Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  It was getting dark and everyone was beginning to yawn, so I pulled on everything I had and lay outside under a tree. Radu brought out a heavy embroidered blanket, part of his wife’s dowry, saying it would be cold later. Indoors, lit by the sanctuary lamp, she had crossed herself several times from right to left in the Orthodox way, thumb, index and middle finger joined to show the Oneness of the Trinity, and kissed the two haloed faces on the icon goodnight.

  * * *

  But these shepherds were not Orthodox, though their rites and nearly all their doctrines were sprung from the great Byzan-tine branch of Eastern Christendom. They were Uniats—‘Greco-Catholics,’ as they called them locally—who, by their ancestors’ submission to an Act of Union—hence the Uniat name—were no longer spiritual subjects of the Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople, or of the Rumanian Primate, but of the Pope. The Rumanians everywhere enter Christian history as members of the Orthodox, or Eastern Church; but, as we know, Transylvanians in the Middle Ages were subjects of the Hungarian crown. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Turkish wars reduced eastern Hungary to the famous vassal Principality of Transylvania. Eager to separate their Orthodox subjects from their co-religionist kinsmen the other side of the mountains—impelled also by Protestant vernacular zeal—the Rákóczi princes succeeded, by various means, in ending the Slavonic Mass of their subjects (which the Rumanians had retained from their early days under Bulgarian spiritual sovereignty), and imposing a Rumanian translation; not to encourage nationalism—just the reverse, in fact—but to widen the gulf between the liturgy of their Rumanian subjects and the Slavonic (and, recently, Greek) rite of their Eastern kinsmen; they hoped to set the Orthodox world of the Slavs and the Greeks at a further remove. Half a century later, when the Turkish eclipse made way for direct Habsburg rule, the Protestant cause waned and the Catholic waxed; and in 1699, a mixture of coercion and blandishment, backed by the astuteness of the Jesuits of Emperor Leopold, brought about a great triumph for the Counter-Reformation in the East: ecclesiastical dominion, that is, over many of the Rumanian Orthodox in Transylvania. By accepting the Union, the neophytes (or apostates) had to accept four points: the Filioque clause in the Creed; wafers instead of bread in the Communion service; the doctrine of Purgatory (which, like Limbo, is unknown in the East); and, most important of all, the supremacy of the Pope. All the other points of difference—the marriage of priests, a bearded clergy, the cult of icons, different vestments, rituals and usages—remained unchanged. This Act severed all official links between the Transylvanian hierarchy and the hierarchy of Wallachia and Moldavia; but distrust lingered in the Uniat rank-and-file and, for nearly a century, very many village priests slipped away and had themselves privily ordained by Orthodox bishops.

  But in the end, these changes had the opposite of the wished effect. The new Mass kindled a sudden interest in the Rumanian language, and in Rumanian letters and origins as well. The publication of vernacular religious books in Transylvania, which the Princes inexpediently fostered, competed with those beyond the mountains and forged an intellectual bond. Also, after the Union, gifted Transylvanian sons of the Uniat manse were sent to study in Rome, where the spiral carvings of Trajan’s Column—Roman soldiers at grips with Dacian warriors dressed very like modern Rumanian mountaineers—filled them with exciting convictions of joint Roman and Dacian descent, and these gave body to traditions which, in a more nebulous form, had long been in the air. Thousands of Rumanian children were called Traian and Aurel after their first and last Roman Emperors and convictions about Dacian descent had sunk deep roots. Among Rumanians on both sides of the mountains, these ideas fostered a national spirit and irredentist claims which the past hundred years have plentifully granted. The Rumanian ethnic cause owes much to the Uniat Church, and the debt, for reasons comparable in worldliness to those which first established the Union, has been repaid by state abolition and compulsory return to the Orthodox fold. Not a decision prompted by religious fervour.

