Patrick Leigh Fermor
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor is a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in occupied Crete during World War II.
Born in London on 11 February 1915, to Sir Lewis, a distinguished geologist. Thrown out of school (King's School, Canterbury, a British Public School) for a romp with a local greengrocers daughter. He carried on educating himself, reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History hoping to get into Sandhurst (a British Military Academy). He was unsuccessful and decided (at only 17) to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (now Istanbul, famous as the last great city of the Byzantine Empire). Two of his travel books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, detail this journey and, as they were written decades later benefit from his scholarly learning, giving a wealth of historical, geographical, linguistic, and anthropological information as the narrative proceeds.
He set off on 8 December 1933, as Hitler had just come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's odes. After completing this trek he wandered the Greek archipelago.
He was knighted in Feb 2004 for his work. The BBC webpage had him as one of their (you can hear his voice there)
You can follow his example easily now with the European Ramblers Association's (E6, E8 and E3 terminate in Turkey)
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