On the Shores of the Mediterranean (20 page)

At its greatest the Meteora consisted of thirteen monasteries and twenty smaller communities, and after the Turkish conquest they became places of refuge as well as places of prayer.

The treasures which the monks could sometimes be persuaded to expose to view were extraordinary and varied, and still are: silver reliquaries containing the heads of founders, saintly relics, the gold-embroidered mitre of a founder, vestments, including a chasuble embroidered with gold and pearls belonging to the Palaeologi, a gold cup belonging to the Cantacuzene, former patrons of one of the monasteries, a crucifix carved with scenes from the Old and New Testaments so small that they can only be viewed through a magnifying glass which took a monk named Daniel twelve years to make.

There was also an extraordinary wealth of frescoes and ikons not really acceptable to the nineteenth-century taste. They depicted what looked to the uninitiated like identical bands of saints, wearing, for example, identical, fluted, casque-like hats on their heads and with beards, combed, parted and done in ringlets, which made them look as if they were the finalists in some beard-dressing competition, all gazing calmly, unworried, untouched by grief, thinking of other things, at some point beyond the beholder in a far distance, while below them the Virgin, attended by St Ephraim,
one of their number, passes away (a seventeenth-century Dormition in the Monastery of Barlaam). There were also innumerable scenes of martyrdom: future candidates for canonization being boiled alive, chopped in half, impaled, burned, broken on an agonizing wheel, both martyrs and those who are martyring them showing no emotion of any kind – the torturers might equally well be tending a garden as impaling a saint; the saints already mentally with God – so that looking at them, and at such great masterpieces of the fourteenth century as the Virgin in Lamentation and Christ in Piety, one begins to understand that one is not looking at people, human beings with human attributes, as one would find in a picture painted, say, in fourteenth-century Italy, but at symbols, painted to remind one to remember them and what they represent.

But what distinguished the Meteora monasteries, and other Orthodox and Coptic monasteries in the Mediterranean lands – on Mount Athos, in Jerusalem, in Egypt on the Nile, and in the sandy wastes of Sinai – was the accumulated wealth of priceless manuscripts and printed books which, to put it mildly, were treated in a pretty offhand manner by their custodians, most of whom were not
au fait
with either Ancient or Hellenic Greek, the Copts being equally negligent and equally unable to read their amazing books, so that what Curzon, the cultivated bibliophile, saw in the course of his monastic visits was the equivalent of a massacre. In the Monastery of Pantocrator on Mount Athos more than a hundred ancient manuscripts, all that was left of the library, many of them fine large folios, were lying amongst rubble. They had been either washed clean by rainwater or else had become stuck together in a solid, brittle mass like a huge biscuit. In the Monastery of Barlaam in the Meteora, the Agoumenos, on being asked by Curzon if he would sell a folio Bulgarian manuscript and an eleventh-century copy of the Gospels in quarto, chucked them
into the dusty corner from which he had plucked them as a sign that he did not wish to do so. What went on at the Monastery of St Katharine in 1844 is told by Constantin von Tischendorf, who was on his first visit to the library in which he was to discover, twelve years later, the Codex Sinaiticus, 347 leaves of a fourth-century manuscript of the New Testament in Greek and parts of the Old Testament, later sold by the Bolsheviks to the British Government and now in the British Museum.

In the middle of the library, however, there also stood a large basket with the remains of damaged manuscripts. When I went to examine it, the Librarian, Cyril, remarked that its contents had twice already been emptied into the fire. What was there now was the third filling, which by all appearances was destined for the same fate. Judge of my astonishment when I pulled out of it a number of parchment leaves covered with Greek writing, which from their palaeographic characteristics could be judged to be of the highest antiquity … I had seen nothing that could be judged to be older than the leaves I saw at Sinai. Their contents proved to be Old Testament matter … the total number of leaves was 129. The basket being destined for destruction, I was able to secure that the smaller number of leaves, 43, which were lying loose nearby, was withdrawn at my request. When I asked later to have those that remained, difficulties arose from the side of the Superior, although he himself betrayed no knowledge of the affair. I merely noted the bare contents of the remaining 86 leaves … But I recommended Cyril, the Librarian, … most urgently to guard these precious leaves well. I added – and everything else at all similar to this that may be found.
²

This was the Codex Friderico-Augustanus, still preserved to this day in the University Library at Leipzig.

