Roumeli (13 page)

Scholarship and the recording of history played a less important part in Eastern monasticism than it did in the West. Records about the Meteora are scarce. Contemporary documents are surprisingly uninformative, and the outlines of their story must be pieced together from the occasional notes of a more historically-minded monk in the mildewed monastic libraries and from the Synodal Judgements and, above all, the chysobuls of founders and benefactors. These voluminous documents inscribed on parchment and appended with heavy seals, are drawn up in Rumanian in the case of Moldo-Wallachian voivodes, and those—the vast majority—in Greek are a tortuous maze of Byzantine abbreviations and ligatures ending, when they are from an emperor, with complex and calligraphic vermilion signatures sprinkled with gold dust and cinnabar.

The first ascetic of the Meteora appears to have been the hermit Barnabas who, in
A.D.
985 founded the little skete of the Holy Ghost in the rocks above Kastraki, something over a mile south of St. Barlaam. Many zealots followed his example during the eleventh century, and, by 1162, they had formed a miniature Thebaid centred on the skete of Dupiani or Stagoi,
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where the scattered athletes of God would congregate for Mass on Sundays. In the fourteenth century, monasteries began to appear on the loftier summits and the Meteora slowly changed into the phenomenon they have remained ever since. Perhaps the first impulse was the advent of St. Athanasios the Meteorite.
The details of his life are based principally on an anonymous and undated manuscript from the library of the Transfiguration. He was born in 1305 in Neopatras on Mount Othrys. Captured by the Grand Company of the Catalans who were ravaging central Greece, he travelled to Athos, Byzantium and Crete. Finishing his novitiate in Mount Athos under the tutelage of a venerable monk called Gregory, Athanasios and his instructor left the Holy Mountain in flight from an invasion of the corsairs that infested the Grecian coasts. Drawn by reports of the many miracles performed at the foot of the Meteora, “which,” the Bishop of Verria informed the pilgrims, “are only inhabited by the vultures and the crows,” and by the triumphs of asceticism achieved there, they wandered south and established themselves in a cave on the summit of the Stylos, or the Rock of the Column, where they devoted themselves to prayer and weaving and basket-work. These rigours, however, proved too fierce for the elderly Gregory, and Athanasios conducted him over the mountains to the refuge of Salonica, returning alone to find that the monk who had replaced him on the Stylos had died there, his body remaining, as he had wished, to be devoured, like that of a Parsee, by the birds. A scavenger with a finger in its beak was the first sight that greeted the returning saint. He then settled on the crest of the rock where his monastery now stands, surrounding himself shortly afterwards with fourteen monks, and building a church there with funds supplied by “a powerful personage belonging to the race of the Triballes.” The first great monastery had been established.

The Triballes, in the high-flown language of Byzantine documents, are the Serbs. The decline of the Byzantine Empire, during the middle of the fourteenth century, had gathered speed. The wars of the rival emperors, John V Palaeologue and John VI Cantacuzene (during which the Turks made their first ominous entry into Europe), had left its western regions exposed
to the ambitions of Stephen Dushan, the Serbian kral, who occupied north-western Greece. By 1345, nearly the whole of Thessaly was in his hands. Mimicking the style of the Empire which he hoped to overcome, he placed his general Prealoumbos as viceroy in Trikkala with the Byzantine title of Caesar.
[3]
It seems likely that this was the powerful personage who backed Athanasios. On the death of Stephen in 1355, his half-brother Symeon Ourosh usurped the Kingdom of Thessaly from Stephen's son. The advance of the Turks in the Balkans soon cut off the old Serbian Kingdom from its newly acquired Greek provinces and Symeon remained King of Thessaly with Trikkala, that dusty lowland town by the winding Peneios, as his capital. To add colour to his imperial aspirations he adopted the family name of his mother (Palaeologue again: she was Maria, daughter of the Despot John, brother of the Emperor Michael VIII who delivered Constantinople from the Latins) and married a Greek princess, Thomaïs, the daughter of John II Ducas, the Despot of Epirus. The children of this marriage were virtually Greek and they appear to have been eager to forget their barbarian origins. The daughter, Maria Angelina
[4]
Ducaina Palaeologina, reigning as Despotess of Epirus, discarded her Serbian patronymic, preferring to stiffen her Epirote dignity with the names of three imperial dynasties acquired in the female line, which she occasionally further reinforced with that of a fourth, Comnena. Her brother, John Ourosh Ducas Palaeologue, succeeded to his father's crown in 1371. But, long before his accession, he had become a monk in Athanasios' monastery of the Transfiguration, and there, except for a short period at Mount Athos, he remained under the name of Father Ioasaph till his death. Resigning the transactions of his Thessalian kingdom
to the Caesar Alexis Angelos, he frequently advised his sister on the conduct of her thorny Despotate beyond the watershed of the Pindus. He seems to have been as wise as he was holy, and it is to him as much as to St. Athanasios that the Transfiguration owes its pre-eminence and its beautiful buildings.

