“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.
I was woken up in the small hours of next morning by the clanging of bells. The air reverberated with the semantra of the surrounding monasteries. The sound of these flat beams, each of them several yards long with a waisted middle for the monk on duty to grasp with his left hand while he strikes the flat surface in sharp accelerating strokes with a little mallet in his right, carry for miles. The blows are scanned in threes in commemoration of the Trinity. Some say this instrument was invented by Noah in order to summon the world’s fauna to the Ark. It made us think how similar to the Ark were these monasteries, each poised on its private Ararat. Just outside my window, the loud clank of the bell of St. Barlaam drove away the last fumes of sleep. I remembered that yesterday had been the vigil of St. Demetrios of Thessalonika and, shovelling on my clothes, I made my way by striking matches along the cat-walks and staircases to the little church of the monastery. Only a few pale slits in the dark sky predicted a new day.
The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semi-circular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candlelight threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the pa
ge. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away from the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.
On the curved wall above Bessarion’s small island of light, the extremities of frescoed saints were faintly discernible: the bare brown shanks of a desert father, the pattern of black crosses on the end of a patriarch’s white stole, the bunioned swaddlings and thongs of a canonized peasant, the purple buskins of an emperor, a hero’s red-gold greaves, the rusty swirl of a martyr’s robe and an archon’s pearl-sewn mules; all vanishing into the dark. Higher on the wall, at the end of elongated and invisible trunks, the embossed gilding of their haloes reflected the candle-flame in a dim theatre of gold horse-shoes. Only with the slow growth of the pallor of dawn through the eastern lunettes did they begin to emerge, one by one. Shaggy St. John Prodromos, oddly winged, held his own head in a platter, half-nimbused with a rainbow of glory. St. Demetrios leaned on his lance. St. George was a centurion with sword and buckler. St. Procopios swaggered with half-drawn falchion. St. Govdelaas was attired in a red robe, a fillet confined his hyacinthine locks. St. Anais ambiguously gesticulated in a cloak lined with a pattern of small black eagles. Higher still, more elaborate scenes were depicted: a beautiful Falling Asleep of the Virgin on a scarlet couch; a Nativity; processions of penitents labouring uphill and each bearing a cross; towering castles, sieges with the sky full of missiles, pitched battles and shipwrecks. Every soffit, every spandrel and pendentive and coign was peopled by a heavenly host that climbed at last to the great Pantocrator inside the central cupola. On the sides of two of the main pillars were frescoed the brothers who re-built much of the monastery in 1511; SS Nectarios and Theophanes, members of the archontic Apsaras family of Yanina. They were identical figures in dark hoods and robes and immeasurable beards, both gazing heavenwards and each holding in one hand a scroll and in the other an exact replica of the church in which they are painted. On the flank of a column of the narthex, dressed in a lemon-yellow dalmatic, a black scapular and a mauve cape, stood a tall figure haloed and darkly bearded, his flowing locks crowned with a royal or imperial diadem. He had been pointed out the day before as the Emperor John VI Cantacuzene—one of the founders of St. Barlaam, my cicerone had explained.[1]
It was broad daylight when the service ended, and I wandered into the narthex, or antechamber, to look at the rest of the frescoes. The painting of the katholikon, or nave, was completed in 1548 and those of the narthex in 1566, by a certain Frankos Katellanos and by Father George, his monkish brother. It is strange how little, to an inexpert eye like mine, the Byzantine formula changes. Except for the Cretan renaissance, the same plastic technique prevailed, on general lines, for well over a thousand years, and a stranger would attribute these paintings to a far earlier date. Like the Orthodox religion today, Eastern iconography remained, until very late indeed, spiritually a part of the Byzantine Empire. Long, indeed, after Byzantium had ceased to exist as anything more than a sacred vision in the minds of the Greeks.
The pillars were again painted with saints’ figures. Many of them were ascetics of the desert. The torsos of SS Agapios and Daniel the Stylites projected from boxes built on Corinthian capitals, and the beard of a naked hermit aproned in pale green leaves fell below his knees in a swaying white stalactite like melted sealing wax. The nakedness of the more fortunate Makarios, identically bearded, was covered with thick smooth hair growing all over him in a suit of silver fox. Only his hands and feet emerged and his knees, which had worn holes in the thick pelt by constant kneeling. The walls were devoted to wild scenes of martyrdom—inverted crucifixions, flayings, impalements, draggings by wild horses, tearings apart by bent saplings, brandings, mutilations and, above all, beheadings. Phalanxes of splendidly clad figures knelt or lay prostrate with blood gushing from their headless trunks while their heads, still haloed, rolled away over the sad plain.
