Alumni Travel Reading 2018-2019: The Danube

In this volume, Fermor records his epic foot journey across Europe begun in his first account, A Time of Gifts. Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933 to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, Fermor provides a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe. The present volume ends as Fermor approaches the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans. The final volume of the three part travel saga is entitled The Broken Road (The Iron Gates to Mt. Athos).

An entertaining and informative collection of geographical, historical, political, and economic facts about the many lands along the Danube, Beattie’s work is an amalgamation of travel guide and travel essay that will delight and inform travelers to the Danubian regions.

Winder wanders through the area that made up the former Hapsburg Empire. He describes what he sees and reflects on the historical scholarship on the period of empire. In particular he comments on villages, towns, and cities--their present condition versus how things might have looked during the time of Hapsburg ascendency.

The author recounts his present and past travels through his native Poland as well as the countries of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine.

The Danube has been a border and a bridge for migrants and goods since antiquity. Commercial networks formed between the Ottoman Empire and Central and Eastern Europe created diaspora communities. This led to economic and cultural transfers connecting the the Continental world of commerce.

A Gothic Soul is an acclaimed work of Czech Decadent prose. The novella is set in Prague, a city peopled by shades,. The protagonist walks the city, often hallucinating, while pondering questions of religion and faith.

This novel by Polish author Miłoszewski won the 2007 prize for best Polish crime novel. It is the first in a series of novels featuring prosecutor Teodor Szacki. The second volume A Grain of Truth (2012) was recently released and will be followed shortly by a third.

A very beautiful evocation of longing for the Danube (Habsburg) Monarchy.

An account of the Bondini-Guardasoni opera company that flourished in Prague and Warsaw (with summer seasons in Leipzig) during the last decades of the 18th Century. The company was particularly attached to Mozart’s operas, both during his lifetime and after his death.

Looking at contemporary times, this collection of essays focuses on the importance of traditional and popular musics in peasant communities and urban centers in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria during the decades leading up to and just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

With chapters on the Habsburgs, the Ottoman Empire, the Hohenzollerns, and the Romanovs leading up to and including the time of the Great War.

The Habsburgs are the most famous dynasty in continental Europe. From the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, they ruled much of Central Europe, and for two centuries were also rulers of Spain. In this Very Short Introduction Martin Rady looks at the history of the Habsburgs, from their tenth-century origins in Switzerland, to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

Take an historical tour through the grand spa towns of Central Europe--fBaden-Baden, Bad Ems, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad, and Marienbad.

The Danuber rises amidst the wooded hills of Germany's Black Forest, it touches or winds its way through ten countries and four capital cities before emptying into the Black Sea through a vast delta whose silt-filled channels spread across eastern Romania. Andrew Beattie explores the turbulent past and vibrant present of the landscape through which the Danube flows, where the enduring legacies of historical regimes from the Romans to the Nazis have all left their mark. (From the publisher)

Nick Thorpe embarks on an inspiring year-long journey that leads to a new perspective on present day Europe.