SS Athanasios, Ioasaph and Barlaam (who established himself on the neighbouring peak at the same period) are the three dominant figures in the monastic triumphs of the Meteora. The saintly king died long after the Turks of Sultan Amurath had defeated the Serbs, his distant and putative liegemen, on the field of Kossovo;
[5]
long after Bajazet the Thunderbolt had annihilated both Greek and Serbian sway in Greece.
[6]
Several different dates are ascribed to his death, but it must have been within a decade or two of the final destruction of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The new-moon and horse-tailed banners were slanting across Europe.

The original church begun by St. Athanasios and completed by Father Ioasaph now forms the hieron, the part behind the rood-screen reserved to the officiating priest. The main body of the church—the katholikon and the narthex—was reared nearly two hundred years later in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, Queen Elizabeth's contemporary. Built in the Athonite cruciform style with the transepts ending in apses lined with wooden stalls, it is much larger than the other churches of the Meteora. The height of the pillars, and of the central dome of the Pantocrator and the shafts of sun falling through its numerous windows on the predominantly blue background of the beautiful frescoes leaven the thick Byzantine masonry to an almost miraculous lightness. We were joined in our scrutiny of the ikons by a sad and elderly monk who seemed to derive little
pleasure from our visit. We accompanied him to the old hospital and a fine barrel-vaulted refectory. The long table was smashed and the floor was littered with rubbish, but, in a bay at the end, a massive circular table of stone marked the seat of the abbot and his symbouloi. It had plainly once accommodated a large number of monks. Asked if it was ever used now, the old monk tilted his head back in the Greek gesture of negation.

“What could we do with such a place? There are only four of us left...
Parakmí, parakmí
...”

His fellow-monks were wavering at the doors of their cells in a long gallery; with one exception, they were aged and fragile men. One, seeing that we were about to leave, ambled indoors and returned with glasses of raki and half a dozen walnuts lying with their shells already broken in the palm of his hand.

“There, my children. I'm sorry we can do no better; but times have changed. Once...”

The ghost of poverty inhabited the beautiful place, but the tradition of hospitality is slow to disappear. His message of decay accompanied us on our journey to the windy edge of the rock, where a few autumn crocuses flourished round a little pavilion.

We regained St. Barlaam by another path over a smooth plateau of rock where we found Bessarion chasing the abbot's mare, which had broken loose. Haunted by visions of the poor animal plunging into the gulf, we helped him round her up and lead her back to her stall and we all three climbed to the monastery together.

Seated with the two monks by the window of the guest-chamber that evening, I asked how St. Athanasios the Meteorite could possibly have ascended the Broad Rock. Bessarion looked at the abbot and then out of the window.

“They say,” he observed tentatively, “that he flew there on an eagle's back....”

Father Christopher had opened his snuff-box. He prepared the snuff himself from powdered tobacco and herbs and spices. It smelt like pot-pourri.

“That's what they say,” he repeated absently, and took a large pinch.

Bessarion began to describe his journey from Greece to the Middle East by submarine.

