The old church of St. Stephen, after the white-washed planes of St. Charalambos, seemed immensely old: a dark, low basilican chamber of which the walls were once entirely covered with ochreous and smoky paintings. Wall inscriptions speak of an early monastic benefactor, Mitrophanes, and of a late restorer living in the early sixteenth century, called John of Kastraki. The church must have been built in the fourteenth century, successor to the original foundation of Jeremiah. Tradition maintains that its great benefactor, Andronicus Palaeologue the Younger, stayed here a while in 1333. The monastery and church were looted by Italians who carried away the bells; German machine-gun bullets and mortar bombs, fired from the plain on the suspicion that the monastery was harbouring guerrillas, pierced the east wall of the church and destroyed nearly all the fourteenth-century frescoes, the fragments of which, with the broken woodwork, now lie about the floor in pathetic heaps of rubble. The frescoed lineaments of the founder, Antony Cantacuzene, are one of the few mural survivors of this attack. The outlines of the shadowy prince emerged by the light of a taper held in the abbot’s wavering fingers.
The pale face and wide open eye of the abbot, in their setting of dark hair and beard and eyebrows, were full of indefinable distress. I wondered, as we followed the slight shuffle of his limp from the pretty white guest-chambers to the lamp-lit refectory, what the cause might be. Father Anthimos had been abbot for a number of years, and his kind face lit up at any word of praise for his monastery. Towards the end of supper, he told us how, during the fighting a few years before, the monastery had been attacked by a body of E.L.A.S. guerrillas; owing, perhaps, to the presence of a post of three gendarmes in the monastery. The iron gate by the bridge was first blown open with a bazooka. Then the invaders swarmed in, seizing two of the gendarmes and cutting their throats at once. The third ran across the open space outside the monastery to throw himself over the precipice, but, brought down by a rifle wound, he met the same fate as his colleagues. The abbot was stripped naked and beaten and one of his legs was smashed with a blow from a rifle butt; and his foot remains twisted at a strange angle. In other ways, this experience had plainly left lasting effects on the abbot. He covertly dabbed his eye with a napkin as he finished the story.[11] Then, with hardly a pause, he began a long account of the origin of the legend of the Evil Eye when Solomon was building the great temple of Jerusalem.
St. Stephen is the easternmost of the Meteora, and the Thessalian plain spreads eastwards from the foot of its rock in an expanse that no eminence interrupts. Seen from the ledge of the monastery next morning, it looked unending. Its eastern limits were the haunt of the centaurs and of the Myrmidons of Achilles, and Trikkala (invisible at the end of the unwavering road and the loops of the Peneios) sent its contingent to Troy. It has always been a battlefield. Caesar defeated Pompey on its southern limits, the Byzantines marched and countermarched, the Bulgarians swamped it in a flood of Slavs, Vlachs proliferated. Not long after the first hermits settled, Bohemond defeated the Emperor Alexis Comnene here, shortly after Bohemond’s countrymen had conquered England. Franks and Teutons and Catalans imported the alien and cumbersome apparatus of Western feudalism. For over a century, it was again the scene of the wars and the jangling dynastic claims of caesars and despots and sebastocrators and krals. The Turkish advance was only halted by Bajazet’s defeat in Asia Minor by Tamburlaine; and then the Ottoman tide swept forward. The themes of Byzantium were hewn into pashaliks and vilayets and sanjaks, submerging the Greeks, except for the irredentist struggles of the armateloi and the klephts, for over five hundred years. I remember peering up at the Meteora from a Bren-carrier in our harassed retreating column in the spring of 1941, and thinking, in spite of the plunging Stukas overhead, how remote and detached they looked, and how immune. The verse I heard in St. Wandrille returns to my mind. Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum, et non accedet ad te malum....And indeed, since the earliest anchorite, for almost a thousand years of turmoil and war and occupation, no harm came near them. Only in the last twenty years have they been touched by the high-leaping waves of universal trouble.