There was something immensely pleasing about the chapel of the Three Hierarchs hard by. Basilican in shape, with a low wooden roof divided up in a Mexican-looking pattern of black and white chevrons and faded orange, it was paved with mellow brick-coloured slabs. Led by the triumvirate of Doctors—SS John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen and Basil of Caesarea—the holy company trooped round the walls with the only Koutzovlach saint bringing up the rear—Nicolas of Metsovo, who was burnt at the stake by the Turks in the market place of Trikkala. In the death-bed scene of St. Ephraim of Syria, the saint lay swathed in a grey shroud on a wicker-work bier, and a fellow-ascetic lowered his bearded face for a valedictory kiss while another embraced his swaddled feet. An affluence of crutched elders streamed from the neighbouring hermitages, some carried on each others’ backs and some in primitive sedan chairs. Next door, an army of virgins and matrons and censer-swinging sages encompassed the death-bed of St. John the Divine. The Evangelist, tonsured in the manner of the Western Church, reclined in a pink and gold palace on a catafalque draped with green and mauve set about with tall gold candle-sticks. The faded colours of all these frescoes, the primitive technique, the arbitrary perspective and the literal punctilio of the detail, give them, although they were painted as late as 1637, an infinite charm. The insane mountains of the Meteora themselves must have been the inspiration for the background to the life of Christ that surrounded the upper walls—those narrow pinnacles of stepped and toppling table-mountains, shooting, in the Betrayal, right across the sky from either side, and almost forming a bridge. Most memorable of all was the oblong cartouche containing the Last Supper. On benches of gold and polygonal stools Our Lord and the twelve apostles were seated in a ring, with an embroidered communal napkin across their knees. There is a faint glimmer of the Renaissance in the architecture of the background and in the yellow and black striped awning draped from gable to gable. A great round table is tilted out of perspective to display its burden of slender candlesticks, goblets of wine, cruets, egg-cups, dishes, elegant waisted ewers with curling spouts, knives, loaves of bread and, scattered here and there, large white radishes still trailing their bright green leaves. The company at the Mystic Feast, clad in gay togas and tunics of red, white, green and lilac, turn to each other in animated discourse with light-hearted gestures. The atmosphere is that of a symposium or a banquet from the Decameron.
I returned to the main church once more, catching a glimpse on the way of Bessarion kindling a fire of thorns in the sooty depths of the kitchen. A blaze lit up the lenses of his spectacles and the minute bronze saucepans for Turkish coffee with which he was busy. Beyond, over the lintel of the outer door of the narthex, the souls of the dead were being weighed in great painted scales. On one side, the righteous were conducted to paradise by angels. They floated heavenward on rafts of cloud, and the interlock of their haloes receded like the scales of a goldfish. But on the other side, black-winged fiends were leading the damned away haltered and hand-cuffed, and hurling them into a terrible flaming gyre. This conflagration, peopled with prelates and emperors, swirled them into the shark-toothed mouth of a gigantic, glassy-eyed and swine-snouted monster. Giant dolphins and herrings and carp, each one with human limbs sticking out of its mouth, furrowed a stormy sea in the background. Below were four compartments. In the first, the bodies of the writhing victims crawled with small white objects: “The worm that dieth not,” the legend read. The second was filled with tearful heads, their teeth bared and brows racked with anguish: it was called “Weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Naked figures huddled despairing in a penumbral cellar in the third: this was Tartarus. In the fourth, labelled “The Outer Darkness,” the vague shapes of the lost ones were just outlined in a rectangle of murk.
Something pressed my shoulder. Looking round, I saw the great horny hand of the abbot resting there and, above and beyond it, his eye-brows raised high. “There you are,” he observed severely, “Hell” (he pointed at both in turn) “and Heaven.” His index-finger was aimed at the ascending airborne swarm. “Let’s hope that’s where you go.” As he tur
ned towards the stairs, I thought I could divine the ghost of a wink. “Up we go,” the abbot continued, “Bessarion’s ready with the coffee.” We halted half-way up the stairs. In my preoccupation with the frescoes I had forgotten to look down into the gulf. The lower world was hidden beneath a snowy mass of cloud that rose in a solid waste to the edge of the parapet. Only the monasteries emerged like outposts in a Polar wilderness, as if one could cross the half-mile to the Transfiguration on snow-shoes. The bridge, the tiles and the rotunda of St. Barbara were just visible. The rest was snowed under. St. Stephen and Holy Trinity rode high on the pale billows, and a bell sounded over the intervening distance like the signal of an ice-bound ship in distress. Towering high above this white desert, the giant blue monolith next to St. Barlaam was hooped with three perfect smoke-rings of cloud.
Distances between the monasteries are not so great as they appear from the plain. In half an hour the winding pathway from the foot of St. Barlaam led us down to a shallow saddle, then up a steep hill opposite and under some plane trees to the foot of the Transfiguration. Three-quarters of the way up the rock of the monastery’s pedestal, the cliff curves slightly backwards from the perpendicular and a narrow bastion of masonry, growing in thickness as the mountainside recedes, climbs for a hundred feet so that its platform may overhang the pathway in a clear drop. The rotting remains of a ladder, jointed every few yards, hung from a hole under the jut of the monastery. Before the steps were cut, this precarious approach was an alternative to the net-ascent. It was withdrawn at night-fall up a channel of rock, and the foundation remained as immune as St. Barlaam from the outside world. From below it looked just as forbidding and inaccessible. A flight of steps and a little doorway at the base now lead through a narrow cavern cut through the rock to the beginning of the stairs. They finally brought us, out of breath and with thumping hearts, into the entrance to the monastery—a vast arched and dusty place. It was traversed by mote-speckled sunbeams that fell on old wind-lasses and baskets and piles of winter firewood. Through the rickety floorboards, vertiginous vistas dropped to the dim vegetation that still flourished on the unhewn rock face enclosed by the tower’s three projecting walls. A slanting lane led away, through great pillars and high semi-circular arches, over changing levels of flagstone and cobble into what might have been the purlieu of a town of immense age mysteriously poised here above the level of the clouds. But the narrow thoroughfares—except on one side, where the Platylithos, or the “Broad Rock” of the monastic charters, swelled into a small hill—advanced into the sky. The monastery buildings, in spite of the four churches they contain, were crammed into a compass smaller than a village green.
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