Roumeli (11 page)

As night fell, the road insensibly climbed. At the foot of the rock of St. Barlaam, a great square chasm, choked with undergrowth and rock, disappeared into the mountainside. “The cave of the dragon,” the abbot said, pointing through the dusk, with a quiet and slightly grating laugh, “safely stowed away under the monastery.” The road turned into a narrow flagged ascent between overpowering volumes of rock, winding among boulders and twisted plane trees and opening at last into a slanting world from which all glimpse of the plain was locked out. We were deeply engaged in this improbable geology. But a turn of the path led from our labyrinth into the most brilliant moonlight, and the mountains were suddenly robbed of their menace and their weight. All was silver and light and magical and miraculously silent. The plane trees were as still as the gleaming precipices themselves, as though each leaf had been rolled out of precious metal and beaten thin and then wired to the silver branches. Fathoms above, the reception platform of St. Barlaam and the jutting tiles of its eaved penthouse projected into the moonlight in a galleon's poop, from which, like
an anchor at the end of its cable, the great hook hung. The smooth sides of the cliff were not only perpendicular, but at many points they curved outwards and overhung their base, as naked of projection or foothold as the glass mountain in a fairy tale. High in the void, the fabric of the monastery overflowed its monolithic pedestal in a circle of jutting walls and eaves and storeys.

The abbot drew rein and let out a roar. The echoing syllables of the name “Bessarion!” dwindled and died down the valley. High above, on the ledge of the monastery, a pale spectacled face peered over the bar of the penthouse and a faint greeting came sailing down. “Let down the rope and come and look after the mare,” the abbot's voice boomed up. The hook, taking two minutes on the way, revolved down to us as the thick steel cable was payed out. This, until the steps were cut in 1932, was the only way into the monastery. In those days, the traveller squatted in a net whose topmost meshes were hitched over the hook, which then floated gently into the air and, revolving and unwinding on itself, was slowly hauled up to the platform on a winch. The net, on its arrival, was fished in with a hooked pole and lowered to the boards. The traveller was then released. In the past century a rope as thick as a man's wrist was used. Answering the query how often it was changed, a former abbot is reported to have said: “Only when it breaks...”

The Deacon Bessarion, breathless from his run down the steps, helped the abbot secure the luggage and supplies to the hook, unsaddled the mare, and led her off to the stable on the flank of the opposing rock, joining us then in the long climb. The staircase twisted back on itself again and again under the overshadowing rock from which it had been hollowed and brought us at last, panting and tired, to a heavy iron doorway. This opened, through a hole, into a dark stepped grotto through the heart of the rock. We rose at last into a courtyard of the monastery that was only divided from the gulf by a low
stone wall. A spacious loggia, paved with square black and white slabs, lay at the top of another short ascent, built out at a recent date from the Byzantine brickwork of the monastery. A cypress tree, stooping in the wind, miraculously flourished there. The tiles and the cupolas of the church in the light of the moon, the patina and disorder of the monastic buildings looked domestic and human after the chaos of rock through which we had come up. Turning round, the abbot—a portentous figure on the top step, with his beard and his robes blown sideways in the sudden tramontana—opened his hands in an ample gesture of welcome. Then, leaning over the rail of a penthouse which shook with every gust of wind while Father Bessarion toiled at the windlass, we watched the burdened hook ascending. The luggage, the saddle and the demijohn were safely unloaded on the planks. Leading us into the chapel, the abbot lit a taper at the sanctuary lamp and the gold and silver of the iconostasis and the innumerable haloes of frescoed saints twinkled among the shadows. Making the sign of the cross and kissing the main ikons, the abbot and Father Bessarion retired. We followed them out into the moonlit yard. There was nobody about and no lights in the windows. The buildings appeared aloof and spellbound.

