Roumeli (14 page)

The monastery of St. Stephen is the most accessible of the Meteora, and for this reason it may have been the first of the great rocks to harbour an ascetic, a twelfth-century hermit called
Jeremiah. Though it is one of the highest, only a little draw-bridge separates its ivy-mantled walls from the bulk of the mountain. A climbing cobbled pathway led us obliquely from the entrance under a dark vault into the courtyard. The place, except for the youngish monk who had answered our tugs on the bell-wire, seemed deserted. The cobblestones, the wooden galleries and the fig tree with its fading leaves were drowned in sunlit sleep and only towards the evening did we explore the buildings. The late eighteenth-century church of St. Charalambos appeared strangely naked and blank after the jostling frescoes to which we had grown accustomed. There was nothing there except the fine Epirote woodwork of the iconostasis and the throne, where censer-swinging mannikins and cranes with vipers caught in their bills could be singled out from the hewn foliage. The church is the guardian of the head of St. Charalambos, an inch of whose pate is visible through the silver-work of a reliquary. This resembles, in craftsmanship, the casket in which the monks of the Transfiguration preserve fragments of the True Cross, the Sponge and the Winding-Sheet. The Meteora are rich in relics, vestments, mitres and jewelled crosiers and also in manuscripts and chysobuls and codices, many of them of great beauty. I remember studying with wonder the detail of their illuminations before the war. Most of them remained hidden for a long time in their war-time caches; some are in the National Library.
[10]

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 royal
and
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.

“
R
OMIÒS
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.)