The last day in the Meteora was nearing its end. The steep path down to Kalabaka and the lower regions uncoiled from a dead tree at the foot of the rock. But it was hard to leave the last of the monasteries. Holy Trinity, with its row of white columns and arches, the grey confusion of walls and rose-coloured tiles, the dome and the tall dark mast of a cypress tree above the deep ravine, looks, more than any of its fellows, like the structure of a dream. None of the monastic rocks can have been harder of access, and speculation as to how the first monk, the almost legendary Dometios, first scaled it, would be a restatement of the conundrum of St. Barlaam and the Transfiguration. The landing stage and its hook overhang a narrower chasm than any of the others and the cutting of the steps, during the episcopate of Polycarp of Trikke and Stagoi, must have been an even harder feat. Nobody knows when the monastic church was built, nor when the little chapel of St. John the Baptist was scooped from the rock, though the names of subsequent restorers and benefactors—Parthenios, Damascene and Jonah—are commemorated on the walls. The iconography is dark and indistinct.
Holy Trinity was the poorest of all the monasteries of the Meteora. It is uninhabited now. The monks left before the war, and none has returned. Some of the doors of the empty cells hung open. Others were closed with twists of wire, and last year’s leaves blew about the wide wooden halls. In the little garden, an old shepherd with bright blue eyes, long matted hair, and a spade-shaped beard like that worn on vases by Ajax and Agamemnon, was sitting on a rock with a tall crook over his shoulder. He was shod in cowhide moccasins and dressed in a kind of sheepskin hauberk caught in by a belt. He looked as wild and solitary as Timon of Athens, but over the rare luxury of a cigarette he admitted that he got lonely in Holy Trinity, and added that he was about to abandon the flocks to become a postulant of St. Stephen. Delving into a past that seemed almost as remote and nebulous as that of the monastery’s foundation, he recounted his experiences during a short-lived emigration to Louisiana as a hand in the municipal slaughterhouses of Baton Rouge.
From the plain’s brink at St. Stephen, we had turned back into the heart of the monastic regions. Only the descending pathway gave a hint of egress to the outside world. Dispersed among the rocks where monasticism still subsisted—Roussanou, St. Stephen, St. Barlaam and the Metamorphosis, isolated survivors of a scattered metropolis of twenty-six foundations—crumbled the shells of the extinct monasteries. Poised on their pinnacles, they are no longer accessible. No steps ascend and no monks are left to cast their nets into the surrounding gulf. They disintegrate in mid-air, empty stone caskets of rotting timber and slowly falling frescoes that only spiders and owls and kestrels inhabit or an occasional family of eagles. How distinct the rocks of the Meteora appear from all that surrounds them! They have a different birth, and bear an alien, planetary aspect, like a volley of thunderbolts embedded in the steep-sided hollow. The flanks of the nearest pillars were as smooth as mussel-shells, striped in places with yellow lichen or with moss as dark as submarine foliage and the straight ascending flight of the conglomerate sides was only broken here and there by a frill of evergreen. As they retreated, all these colours resolved themselves to a universal blue-grey gunmetal hue.
Here, on the edge of the precipice of Holy Trinity, we were on a level with all the monasteries except the towering Transfiguration. Lying on the grass among autumn crocuses and cyclamen and anemones, we watched the shadows darken. The great columns, as slanting and horizontal creases appeared, seemed to be on the move; to climb and twirl like melting sticks of barley sugar, thrusting their burden in spirals into the still and watery evening. A slender Jacob’s ladder of pale gold sloped among the monasteries from a bright-rimmed cave among the changing clouds, singling out half an acre of mountainside and the minute strolling figures of Father Christopher and Bessarion on the raft of St. Barlaam. The faint tap of a semantron sounded across the darkening chasm, followed
soon by the sad clanking of hesperine bells from the Metamorphosis. As the shades of evening assembled, the monasteries began to float as if they had sailed to the surface of some private element. Their massive supporting pillars became irrelevant appendages: wavering tendrils that tapered and dwindled and vanished in the dusk until the clusters of domes and cypresses and towers, like little celestial cities, seemed only to be held aloft in the void by the whirring and multiple wings of a company of seraphim.