By the time we reached the Meteora we had left it too late, at least twenty years too late. There was a huge coach park outside the Monastery of the Transfiguration, the Great Meteoron, full of coaches from the cold European north, and lined with stalls selling junk. St Barlaam, that had been so difficult to enter, now had a bridge thrown across the chasm and the interior was like that of a railway station, full of oracular guides, and the refectory had been converted into a museum, admission 3 drachmas, closed 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. It was almost impossible to enter the beautiful church of the Katholikon, built by Nektarios and Theophanes Asparas of Ioannina, between 1542–44, to see its noble frescoes, because of the huge numbers of people. Now only two monks lived in the Monastery of the Transfiguration, which was almost entirely given up to mass tourism. Only one monk lived in Ayia Triadha, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity; but nuns had reoccupied Rousanou.

Phalanxes of motorcyclists roared around what was now a panoramic road that had done its bit to help destroy the unique feeling of silence and solitude that had once reigned here, broken only by the sound of bells and the
semantra
, the flat beam which was beaten with a mallet, summoning the monks to prayer.

What had not changed were the inaccessible places: the pigeon holes in the cliffs, homes of the earliest anchorites, the cleft rock of the Prodromos with the ruins of its monastery, abandoned in 1745; the rock on which the Hypselotera, highest of all the monasteries, originally reached by vertical ladders, dedicated to the Highest in the Heavens, was built in 1390, only to be abandoned in the seventeenth century because of the horrors of the ascent; the Hypapanti, still visitable, set in a huge cavern and adorned with frescoes; and the completely inaccessible Ayia Moni on what
is more like a needle than a rock, built in 1614 and destroyed by an earthquake in 1858; Ayios Dimitrios, destroyed in 1809 when it was bombarded by Turkish artillery, having become the lair of a band of
klephtis
. All these, except the Hypapanti, were still left to the nesting vultures, as they had been for centuries.

Still in a state of shock at the thought of the Monasteries of the Air, where we had planned to spend some days, rising from chasms full of motor coaches and monks frenziedly selling picture postcards to fulfil their day’s quota, I decided to realize the ambition of a lifetime, which was to climb to the summit of Mount Olympus and look out, god-like, over the wide Aegean.

‘How big is this Olympus?’ Wanda asked when I announced my intention and when I told her, after looking it up, that there were ten summits, none of them less than 8800 feet, and that seven of them were over 9000 feet but that there was no need to climb the whole lot on the same day, she said she would ‘tink about it’, which meant that she would probably stay at the base camp.

We set off through the Plain of Thessaly under a lowering sky in a light drizzle which made the fields of stubble on either side of the road look particularly uninteresting. Even the River Peneus at Trikkala, compressed between concrete embankments and spanned by hideous bridges, contrived to look awful.

Soon we arrived at Larissa, which is famous for its ice-cream, its storks – but they had already left – halva and, something rather rare in Greece where they don’t exactly grow on trees, bicycles, what looked like 72,300 of them (which was the number of its inhabitants at the last count, or whatever the current number was), all being ridden at once. There were also approximately twice that number of cars and trucks. The noise was indescribable. In Larissa we waited for hours while some panel-beaters extruded our van which I had driven backwards into a tree, under the impression that I was driving a tram, in and out of the rain which sometimes drizzled, sometimes came down in torrents, as if it was bath night for Olympian Zeus, who was now only a few miles and some 9000 vertical feet away, and he had turned on the tap with his big toe and let it overflow. We waited in patisseries, cafés, under orange and lime trees, even for a few brief moments in a cinema, all of which were conveniently situated in the main square which apparently had so many different names that even the Larissans were not sure what to call it. We also took refuge from the rain in the Archaeological Museum, in what the guide book said was the unfinished cathedral and among the vestiges of a classical temple almost next door to it, which was not much good for keeping the rain out. We ordered roast lamb in a modest-looking restaurant, countermanding the order when we found that it was going to cost 800 drachmas a portion, paying for the bread we had eaten and skedaddling. How can one really say that one likes any place under such circumstances, even Larissa?

What had we learned about the Greeks in our brief sojourn in their country? We seemed to have spent most of our time up to now consorting with Albanians, Pargiots, Suliots, Vlachs and what were said to be the descendants of Negro slaves, one of whom looked like a Hindu. They were certainly inquisitive, hyperactive mentally, thirsty for knowledge, believing whole-heartedly in the benefits of education, as were the benefactors of Métsovo (but they were Vlachs), tactful, astute, cunning (dishonesty is not, as in most other Mediterranean countries, or anywhere else for that matter, a national characteristic), courteous to strangers who might appear unheralded in their midst, temperate and chaste, at least amongst themselves, reserving – like most other dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean – unchastity for visitors, extremely patriotic, extremely democratic, convinced of their superiority over other nations, particularly intellectual, ambitious, thrifty, loving money, brave.

