Patrick Leigh Fermor has died, at the grand old age of 96. For any English reader who knows Hungary and Translyvania, his fabulous travel narrative Between the Woods and the Water will always be a first point of departure. He was one of the last outside witnesses to the afterglow of Habsburg empire in Central Europe, before its glorious ethnic and cultural patchwork was erased forever by Nazism and Communism. Apparently a third volume in the same series is due for publication soon. May his work, and the society he chronicled, live forever in memory.