[1] I think this was a mistake, and that the fresco probably represents John Ourosh Palaeologue, King of Thessaly, virtual Despot of Epirus and Abbot of one of the Meteora; a man, according to chronicles, renowned for his holy life. This would explain the royaland the saintly attributes, only the former of which could be applied, even by the most charitable iconographer, to Cantacuzene. The error, if it is one, is understandable, as the Emperor, retiring at the end of his stormy career to a monastic life on Mount Athos, adopted the same conventual name as Ourosh Palaeologue, i.e. Ioasaph or Jehosaphat. (Ioasaph was also the monastic name of John VII Palaeologue.) The name is written beside the fresco. Also, Antony Cantacuzene was a founder of the neighbouring monastery of St. Stephen, though his link with the Emperor’s family is not determined; which increases the confusion. John VI was mentioned to me as a founder by monks in three of the Meteora and his fresco is designated as such. Chronicles, though, as far as I have been able to discover, do not record the fact. He was almost certainly a liberal benefactor, and may have visited the monasteries during his campaigns in Epirus and Aetolia in 1340.
[2] Stagoi, the hierarchic name of the bishopric of Kalabaka (cum Trikke, or Trikkala), is contracted from the words eis toushagious, “all the Saints.”
[3] No longer the exclusive appanage of the Emperor, but second in the imperial hierarchy.
[4] Angelina is not a Christian name, but the feminine of Angelos, which is also the surname of a former Byzantine imperial family. Ducaina and Palaeologina follow the same process.
[5] 1389.
[6] 1393.
[7] Except perhaps those in the church of St. Nicholas on the lake-island of Yanina.
[8] The abbess’s words were the only mention of her I ever found. Perhaps I have not come across all the sources. The records say that Roussanou, the faint Russian sound of whose name the abbess attributed to this problematical hyperborean foundress, was instituted by the monks Nicodemus and Benedict—a very strange name for an orthodox monk—in 1380, and restored in 1545 by two monks from Yanina, Maximos and another (and final) Ioasaph. It seems always to have been a male foundation.
[9] Monasteries of the Levant, by the Honble. Robert Curzon, and Excursion dans la Thessalie Turque en 1858, by Leon Heuzey, are the most interesting of the numerous accounts.
[10] When Thessaly was liberated from the Turks, the monks and the surrounding villagers rose in arms to resist the attempts of the Athenian authorities to transfer their manuscripts to Athens.
[11] I heard it again next day from the inhabitants of Kalabaka.
3. THE HELLENO-ROMAIC DILEMMA AND SIDETRACK TO CRETE
“ROMIÒS eísai?”
A glance of surprise accompanied the question. It was long past midnight and I had stopped at an open-air bar on the way back to my hotel in Panama City. The three barmen were taking their orders in Spanish but shouting them back to the whiskered cook in Greek; and when my turn came, I asked for something in the same language. Hence the question: are you a Greek? The place was run by a family from the little port of Karlóvassi in Samos. They were the fourth Greeks I had met during nearly a year in the Caribbean and the Central American republics: one was a business man in Haiti; another, on the plane between Havana and British Honduras, a grocer; the last, a lonely innkeeper in Cordova, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua opposite the volcano of Momotombo. (Greeks, so widely scattered all over the world, are scarce in these parts. The nearest settlement was a little sharkproof colony from Kalymnos in the Dodecanese who dive for sponges off the Florida reefs.)
How incongruous, among the languid Panamanians and Lascars and Chinamen, these three alert islanders seemed! When the time came to pay, it was impossible. This encounter was a sudden shaft of light and cheer in a rather dispiriting sojourn, and, as I made my way back to my quarters through the trams and the mosquitoes and the racy invitations murmured in the lanes, I meditated with homesickness about the faraway archipelago and the language and the country which we all knew well; and also about the wording of their question: why, in their momentary delusion about where I came from, they had used the word “Romiòs” instead of the more usual “Hellene.”
The answer carries us back two-third of the way to Pericles.
When Constantine founded a second capital for the late Roman Empire, Constantinople was not meant to be the successor to the ancient metropolis on the Tiber, still less a substitute or a rival. The mushroom city was the twin capital of an undivided State. But within sixty years, different emperors ruled as administrative partners over the two regions. The eastern city expanded; the western, beset by barbarians, declined; and, in less than a century, almost by mistake, it was extinguished by the Goths, leaving the Empire shorn of its western half, but once more subject to a single city, the New Rome on the banks of the Bosphorus. And so it remained until 1453, when it was destroyed by the Turks. The eastern outlived its amputated western half by twelve dynasties, eighty-four emperors and just under a thousand years.