  Thinking of all this, my mind flew back to those happy mornings among the books and microscopes of Count Jenö’s library. The Double Procession of the Holy Ghost...! This tintack which split Christendom was just the kind of thing to excite the Count’s historical curiosity. We had been talking about how, in the Byzantine East, the Holy Ghost proceeded only from the Father (“I don’t quite know what they mean, mind you,” the Count had confessed) while, in the Catholic West he proceeded from the Father and the Son—ex Patre Filioque procedit. When did this Western clause—not mentioned in the first seven Councils (the only ones valid in the East)—first crop up? Reference-books soon heaped up round us on the library table. “Here we are!” the Count exclaimed after a while, reading out: “Clause interpolated in the Creed at the Third Council of Toledo (never heard of it!) in 589, when King Reccared of Aragon renounced the Arian heresy!” The Count looked up excitedly “Toledo! King Recarred! He was a Goth! Probably from these parts, his grandparents, I mean—Ulfilas’s lot, gone West!” He read on skipping elliptically from page to page in a Jingle-ish way...“Clause not yet adopted at Rome...omitted from manuscripts of the Creed...inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m... Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes...but only adopted among the Franks... Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!” He paused and rubbed his hands. “I wish I’d been there!” He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. “Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne—a Frank, of course!—but approves of the doctrine. H’m. Sounds like cold feet... But the next Pope adopts it...ninth century already. Then comes Photios, the great Eastern Patriarch and general fury, mutual anathema, and the final breach in 1054...” He looked up. “I’ve always wanted to know about it. I didna ken, I didna ken,” he said; then, closing the book, “Weel, I ken noo.”

  Turning the pages of a Uniat missal belonging to his wife, he alighted on a directive preceding the Uniat liturgy: “‘In the Mass, the words and from the Son, concerning the procession of the Holy Ghost, are not included in the Creed. At the Council of Florence in 1439, the Church in no way demanded this addition from the Orientals, but only their adherence to this dogma of the faith.’ Adhere, but don’t utter!” he exclaimed. “A dogma that need not speak its name!” I said that it sounded a shadowy form of allegiance. “Please remember,” the Count said gravely, “you are speaking of the Holy Ghost.”

  Among the Orthodox, Uniats have always borne a faint stigma of desertion, and among the rank and file of Catholics in Transylvania they seemed somehow—and rather unfairly—neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. The switch of fealty was certainly prompted less by spiritual conviction than by raison d’état: Counter-Reformation expansion and zeal on one side, and on the other, the chance of flight from a harsh to a slightly less harsh form of oppression. Later generations clung to their faith with staunch rustic tenacity as they still do in the Ukraine, and nobility and pathos haunt their story.

  The first Uniats of all, however, were neither the Transylvanians nor the Ruthenes, but later members of the Palaeologue dynasty: Michael VIII very briefly, and finally, the last two Emperors of the East. Our thoughts must wing back to the last years of Byzantium, where the Turks were closing in for the final scene. It was the hope of succour from the West that in 1437 sent John VIII Palaeologue and his court and clergy on the extraordinary journey to Florence which Benozzo Gozzoli has commemorated on the walls of the Medici Palace. During the discussions in Santa Maria Maggiore, two of the Eastern prelates were given cardinals’ hats; but at home, chiefly stirred up by the Filioque question, Byzantium was in a ferment. Nevertheless, willy-nilly, and in the teeth of Orthodox protest, the Emperor accepted the Western demands. Gibbon describes the culminating moment with the Emperor enthroned on one side of the Duomo and the Pope on the other. ‘I had almost forgot,’ he writes, ‘another popular and Orthodox protestor: a favouri
te hound, who usually lay quiet on the foot-cloth of the Emperor’s throne; but who barked most furiously while the Act of Union was reading, without being silenced by the soothing or the lashes of the royal attendants.’ Then the Emperor had to return and face his booing subjects at Byzantium. But, except for some brave Genoese, no help came and John’s brother Constantine XI, still a Uniat—though a reluctant one, it would seem—fell fighting in the mêlée when the Turks stormed and captured the city. ‘The distress and fall of the last Constantine,’ Gibbon says, ‘are more glorious than the long prosperity of the Byzantine Caesars.’