The Convent of St. Barbara, or, as it is more commonly styled, Roussanou, projects from the side of the basin which is roughly girded by the taller spires of the Meteora, on a sharp leaning blade of rock. It is as compact as a swallow's nest. The masonry and the mineral imperceptibly blend and the convent sails into the air like a little Danubian keep; expanding below the eaves in a circuit of beam-stayed wooden balconies, the tiled upheaval of its roof swelling in the centre to an elegant cupola. We descended in a wide half-circle from the foot of St. Barlaam and climbed down the hillside through thickets of thyme and cystus and tamarisk. The cleft between the crag of Roussanou and the adjacent peninsula of the massif is spanned by a narrow iron bridge running like a diving board from the top of a steep triangle of stone steps, built out from the mountainside, to the monastery door. Father Chrysanthos, the last monk of St. Barbara, died there long ago and it is now the home of a minute company of nuns. The two that were living there greeted us as we entered and led us into a golden empty expanse of low wooden ceilings and undulating floors whose worn planking was suspended from wall to wall as uncertainly as a cobweb. Everything trembled at the softest footfall. The light streaming through the wide balconied windows and from the chinks in the woodwork resembled that of the deck of a sailing ship under an awning. Banistered ladders climbed to
still higher regions overhead and disappeared through hatchways into the bowels of the convent. The chapel, a small flagged chamber with a domed square rising on four pillars to the saucer shaped hollow whose tiled convexity we had seen from above, is embedded in the timbers of the conventual buildings. Judgements and martyrdoms, more bloody than any I have ever seen,
[7]
flowed across the narthex walls. But inside the whole universe was displayed. Seas and mountains unfolded, forests stocked with strange denizens, an entire zoo: peacocks with their tails spread, camels, lions, antelopes, serpents, wyverns and hippogryphs. Dragons traversed the sky trailing smoke like skywriting from their nostrils and the elements were represented by dripping icicles, storm-clouds, hail, rain, ice and snow. Equinoxes, eclipses, the sun, the moon and the planetary system joined in a diminishing ring above the girdle of the zodiac. The regions of paradise, peopled by thrones and dominions and powers and many winged seraphim ascended the drum of the cupola in celestial zones to the tall golden figure of the All-Powerful.

In spite of their simplicity and gentleness, there was little trace of Western conventual aloofness, of the recluded and downcast custody of the eyes, about the two nuns of Roussanou. The faces under the black head-kerchiefs were round as apples, and they addressed one as “my child” in the familiar and friendly Greek fashion. Mother Ekaterini, the abbess, settled in one of the sunny window seats and unfolded her sewing with a sigh while Sister Kyriaki prepared a meal on a little table—
pitta
, a salad of onions and tomatoes, and, on each folded napkin, a loaf of bread with its crust embossed with a cypher of our Lord's initials and St. Constantine's cross from the Milvian Bridge with its message of victory. Smoothing out the needle-work in her lap, Mother Ekaterini told us that the monastery
had been founded five hundred and sixty years before by a Princess Marina of Russia. She knew little about her, except that she had fled from Russia when she was still a beautiful girl and settled here as a nun for the remainder of her life. I wondered what descendant of Rurik or great boyar's daughter of Kiev or Novgorod she might have been.
[8]

While we ate, they asked us about England; was it across the sea? Was America part of England, as Thessaly was a part of Greece, or was it the other way about? Sister Kyriaki wondered whether there were any nuns in England. Before we could answer, the abbess spoke in tones of gentle admonition.

“Of course there are, thousands and thousands of them. If they have them in a small country like Greece, do you think they wouldn't have them in a great place like England?”

Far below the window the road unravelled through the rocks to the edge of the plain, of which only a fragment appeared through a causeway of the Meteora. The small monastery of St. Nicholas, ruined and empty and St. Barlaam's first sojourn, mouldered on their spikes. Then the rocks came to an end except for a sudden resurgence by the strand of the Peneios, where a massive blue-grey outcrop rose like a basking whale. An eagle, soon followed by his consort, floated languidly round the pedestal of St. Barlaam, their motionless feathers almost touching the precipice. The midday sun struck their still wings and stretched their long perpendicular shadows down the rock face. I repeated Bessarion's words about the trajectory of the Meteorite. Sister Kyriaki was astonished. “Just fancy,” she said, crossing herself in wonder, “on the back of an eagle!”

“Well, he was a saint,” the abbess said, threading a needle with authority. “How should he travel?”

To a stranger accustomed to the discipline and the quiet activity of the monasteries of the Catholic Church (those rigours destined to organize monastic life so that its central purpose may be fulfilled in greater peace and silence), much in the monachism of the East, and especially in these reduced communities on the Meteora, seems haphazard and improvised. When one remembers that scarcely a dozen monks now inhabit a region which was once the home of many hundreds, it will become more understandable. Foreign travellers observed the symptoms of decay a hundred years ago.
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Now, even in the inhabited monasteries, all that remains is a handful, perhaps only a couple, of monks, one or two peasants devoted to the service of the monasteries, and a tiny floating population of shepherds. The best impression of Orthodox monasticism as it must have been in its apogee (though even here the symptoms of decline are not lacking) must certainly be sought in the great monasteries on the slopes of Athos and from the dwellers in the solitary hermitages, approachable only by rowing boat and rope-ladder, excavated in the face of the mountain high above the Aegean waves.