'He
is
a saint,' I was assured by Fr. Aristopoulos, the earnest young monk who showed me into the Martyrion. 'Fr. Philloumenos received many telephone calls from the Jewish zealots saying he must leave Jacob's Well, that it was their holy place, not ours. After his dogs were poisoned the Patriarch said that he should come away and live in Jerusalem where it was more safe, but every time Philloumenos refused. He was saying vespers when the killer found him and started to chop at him with the axe.'
'He didn't kill him outright?'
'No,' replied the monk, 'but with many cuts: hands off, then feet, then legs. In pieces. Very nasty. Only at the end he threw the grenade.' Fr. Aristopoulos crossed himself in horror. 'But you know, when they held a small service for him four years after his death, they exhumed his relics and found that his body was uncorrupted.'
'But how could it be uncorrupted,' I asked, 'when he had already been chopped up and incinerated?'
'Well not
totally
uncorrupted,' admitted the monk. 'But it was still a very miraculous preservation. After this there were miracles - including healing of the sick - and many visions of Fr. Philloumenos. Some I have seen myself.'
'You've seen Fr. Philloumenos?'
'In my dreams I have seen him,' said Aristopoulos. 'Also I have smelt him.'
'I don't understand,' I said. 'I thought you said his body hadn't corrupted.'
'No, no,' said Fr. Aristopoulos. 'It was a good smell. During the Gulf War the Greek Consulate ordered all Greeks to go home. The seminary was closed and all the students left. I was here alone. I locked up the chapel and for three months I stayed upstairs in my room with my gasmask because of Saddam's Scud attacks. Then in March, when the war was over, I came and unlocked the door and walked in here for the first time since the New Year. It was as if the church was full of incense: a heavy smell, so nice, so sweet. It was coming from Fr. Philloumenos.'
So this, I thought, was how miracle stories began.
I told Fr. Aristopoulos about my meeting with Fr. Alexandras and his story of the assault on his cave. Aristopoulos replied that attacks on Church property were far from unusual. During the Six Day War, he said, the room in which we were standing had been attacked by a lone Israeli soldier who had fired off several shots at the iconostasis before being wounded - so at any rate claimed Fr. Aristopoulos - by a miraculous ricochet from an icon of the
Theotokos,
the Holy Virgin.
Checking these stories in the more sober
Jerusalem Post
archives and with the different Church authorities in Jerusalem, I found that from the early 1970s to the mid-i98os there had indeed been a wave of attacks on Church property. A Jerusalem church, a
Baptist chapel and a Christian bookshop had all been burned to the ground, allegedly by ultra-Orthodox
haredim,
while students from a nearby
yeshiva
had committed serious vandalism at the Dormition Abbey. There had also been a series of unsuccessful arson attacks on the Anglican church in West Jerusalem (the old wooden doors had had to be.changed to steel to thwart repeated attempts at igniting them), as well as on two churches in Acre (a Greek Orthodox church in the Old City and a Protestant chapel in the new Israeli suburbs) and an Anglican church in Ramleh.
In addition to this, the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion -already damaged between 1948 and 1967 when it stood in the no-man's land between Israel and Jordan - had been further desecrated no fewer than eight times. I visited it afterwards: the tombstones had almost all been shattered, metal crosses lay twisted in their sockets, and some of the sepulchres had been broken open; the one standing mausoleum was riddled with bullet-holes. As Canon Nairn Ateek of St George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem put it after he had spent half an hour listing all the incidents of desecration he knew about: 'Israel would like to give the impression that it champions religious tolerance, but the whole country was built on the usurpation and confiscation of Christian and Muslim land. To this day the confiscation and desecration of Church land and buildings continues.'
Canon Ateek's views are widely held by the Palestinian Christians I talked to in Jerusalem, but there is another side to the story. The Israeli authorities have always roundly condemned the vandalism of Church property and assisted the churches to recover from any serious damage. While ultra-Orthodox Jewish
haredim
remain the chief suspects for most desecrations - and their presence is further indicated by the nature of the Hebrew graffiti sprayed on several of the desecrated sites - their involvement is rarely proven, while in some cases, such as the desecration of the cave of St Chariton, it is not impossible that the attack could equally well have been carried out by disgruntled Arabs. Moreover, while Christian institutions still tend to suffer from abusive graffiti - when Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently visited Jerusalem, for example, the gates of St George's were daubed with 'Go home dirty black Nazi pig' - the wave of arson and vandalism that took place during the seventies and early eighties now largely seems to have ceased, and there has been only one major arson attack in recent years: the gutting of a church in Tiberias.
Certainly, none of these unconnected incidents in any way proves the Palestinian Christians' contention that there is a concerted campaign to drive them out of their ancestral homes. But what they do undoubtedly reveal is a degree of prejudice and intolerance in Israel reminiscent of several other Middle Eastern countries - notably Turkey - where a religiously homogeneous majority is able to lord it over a relatively powerless minority community. Few Western Christians are aware of the degree of hardship faced by their co-religionists in the Holy Land, and the West's often uncritical support of Israel frankly baffles the Palestinian Christians who feel their position being eroded year by year. As Fr. Aristopoulos at the Martyrion put it: 'Had we been Jews and our churches been synagogues, the desecration we have suffered would have caused an international outcry. But because we are Christians no one seems to care.'