  But it was the first Gibbon quotation which had fired Count Jenö. “Just fancy! A dog in church! I wonder what he was called? What breed he was? One of those Arabian greyhounds, I bet...” After a pause, he said, “It reminds me of a similar occasion: The Vatican Council on Papal Infallibility in 1870! Endless sessions and lobbying, you know, and nothing but rows—Schwarzenberg, Dupanloup, Manning and the rest of them. But they pushed it through at last. When it was being ceremonially read out in Saint Peter’s, a terrible storm broke out—clouds black as soot! forked lightning! rain, hail and thunder, you couldn’t hear a word!” Count Jenö, an easy-going but devout Catholic, beamed among his moths and his specimen-cases. He loved this kind of thing. “Not a word! Much worse than the Emperor’s dog! What’s more, the Franco-Prussian war broke out next day, and all the French and German cardinals rushed north on the new railway—in different first-class carriages, of course—and cut each other stone dead when they got out to smoke and stretch their legs on the platform at Domodossola...”

  Well, as a result of all this, Radu and his family, after two and a half centuries under Rome, are members of the Orthodox Church again: rather bewildered, perhaps.

  * * *

  Cliffs and bands of rock jutted from the trees and sometimes the woods opened to make way for landslides and tumbled boulders and fans of scree. There was the scent of pine-needles and decay. Old trunks had rotted and fallen and the pale leaves of the saplings which replaced them scattered the underworld with various light and broke it into hundreds of thin sunbeams. The ghost of a track, perhaps only used by wild animals, advanced with hesitation; the matted carpet of leaves, cones, pine-needles, acorns, oak-apples, beech-mast and the split caskets of chestnuts must have been piling up forever. A tall pine had collapsed in a tangle of creepers and I was scrambling on all fours through the foxgloves and bracken underneath when my hand closed on something half-buried in leaves. It was a five-pointed stag’s antler: a marvellous object, from the frilled coronet at the base to the tips of sharp tines as hard as ivory. How could something gnarled with these ancient-looking wrinkles have such a swift growth and so brief a life? They prick through a stag’s brow in spring like twin thoughts breaking out of the skull, then shoot and ramify with the fluid motion of plants, fossilising as they grow; larger each year, more fiercely spiked, then scabbarded in velvet to be torn to shreds against boles and branches until the buck they have armed is ready to clear the woods of rivals; only to fall off again at the end of winter, like moulting feathers. This one was about a foot and a half long and perfectly balanced and I set off through the bracken feeling like Herne the Hunter. It was impossible to leave it there, even if I couldn’t take it all the way to Constantinople.

  Soon I came on four does, each with a fawn grazing or pulling at the branches that hemmed the clearing. I must have been down-wind; they only looked up when I was fairly close. They turned in a flurry, heading for the underbrush and sailing downhill in great arcs until all their white rumps had vanished in turn; and, as they took flight, a russet stag, unseen till then, looked up with a sweep of horn that was spread far wider than the antler in my hand; and while the does were curvetting past, his antlers swung out of profile into full face like a ritual separation of twin candelabra. His wide eyes were severe but unfocused, white flecks scattered the back of his tawny coat, and his hooves were neat and shining. Turning aside, he took one or two sedate and strutting paces, trotted a few more with his head and its scaffolding well back, and leaped down the slope after the does. The load of horn rose and sank with each bound; then he flew headlong through a screen of branches like a horse through a hoop and the boughs closed behind him as he crashed downhill and out of earshot.

  I could hardly believe they had all been there a few seconds before. Could my antler have once been his, shed a few years back? Perhaps even now he had not reached full span, although August was beginning: I had seen no tatters of velvet... Anyway, the trove in my hand could just as easily have been centuries old.