Then we left Larissa for the Vale of Tempe by what the indispensable
Blue Guide to Greece
called ‘the usual route’, that is past the Museum which, considering that it was a mosque and therefore only had one room in it, had seemed to devote a disproportionate amount of space to a single menhir, through the area – and there is one in every town – devoted to the crushing of defunct motor cars, then following the road past the sugar refineries, which ran parallel to the railway line to Thessaloniki, otherwise Salonika, a place to be avoided at any cost.

Ahead, on one hand we should now have been looking at the peaks of the Olympus range, on the other at Ossa, rising above its stony foothills. This was the mountain that had the misfortune to have Pelion, a mountain in Magnesian Thessaly, stuck on top of it by the Giants who were intent on using it as a mounting block from which to reach the summit of Olympus in their war with the Gods, known as the Gigantomachia, which they lost. All
we could actually see were some of the stony foothills. Everything else was covered with ten-tenths cloud. It might have been Balmoral.

We entered the Vale of Tempe, which separates Olympus from Ossa and through which the Peneus flows on its last five miles or so to the Aegean Sea, one of the wonders of antiquity, said to be the work of Poseidon, the god of earthquakes and water. This defile, although it was easily defended against invaders attempting to reach the interior of Greece, could easily be turned, as Xerxes discovered in 480 BC when he took his army over mountain roads causing the Greeks to abandon their position and fall back on Thermopylae, as did the Germans in 1941. Older guide books praise the beauties and virtues of the Vale of Tempe, the wonderfully fresh air in the verdant gorge, the grandeur of its almost vertical cliffs, partly clothed in ivy and other climbing plants, the abundant waters of the Peneus, no longer compressed between concrete embankments as they are at Trikkala, flowing in the shade of willows, terebinths, lentisks, oleanders, wild fig,
agnus castus
and laurel, laurel which Apollo, having killed the serpent Python, the dragon that guarded Delphi, and having purified himself in the waters of the river, carried to Delphi, where he replanted it by the spring known as the Castalian Fountain, initiating a cult. In memory of this act, a band of young men were sent at intervals of eight years from Delphi to Tempe, where they took cuttings of the now sacred laurel which they carried back to their native city.

What most guide books fail to say is that the Peneus, flowing deep in its midst, has to share the Vale not only with a railway line but with a multi-lane highway decorated with concrete lampposts, the main road from Salonika to Athens and the Piraeus, that winter and summer it is jam-packed with juggernaut lorries, and that to stop at a lay-by when travelling eastwards, as we were doing, involves turning across the path of oncoming traffic
travelling westwards, something which requires more courage than many people possess.

Eventually emerging from this spectacular mess on to the shores of the Aegean, we left Thessaly behind and at what would have been sunset if there had been any sun, arrived at the little town of Litochoron, one of the setting-off places for Olympus which is situated in a plain at the foot of the eastern outriders of the mountain, a wasteland of sand, scrub and stone brought down from the mountain and until well into the 1920s a place infested with bandits, which slopes away gently to the shores of what is known as the Thermaic Gulf, at the head of which lies the city of Salonika.

Described by climbers who visited it in the early twenties as being a miserable village, Litochoron had suddenly found favour as a health resort, especially for those suffering from tuberculosis, and now it was a pleasant little place, if not one in which most people would want to linger very long, any more than they would want to stay in the Cheddar Gorge indefinitely, with about 6000 inhabitants, most of whom invaded the square each evening for the Greek equivalent of the
passeggiata
and also to witness the ceremonial hauling down of the national flag by soldiers of the Greek army, who have a ski school on the mountain. They were a friendly lot, the people of Litochoron, and we had a number of interesting conversations in the cafés with well-dressed gentlemen who had spent most of their lives in such far off places as Pittsburgh, Darwin and West Hartlepool but had never climbed Mount Olympus or even thought of doing so.

Until a motor road was built up through the Mavrolongos valley, one of the principal ways into the heart of the massif, Litochoron was the place where pack animals and a guide were usually engaged by those intending to make the twelve-mile trek to the top of the mountain, which normally took two days. But
now one could start from Prionia, where there was a restaurant, water, which was difficult to find higher up, and where the pack animals were now kept. It was possible, although a rather arduous exercise, to reach the top and come down again to Prionia in a single day; and after listening to an expert in the Greek Alpine Club office in Litochoron, who said that the black cloud that was currently blanketing the entire massif down to a height of around 6–7000 feet might well remain on it for a week or more, I decided to climb it the following morning.