The day after I saw Fr. Philloumenos's axe-cleaved remains, I found a Christian Palestinian driver, Sami Fanous, who agreed to take me to see the cave at Ein Fara. I very much wanted to see the ruins of the
lavra
where Philloumenos used to visit his friend Fr. Alexandras, and where, fourteen hundred years earlier, John Moschos had retired to spend a decade of his life in silent meditation.
Since Alexandros's departure, the new Israeli settlement of Pharan had absorbed the cave, the spring and much of the surrounding countryside, and to get to the ruins we had first to get into the settlement. At its entrance, a massive yellow-painted electric steel gate blocked the road; on either side tangles of razor wire led off across the hills as far as the eye could see. Sami stopped the car and we were questioned by the guard. I showed him the monastery marked on a map, and he went off to a sentrybox with my passport. There he conferred with someone on a telephone. He replaced the receiver and came back to tell us to wait. After twenty minutes, the telephone rang, permission was granted, and we were waved through.
The path to the monastery led off from the bottom of one of the settlement's housing estates. I left Sami with his car and headed off down into the valley on foot. All around, the hillsides were hard and dry: compressed beds of geological strata rolled off in great undulating contortions into the distance; there was no tree, and barely a blade of grass visible in the whole great panorama. As I descended into the
wadi,
however, the path turned a corner, and far below, at the lowest point in the valley, there appeared a small oasis: a patch of the densest woodland made up of ferns, pines and palms. From where I was standing I could not see the spring itself, but I could clearly hear it. The distant sound of the running water filled the silence of the
wadi,
echoed and amplified as it bounced off the walls of the ravine. It was an unseasonably hot day, and I shouldered my pack and stumbled down the path towards the sound.
Arriving at the bottom, I took off my shoes and bathed my feet in the clear, cold water. Despite the heat, the area around the spring was cool, shady and peaceful. As I sat there I thought how easy it was to understand why Moschos had chosen this spot to spend his years as a hermit: in such a place, it seemed to me, it must have been easy to foster the great monastic virtues of gentleness, balance, lack of haste and clarity of spirit. All around the spring, peppering the cliffs of the ravine, were the mouths of the caves that had once been filled with Moschos's fellow hermits, men like Abba Paul, 'a holy man of great humility
...
I don't know whether I ever met his like in all my life'; or Abba Auxanon, 'a man of compassion, continence and solitude who treated himself so harshly that over a period of four days he would eat only a twenty-four
lepta
[ha'penny] loaf of bread; indeed sometimes this was sufficient for him during a whole week.' These caves had also been home to Abba Cosmas the Eunuch, Moschos's spiritual father. Moschos only sketches his Abbot fairly briefly in the
Meadow,
but we learn that he apparently had the power to heal the sick, and that even by Byzantine standards he was famous for his ascetic self-control: 'on the eve of the holy Lord's day, he would stand from vespers to dawn singing and reading, in his cell or in church, never sitting down at all. Once the sun had risen and the appointed service had been sung, he would sit reading the holy Gospel until it was time for the Eucharist.'
Other than the bare hermits' caves, only a little survived of the monastery that Moschos had known. There were some crumbling cell walls, a cistern, a few stretches of Byzantine stonework, the odd staircase and a little sagging terracing where the monks had once, presumably, grown vegetables. A Byzantine mosaic was said to survive in the cave church at the top of the honeycomb of interconnected caverns, but it was impossible now to reach it without a rope or a ladder. After an hour poking around, clambering into some of the more accessible cave-cells, I set off up the hill again.
I was halfway up the path when I was met by Sami, my taxi driver. He was clearly very frightened. In my absence, he explained, he had been interrogated by the settlement's security guards. They had confiscated his ID card, and he was now terrified of being detained or arrested. 'Don't say I'm a taxi driver,' he begged. 'Say I'm your friend.'
We got back to the car and drove to the main gate, where a different guard was now on duty. He called for the head of security on his walkie-talkie, and told us to move the car off the road and to wait.
'There are many Arab terrorists in this area,' he said by way of explanation.
We waited for nearly an hour before the head of security turned up. He was a small, tough-looking man in khaki fatigues. A pistol was tucked into his belt and in his hands he held an assault rifle. He cross-questioned me for thirty minutes, examining my maps, my paperback of
The Spiritual Meadow
and my passport over and over again. What was I doing? Was the driver my friend? Where was this monastery I kept referring to? Was it an Arab monastery?
And who was John Moschos? Was he an Arab too? Did I have other Arab friends? Had my Arab friends asked me to do anything for them in the settlement? He then returned to the sentrybox and read my passport details down the telephone to someone. He made several more phone calls and conferred for a further fifteen minutes on the walkie-talkie. Finally he came over and returned my passport and Sami's ID.
'There has been a misunderstanding,' he said gruffly as the steel gate rolled back. 'You can go now.'