"Are you Orthodox?" (Part 2)

I'd had a glimpse of Mount Athos four years earlier.

On a July morning in 1976, my father and I left Thessaloniki in a rented car and headed east in the hope of meeting his first cousin, Angelos Evangelatos, a monk of Mount Athos.

The trip was organized on a whim, and we had allowed only one day for it.  Our haste left no time to obtain necessary travel permits, so we began the day’s adventure not knowing whether we would be allowed past Ouranoupolis, the last town in Greek territory and the starting point for the boat services that run up and down the peninsula’s western coast.  Our plan was to talk our way onto a boat that would take us from Ouranoupolis to a meeting place somewhere on the western shore where we had been told Angelos was living.

Ouranoupolis with the Prosphori Tower (13th cent.)

The three-hour drive through mountains to Ouranoupolis yielded a cloudless warm day and a calm sea.  We had missed the last regular boat down the coast, however, so we had to scrounge for private passage.  The necessary bargain was struck at the Café Athos, which served as a clearinghouse for local service providers.  Soon we were gliding down the coast in Ammouliani, a motorized wooden caïque, in the company of its captain, two crew members, and Vangelis Tsirbas, the dark scrawny chain-smoker who would be our guide.

Tsirbas and Dad

In view of our lack of permits, Tsirbas said, there would be no point in stopping at Dafni, the sole clearance station on the western coast.  There would also be no going ashore at our destination.  Greek gendarmes patrol Mount Athos, and our captain, he warned, was not about to risk losing his coasting privileges by allowing permit-less travelers to set even one foot onto the beach.

Two of the Three Brothers

About six miles down the coast, we dropped Tsirbas at the Tria Adelphia (“Three Brothers”), a sea-worn protrusion of rocks marking a small landing place from which a gravel path ascended the hillside.  An hour’s climb would lead Tsirbas to a kellion near the chapel of St. Nicholas where, according to what we’d been told, he would find Angelos.

To kill the time, we continued down the coast.   Our captain and one of the two crew members mostly slept, leaving the driving to the other crew member, the captain's nephew.  The boy was no more than thirteen but seemed to know where he was going.

Arsanas of Zographou ("Of the Painter")

Intriguing sights made us deeply regret our double lack of time and permits.  Large multi-storied buildings dotted the shore, the arsanades (landing places) for monasteries hidden inland behind coastal hills.   The arsanades were obviously very old, but their style, an exotic hodgepodge of fortress-like masonry below and half-timber above, was unrecognizable and impossible to date.  Here and there, stout crenellated towers silently testified to an Aegean Sea once infested with Saracen and Catalan pirates.  The structures were uniformly ramshackle and lifeless, but complex stonework and traces of faded color hinted at a more robust past.

Docheiariou ("Of the Steward")

Farther down the coast, monasteries began revealing themselves high up in rocky declivities and down nearer the shore.  They, too, displayed the strange defensive architecture of the arsanades but were much larger.  Some were immense.  Magnificent towering structures slid by in a litany of names and laconic descriptions:  “Chilandariou.  The Serbian monastery.”  “Zographou.  The Bulgarian house.”  “Docheiariou.  Thirty monks.”  “Xenophontos.  Thirty-five.”  “Panteleimonos.  Russians.  We call it Roussikon.  See the big dormitories?  They used to house two thousand.  Only fifteen now.”

Roussikon

Had we gone a little farther, we would have seen St. Paul’s, cousin Angelos’s former monastery, which had thirty-five or forty monks, we were told.  But we had to turn back to the pre-arranged meeting place, a patch of empty beach within sight of Dafni.

Angelos and Tsirbas approach

Just as we arrived, Tsirbas and Angelos were dismounting the mules that had carried them down the mountainside.  Angelos steadied himself along the rocky shore with a length of bamboo.  As he and Tsirbas approached, Ammouliani's captain and crew put down an anchor at the bow to hold us off and led a line ashore to steady the stern.

Full-bearded and seventy-three, Angelos wore a simple black cassock, his long grey hair tied back under a black pillbox cap.  Even from a distance and before he said a word we recognized him from the startling resemblance to Atzouleta, his sister, whom we knew well from visits to Athens.  Hiking up his cassock to avoid the gentle surf, he climbed aboard.   Then, standing upright on the rolling deck, he embraced us teary-eyed and presented a gift of sweet grapes.

Following the usual custom on becoming a monk, he had abandoned his worldly name and became Andreas.  He did not stand on ceremony, but out of respect we addressed him as Father Andreas.  He had been, after all, hegoumenos (abbot) of St. Paul’s.

Cousins meet

Settled on top of the hold under an awning spread against the sun, we spoke with him for most of an hour.  Within minutes it was clear that he shared not only Atzouleta’s facial features, but also her easygoing manner and penchant for homegrown humor.  With an impish smile he apologized for having just eaten three cloves of garlic to hold down his blood pressure.

In 1936, with Europe on the brink of war, his family had rebuked him for abandoning them and the world.  As the eldest son, he was expected to look out for his widowed mother and younger siblings, not disappear to a life of monastic isolation.  But with the passage of years all was forgiven, and a lifetime on Mount Athos, far from worldly cares, had made Father Andreas sublimely happy.  In forty years he had left the peninsula only a handful of times, lately for medical treatment in Athens.

He hadn’t lived too badly, either.  In anticipation of coming war, the monks had laid in extra stores of grain and other staples.  While the rest of Greece starved, the monks ate well.   Their needs were not very acute in the first place, and their over-supply, he told us, had continued to feed them until quite recently.

He described a simple life lived in total peace:  no cars, no phones, no lawyers, no crime.  His typical dinner was a slice of bread, some chick peas, and olives.  He lived solely to work, pray, and enjoy the beauty of God's creation.  It was essentially the same as how Cristoforo Buondelmonti, the Florentine traveler, had found Mount Athos around 1420:

"Here, in lush valleys, teem bees, figs, and olives.  The inmates of the monasteries weave cloth, stitch shoes, and make nets.  One turns the spindle of a hand-loom through the wool; another twists a basket of twigs.  From time to time, at stated hours, all essay to praise God.  And peace reigns among them, always and for ever."

On mention of my niece, born three years earlier with an ailment that made it uncertain she would walk, he promised to light a candle and pray for her.  He was obviously touched by the trouble we had taken to find him and deeply regretted not being able to show us around.  Sadly, a more prolonged visit was impossible.

Father Andreas parted as tearfully as he had arrived.  Watching him return alone across the beach to his tethered mule was to witness a scene that has repeated itself on Mount Athos for a thousand years.

 The Buondelmonti quotation serves as the epigraph to Robert Byron's The Station (Alfred A. Knopf, New York:  1928), an account based on his visits to Mount Athos in 1926 and 1927.