The world in which Byzantium–Constantinople–New Rome grew up was Greek. So were the surviving Roman citizens and soon the emperors too. Athens had fallen into a decline, and Constantinople was now the heart and centre of the Greek race. When theological discord about the Holy Ghost divided the East and the West the newer imperial city became the metropolis of the Eastern Christendom as well, and remained so for all its millennial span. So, for a thousand years, the Greeks were Romaíoi—Romans—as well as Hellenes; and the word Romaíoi soon meant a subject of the Empire and an Orthodox Eastern Christian in rather confusing contrast to the Western Christians with their spiritual capital in Old Rome. The word “Hellene” came to mean a pagan, and when, after Julian the Apostate’s brief revival, paganism disappeared, the word “Hellene” went into abeyance too. Much later, for a freak decade or two, a Byzantine élite, influenced by the neoplatonist cosmogony of Gemistus Plethon—alas, lost—seriously thought of themselves as “Hellenes.” It was a faint, entrancing Renaissance echo of Julian’s throwback, and, the times being what they were, the word “Hellene,” one suspects, had more than a dash of its old pagan meaning. Radiating from Mistra in its last days, the revival was as fleeting and ill-starred as the school of painting that flourished by its side. (I wish I had been there.) Dire events blew those brief candles out. Afterwards only Romaíos remained. To the Moslem races—the Persians and Arabs and, later, the Turks—the Empire was known as Rūm. By the time Byzantium fell, and for the following four centuries, all Greeks, in Islam, were Rūmis. The grander word Romaíos dropped out of everyday use, and Greeks themselves used the more familiar word romiòs (a half-Graecized form of rūmi) in referring to themselves and their countrymen.[1]
The spoken Greek of everyday—the language of popular poetry, songs and proverbs, the living tongue, in fact—came to be called Romaic. Opposed to this was the archaizing literary idiom of theology, chronicles, official documents and the liturgy, which grew steadily more artificial as time passed: a language of scribes. The deviation began long before Byzantium fell; both are versions of the universal koinē of the Hellenistic world, and undisputed heirs of ancient Greek. But Romaic, or Demotic, Greek was spoken by everyone; the other, “Katharévousa,” the “Pure,” was written by a few, spoken by none. One was familiar homespun, the other, ceremonious brocade. When, for a combination of political and religious reasons, the Greeks stopped thinking of themselves specifically as “Hellenes,” they didn’t cease to be Hellenes, even if they thought of themselves as Romaíoi. When Greece regained its freedom, the old
name of Hellene was once more in the ascendant and Romiòs fell into disfavour among the revivalists. Today, the two words carry definite and different undertones.
“Hellene” is the glory of ancient Greece; “Romaic” the splendours and the sorrows of Byzantium, above all, the sorrows. “Hellenism” is symbolized by the columns of the Parthenon; Byzantium, the imperial golden age of Christian Greece, by the great dome of St. Sophia. Were one compelled to find an emblem for the more complex meaning of Romiosyne—the Romaic World, “Romaic-hood”—perhaps it would still be St. Sophia; but a St. Sophia turned into a mosque filled with turbans and flanked by minarets, with all her mosaic saints hidden under the white-wash and the giant Koranic texts of the occupying Turks; the Greeks meanwhile, exiles in their own land, celebrate their rites in humbler fanes.
A few years ago I asked George Theotokas, the distinguished Greek writer, why the word Romiòs, used in certain contexts, has a derogatory sense. He thought for a long time, and then said “I suppose because it means our dirty linen. Einai ta aplyta mas...” In this subsidiary meaning, it not only conjures up the tragedy of the Fall, but the helplessness of subjection and the strands of Turkish custom which inevitably, during an occupation lasting centuries, wove themselves into the web of Greek life. It suggests the shifts and compromises with which the more intelligent Greeks outwitted their oppressors. Under the Ottomans, only the Greek Orthodox Church, and their wits, were left to the Greeks. These they used to some purpose. The Oecumenical Patriarch, the Sultan’s single go-between with his Christian subjects, held the Greeks together as a family till better days should come. Turkish scorn of languages and their artlessness as negotiators led Phanariot Greeks, as Dragomans of the Sublime Porte, to play a considerable part in the foreign policy of the Empire. Greek Phanariot princes reigned vice-regally from the vassal thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia; Greek bankers handled finance; Greek mountaineers—the Armatoles—“guarded” the mountain passes; Greek seamen manned the warships of the Turkish fleet.[2]
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