We spent the night in Litochoron at the New Youth Hostel, Director Demetrios Irantos, whom we never saw, the whole place being run by what looked like a small boy, we ourselves being probably the most ancient youths who had ever stayed in it. Mr Irantos’ brochure assured us that while we were on the premises we would enjoy ‘the breezing of the Aegean Sea’ and ‘perfect neatness’. It was a friendly, if somewhat crowded place, filled when we arrived to claim the last two bunks with keen young British backpackers, nothing like the ones with earrings we had encountered on the quay at Bar and Igoumenitsa. These were all male and wore great boots and practical but inelegant clothes; hill walkers with a distinctly aggressive approach to their chosen pastime, and far into the night they droned on about how many hours or days it had taken them to do the Yorkshire North Moors walk or sections of the Pennine Way which apparently were now almost as crowded with walkers as a motorway with vehicles.

The only thing seriously wrong with Mr Irantos’ Hostel was the shower compartment, which he had somehow succeeded in hewing out of the corner of what was already a ridiculously small room. It was so small that it was impossible to take a shower without the water actually playing on the live electric light which illuminated it and which, whether it was switched on or not, constituted such a hazard to life that some waggish guest had
stuck a label on the door with the announcement ‘Frying Tonight’ printed on it.

Having set the alarm for five o’clock the following morning, which woke the other guests, I got up, looked out of several windows but could see nothing of Mount Olympus or anything else, even though the economically-minded municipality had switched off the street lamps which was a help rather than a hindrance. On my way back to bed I found a notice board to which Mr Irantos, or one of his aides, had pinned a short list of edicts and helpful suggestions, two of which I copied down, being unsure whether or not I might pass this way again. One read: ‘At bed at 11 o’clock at night the outdoor is after this time closed. These are not about the people who have private room’, which showed that even here, on the slopes of Mount Olympus, just as there was for the Gods on the summit, there was one law for the privileged and another for those who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want, a private room.

The other, a more kindly one, read: ‘You can eat and wet clothes in the playground of the Youth hostel.’ Funny? Well, I thought it was funny, but it made me wonder how good I would be at writing the same thing in Greek and pinning it on the notice board if I happened to be the warden of an English Youth Hostel catering for Greeks.

It was just as dark at six, by which time some of the conquerors of Olympus and the Pennine Way were beginning to complain about my alarm clock going off all the time, and so at seven I woke by natural means. Wanda had never slept at all since my first morning call, being a light sleeper.

At eight o’clock we arrived at Prionia, on the way having stopped in the bottom of the Mavrolongos Gorge, where it was almost as dark as night under the trees, to look at all that remained of the monastery of Ayios Dionisos. Built at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, blown up by the Turks in 1828, rebuilt some twenty-five or thirty years later, it was finally destroyed in 1943 by the Germans, who might be pardoned for suspecting that such a remote building might be being used as a base for clandestine activities.

At Prionia, where there was nothing apart from the small eating place and the wooden building used to stable the mules, there were a number of vehicles, all of them with German registrations, most of them Volkswagen caravan conversions with their occupants asleep inside them. The weather was incredibly gloomy. Black cloud pressed down into the gorge so heavily that the weight of it could actually be felt, and I developed a violent headache. I left at eight-thirty, after a large breakfast, passing a beautiful waterfall which fell into a crystal clear pool, the last source, I had been told, before the summit, where I emptied my waterbottles of the tap water from the hostel and refilled them, then followed the red markings painted on the rocks, the going very steep now, through thick forest of pine and beech and other deciduous trees, some of them big specimens, rounding the heads of numerous side valleys.

At nine o’clock I crossed the dry bed of a torrent into which an enormous avalanche, which had stripped the mountainside clean of them in a swathe a hundred yards wide, had pitched what must have been thousands of tons of shattered tree trunks to form what before the forest guards had cut a way through it, using dynamite, was an impassable barrier. This was more or less the limit of deciduous trees, apart from a few scattered walnuts, and now the mist became even thicker than it had been.

It began to rain heavily. The atmosphere was incredibly humid. Having to choose between being soaked to the skin by rain or wearing a waterproof jacket and being soaked with perspiration, it was difficult to know what to do. I chose to be wet with rain. At nine-thirty I passed a sign which read ‘Spilios Agapitos Hut
– 1 Hour’, and as it was officially 2½ hours from Prionia to the hut and I had only been climbing for an hour, I decided to go for a strictly private record attempt to reach the hut in 1¾ hours as there was nothing to see en route except the trunks of trees looming in the mist, and I was so wet that the sooner I got there the better. At quarter past ten, having passed through a belt of enormous conifers with trunks between four and five feet thick that must have been anything up to a thousand years old, I reached the hut, the Katafiyo Spilios Agapitos, the property of the Greek Alpine Club, at 6890 feet.