I wonder what Paddy Leigh Fermor would have made of it.
The doyen of travel writers, a dedicated pedestrian who trudged across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople and always embraced St Augustine's creed of solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking – might not have had much truck with a 6,000-mile classic car tour to the remoter regions of Turkey.
Here was a Hellenophile for whom Constantinople – never Istanbul – was his true north. Visiting him at his home in the Peloponnese in 2007, I asked him whether he shared the Greek regret at the loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
‘Only in a romantic sense,’ he replied. ‘You can't just forget 2,500 years of history and call it Istanbul. I deplore the Turkish role in Eastern Europe, but of course