  Bit by bit, the shoulders of bare rock began to grudge foothold to the taller trees and I was advancing through dwarf fir and a slag-like scree covered with a spectral confusion of thistles. A pale ridge of mineral had sprung up to the right; a much loftier upheaval soared to the left, with another far away beyond it, wrinkled, ashen and shadowless, like an emanation of the noon’s glare. I was moving along an empty valley of pale rocks and boulders, cheerlessly plumed here and there with little fir trees, and eventually these too died away. The warp of the mountains had led me astray. I was not sure that I was where I thought I was, or where I ought to be. It was a bleak place with the pallor of a bone-yard and a wind blowing up made it bleaker still. Damp mist was advancing along the trough, thin wisps at first, followed by denser whorls of vapour clammy to the touch, until it was hard to see more than a few yards. I must have been in the heart of one of those clouds that people gaze at from the plain as they come decoratively to anchor along the cordilleras. When the mist turned into fine rain, I fumbled my way up the flank of the ridge which had stealthily piled up between me and the slope I had been following for two days. I found a cleft in it at last, climbed steeply out of the mist and then down again through boulders and unstable cataracts of scree and plunged through the thistle-belt and the dwarf fir, putting the ascending process into reverse until I was back among the bracken and the sheltering hardwoods and pines. Scrambling about the planetary emptiness above, I had lost my bearings; and when I found the vestige of a sheep-track—unless it had been trodden there by deer—I followed its slight slant, hoping for a turn to the left, but in vain; until, late in the afternoon, I heard dogs barking far away and an occasional bell, and lastly, a clear liquid music that I couldn’t place. But when the trees opened there was something familiar about the sloping grass, the shingle roofs at the far end and the grazing sheep. It was Radu’s clearing; I had travelled in an enormous circle.

  Vexation only lasted a moment. I had thought I would never see that place again.

  The musical notes came from Radu’s brother Mihai. He was sitting on a green rock with his crook beside him under the moss-covered boughs of an enormous oak and playing a six-holed wooden pipe a yard long. It was a captivating sound, sometimes liquid and clear, sometimes, in the bass notes, reedy and hoarse. Minims and quavers hovered, sinking at the end of each passage to deep semibreves before reascending and moving on. Across the valley, the sun dropped among the lower ranges and clouds broke the sunset into long beams. They climbed to our ledge, touched the undersides of the leaves and lit up the sheep’s wool. The oak-branches, the drifts of clouds and the mossy glooms winding through the trunks were suddenly shot through with spokes of sunset. Birds scattered the air and the topmost branches, and for a few minutes all the tree-trunks flared as crimson as a blood-orange. It might have been the backwoods of Arcadia or Paradise and we advanced over the grass with the antler and the flute and a troop of five dogs like actors in an enigmatic parable or a myth with its context lost.

  The others were surprised and welcoming. It was like coming home. Radu was puzzled: why lug that antler about? Last night’s thought of a hare had not been forgotten—indeed, my return might have been pre-ordained—for his gun leant against a tree and the yard was afloat with fumes of onion, garlic, paprika and bay leaves.

  After leaving sketches of some of them next morning, I set out again, guided for a furlong or tw
o by Mihai, who filled me with half-grasped instructions.

  * * *

  The scurry and improvisation of the days before starting south from Lázár’s had driven serious planning clean out of our minds. The proper thing on leaving the Maros would have been to follow its tributary, the Cerna,[8] past Hunyadi’s castle once more then to the beautiful Hátzeg valley. Here I could have stayed with the eccentric Gróf K—the one who had ridden a horse with its head in a bag. (His fame was widespread; the shepherds smiled when his name cropped up.) Then I could have climbed through the forest to the great Retezat massif. It was here that István had suggested that we might have hunted chamois. When I reached civilisation again after these mountain days, I was distressed to learn all I had missed: chamois, perhaps; deep silent valleys; a special rose-red heather smelling of cinnamon and named after Baron Bruckenthal; hundreds of streams; peaks that sailed into the air like pyramids and dropped plumb into the abyss; cascades of mighty blocks scattered in wild disorder; scores of Alpine lakes... It struck me, all the same, that I had hardly been starved of splendours. Could that distant glimpse yesterday have been the summit of the Retezat? Probably not. I didn’t know then and I still don’t.[9]