I half remembered the details of the guest-room, as Father Christopher turned up the wick of an oil-lamp, from the few days I had spent there four years before the war—the table with a glass bowl full of the cards of visiting ministers and prelates and Byzantologists, the sofa under the window, the faded Russian print of a panorama of Jerusalem. It seemed curious that anything as human and welcoming as this golden lamplit chamber could exist on so windy and austere a height. But soon Father Bessarion was cutting up apples and goat's cheese
for a
mézé
to accompany the
ouzo
with which the abbot replenished the little glasses the moment they were emptied; and when we sat down together to a frugal supper of beans, the great demijohn was uncorked. By the time the two monks were lighting their pipes, we were thick in conversation about the war and the problems of Greece and the decay of Orthodox Monasticism. They made an interesting contrast—the shy, diminutive Bessarion with his ragged cassock and soft skull-cap, the eager benignity of his eyes behind thick lenses, and the abbot's great stature, his shrewd and humorous glance, the lean sardonic features repeated on the wall in a gigantic shadow embowered in clouds of smoke. A thread of raciness and worldly-wisdom ran through his discourse. His family had been priests in Kalabaka for centuries. Quitting this traditional sequence of the secular clergy, he had become a monk of St. Barlaam at the age of thirty-two, and then, which sounded unusually swift, he had been ordained deacon and priest and appointed archimandrite and abbot three months later. He was now seventy-six, and had never suffered more than a few days' illness in his life. His remedy for an occasional cold or a touch of fever was, he maintained, infallible—five days up in the mountains with the flocks belonging to the monastery, innumerable
okas
of wine, sleep every night in the shepherds' brushwood huts, and then—he extended his vast hands in the gesture of Samson embracing the columns of Gaza—he felt as strong as a giant once more. Father Bessarion, he hoped, would succeed him in his abbacy. Stroking the great tortoiseshell tom cat in his lap—there were two in the monastery, Makry, now sleepily purring, and a little black female with a white face and a red ribbon round her neck, called Marigoula—he described the monastery in winter, when the mountains were deep in snow and the jutting timbers stalactitic with icicles. “Some of them are many yards long and more than two feet thick. When the thaw starts, they break off and tumble into the valley with a noise like
cannon-fire. Sometimes the clouds are so thick that Bessarion and I bump into each other in the church while singing the office....” How strange and lonely this bachelor life sounded! Other monks were mentioned, but we only saw one during the whole of our stay, a man of unbelievable age who tapped his way slowly into church one morning with a walking-stick.

After the hard planks on which I had been sleeping in the villages of the Pindus, the bed in my white-washed room was a great luxury. When the wind dropped I could hear the deep level breathing of the sleeping abbot in the room next door, and, occasionally, a sigh of contentment. Then the wind began to moan once more round our tapering mattress of rock. Outside, the moon rimmed the tiled cupolas of the church, filling the empty slanting leagues that ran southward from these columnar mountains with a pale and glimmering lustre.

At luncheon next day, the abbot's chair was empty. He had risen in the dark and ridden off to harangue some charcoal burners working in the monastery woods on the slopes of the Khasian mountains; a journey involving six hours in the saddle each way. We were alone with Bessarion. Outside the extreme severity of Mount Athos there seems to be no distinction of sex in the hospitality offered by Orthodox monasteries, and Joan was as welcome a guest here as any of the male visitors. Bessarion's large eyes kindled behind his glasses as he told the stories of the local saints of Thessaly—the miracles of St. Dionysius of Karditza and the death of the patron of his native place, St. Gideon of Tyrnavos, martyred just over a century ago by Veli Pasha, son to Ali, the famous tyrant of Yanina. His own life story was interesting enough. After our retreat from Greece in 1941, he had hidden two British soldiers for a number of months in the foothills of Mount Olympus, later increasing
their number with a wing-commander who had baled out of his burning aircraft on to the Thessalian plain. When this became too dangerous, he escaped with them by submarine from Trikeri, south of Mount Pelion, to the Middle East, where he served with the Greek Army from El Alamein to the final Greek triumph at Rimini. But he had always longed to be a monk, and, on his release, he had spent a number of months in various Athonite cloisters and hermitages. Then he stayed for a while in the monastery of Dousko on Mount Khodziakas, but, feeling unable to settle there, removed to the Meteora.

“This is the place for me,” he ended up. “I will always stay in St. Barlaam.” He pointed to the blue waste of sky outside the window. Nothing else was visible. “Up here,” he said, “one feels nearly in Paradise...”

