor at telegraph.co.uk, accessed June 11, 2011
  3. ↑ a b Kurt Kister : The Pilgrimage of the Wanderer , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 3, 2013, p. V2 / 9
  4. ↑ Klaus Modick: The Cretan Guest , Munich-Zurich, 8th edition 2011, chapter IX, subsection 8-10.
  5. ↑ Joan Leigh Fermor in the English Wikipedia en: Joan Leigh Fermor
  6. ↑ thegazette.co.uk London Gazette of 14 October 1943. p. 4540
  7. ↑ thegazette.co.uk London Gazette of 13 July 1944 p. 3274
  8. Jump up ↑ Romania - Travel in a Country Before Darkness fell. In: Sinn und Form 4/2010, pp. 486–495
  9. ↑ Patrick Leigh Fermor: The interrupted journey From the miracle of arrival - to the last breath , review by Matthias Weichelt in the FAZ of December 18, 2013, accessed on January 29, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Fermor, Patrick Leigh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and special operations executive agent
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH June 10, 2011
Place of death Worcestershire