Vocations for the monastic life of the Eastern Church have become less frequent in recent decades. Now, they are very rare indeed. From the early centuries of the Christian era when the immense numbers of ascetics in the Thebaid were organized into communities by St. Pacomius, Greece, Egypt and the Levant have always been a fruitful region for monasticism. It was for an international host of monks that the great St. Basil, in the writing of his Rule (the forerunner of that of St. Benedict which is the corner stone of monasticism in the West), legislated from his cypress groves on the Pontic shores. There is still only one monastic order, St. Basil's, throughout the Orthodox world. It is divided, however, into two observances: the Cenobitic, or communal, in practice comparable to the life of the Benedictines; and the Idiorrhythmic or individual, which may be roughly likened to the life of the Camaldulese and the Carthusians. The latter live and eat apart, and only meet each other in church. But, in spite of the early hours and the frequency of the fasts, the life is far less severe and secluded than that of the orders of St. Romuald and St. Bruno; and the rigours of the Cistercians are unknown. Eastern monasticism
prospered and proliferated through early Christian times and the Middle Ages, and there was scarcely a desert without a stylite or a mountain-top without a monastery. The highest peaks were usually dedicated to the Prophet Elijah, their elevation being symbolic of his assumption to heaven; but all the great monasteries of the East seem to have been built on amazing sites. The monasteries of Mount Athos, the volcanic cones of Cappadocia, the peaks of the Meteora, St. Catherine on Mount Sinai and St. Ivan of Rila in the southern Bulgarian heights, illustrate what was happening on a smaller scale throughout the Christian East. The humanism of the Renaissance failed to shake the timbers of Orthodoxy, likewise the Great Heresy and the New Ideas of the Encyclopædists. Those remote storms, which rocked the Western Church to its foundations, were muffled by distance, by an alien culture, and by Turkish occupation. For the Turks, though scornful, were, on the whole, tolerant of the religious life of the rayahs. Monasteries were allowed to multiply. Their outburst of racial ferocity against the rebellious Greeks served to strengthen the position of the Church, and the Church, alongside the language, became the outward symbol, the talisman, of Greek survival. (And so it has remained.) Greek monasteries were thriving and populous communities during the last century and for much of this, and I think their decline is due to economy and legislation rather than to religious doubt or controversy. The Russian revolution was a severe blow to the strength of the Orthodox Church in general and, in particular, to the revenues of many Greek monasteries. The nationalization of church property in Rumania also stripped them of many estates granted in past centuries by the hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia. The reforms of Venizelos caused further secularization of conventual property; and war, occupation, burning by Germans, looting by Italians and sporadic destruction by rebels have all done their work. Little remains. Empty monasteries, ruined by neglect
and disaster, gutted by time and now, perhaps, used only as a fold for goats and sheep, are as essential a part of the Greek landscape as the countless fortresses left by the departing Franks. Many are no bigger than a peasant's farmhouse. A few kind and hospitable old men still linger in some of them, tending their poultry and half an acre of corn or a grove of olive trees, only exchanging their patched and tattered habits for black robes and a cylinder hat when they ride to market on their donkeys.

Another reason for the lack of monastic vocations is the recent impact of the materialistic civilization of the West, which for the Greeks still possesses all the charm of novelty. The Greeks are restless, positive, individualist and enterprising, and, with what justice I do not know, they often accuse modern monks of being lazy. Monastic life in Greece, which, especially in Athos, has hardly changed since the early days of Byzantium, has little appeal for a generation enthralled by the appliances of the industrial West. Abstractions are rare themes in Greek conversations, and the contemplative life is profoundly alien to them. The change that has come about is thus the result of no intellectual struggle, but of an easy and automatic defection. In the West, perhaps because of the satiety, disgust and fear of the civilization it has engendered, a revival of monasticism is taking place. In Greece it is the reverse. Life, if it were not for wars and economic distress, would be complete without the anodynes of either religion (except in the villages, or in the towns as a national symbol) or philosophy.

The abbot, over dinner, gloomily echoed this sentiment of monastic decay. “St. Barlaam alone possessed three village-farms, but they were all lost under Venizelos in 1928. They're done for. We used to have thousands of acres too....And, up till the war, hundreds of sheep and goats—hundreds of cows, sixty horses...the Germans and Italians and rebels did for them. There were hundreds of monks up here, battalions of them—battalions,
Mihali!
—in the old days—and a hermit in every hole in the rocks, like hives full of bees....Look at us now! Ah,
parakmí, parakmí!
” The last word—“decline”—was to become familiar during the next few days. “The young don't want us any more.” He poured out the wine pensively, and then, with his sudden rather Pan-like smile, repeated the words of the Greek Testament about wine making glad the heart of man, and touched our glasses with his own.