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| The "White Tower," Thessaloniki's landmark |
To Mount Athos the following day? "Impossible," she declared. "You must delay your trip for six days."
This could not be done. “I’ll be gone from northern Greece in six days,” I informed her, slightly stretching the truth.
From prior experience, I knew to remain polite but stand firm. I also knew that the rules of engagement with the Greek bureaucracy did not require strict adherence to the truth on either side.
I pressed on. “I’ve come to see my aging cousin, the former hegoumenos of St. Paul’s.” It was the truth, but not the whole truth. Seeing Father Andreas, a first cousin once removed whom I'd met only once before, wasn’t my sole purpose for being in northern Greece.
Still impossible, came the response. Five more minutes of tactful thrust and parry finally produced an opening through which I could see victory and she could make an honorable retreat.
“Are you Orthodox?” she inquired
On my affirmative answer she disappeared into an inner office. About fifteen minutes later she emerged with three official-looking papers, each in its own envelope. One was for deposit in a nearby gendarmerie. The other two were for presentation at Karyes, the administrative capital of the Holy Mountain.
Very early next morning I was on the bus to Ouranoupolis seated next to Prodromos, an affable young monk returning to Stravronikita, his monastery.
* * *
At Ouranoupolis I boarded the regular boat for Dafni, again a wooden caïque but larger than Ammouliani four years before. It was crowded with goods and men, many of them monks returning to their monasteries from sojourns “in the world.”
Among the passengers was a tall white-haired man. From behind I could hear him speaking knowledgeably about Mount Athos in accented English. Perhaps a Byzantine scholar on holiday, I thought. On turning around, his open jacket revealed a purple shirt and clerical collar. He was Bishop van Kleef of the Old Catholic Church of Haarlem, which, despite its name, is an 18th-century split-off from Roman Catholicism now in union with the Church of England.
While deeply interested in exploring Mount Athos, he criticized its monks for devoting their lives not to the salvation of mankind but to the salvation of themselves, which he deemed a “selfish form of Christianity.” Even so, he was generous enough to allow (in a left-handed sort of way) that the monks could not be judged with Western logic and had to be accepted in the context of Orthodoxy.
On my other side was a crabbed Greek man, unshaven and wearing a battered fedora. I didn’t pay him much attention but noticed that every so often, while conversing with one of the monks, he kissed a small crucifix drawn from a pocket.
Now he interrupted my conversation with Bishop van Kleef to ask, "Are you Orthodox?" My response elicited his apparent need to out-Orthodox me. "This is my seventh pilgrimage to Mount Athos," he preened.
Then he noticed a book of short stories in my bag. Its cover, decorated with an image of sensuous red silk, drew his gimlet-eyed inquiry: “Does it contain erotika?” I assured him it did not, abandoning the truth altogether.
What he really wanted was to know about the purple-shirted fellow I had been speaking with in English. “What business does he have here?” he grumbled, pouncing on the “Catholic” part of my explanation. He was no kinder in judgment of his own church’s hierarchy, denouncing the Greek Orthodox archbishop in the United States as a no-good and a Mason.
Starting with Docheiariou, one of the imposing monasteries that slides by on the seaward route from Ouranoupolis to Dafni, he began distracting me with his map of the peninsula, tediously pointing to the label for each monastery as if the map required decipherment. His annoying assault continued intermittently for the remainder of the hour and a half trip to Dafni.
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| Landing at Dafni |
* * *
As it was, the old bus's speed never much exceeded a walking pace, so it took fully forty-five minutes to reach Karyes. The winding route skirted the monastery of Xeropotamou ("Dry Torrent"), one of Mount Athos's richest in its 10th century heyday, but now much diminished.
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| The Protaton |
With obligatory stops at the local gendarmerie and then the office of the Holy Epistasia, we presented our papers and were each issued a diamonitirion, the local visa, but only after paying the entrance fee. In Greek, a cassocked cashier asked “Are you Orthodox?” My affirmative reply required me to pay 100 drachmas. Without asking, I was granted a three-day extension of my visit.
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| My 7-day diamonitirion, signed by the four Epistatai and dated August 31 (Julian-style) |
“Five hundred drachmas, please,” came the smiling reply, but no extension.
* * *
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| A latter-day view of Iviron, with its arsanas in the foreground |
Set on a broad shingle about two hundred yards from the sea, Iviron was founded in the late 10th century not by the Spanish Iberians but by the Georgian ones. Particularly instrumental was the warrior-monk John Tornikios, better known as Thornic. In 979-80, at the call of emperor Basil II (nicknamed Voulgaroktonos, the “Bulgar-Slayer”), Thornic led an army of 12,000 Georgians against the rebel Bardas Skleros, throwing him back into Persia. With his share of the resulting booty, Thornic established one of the Holy Mountain’s largest and oldest monasteries.
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| Iviron's katholikon (the phiale is out of view) |
Surrounding the courtyard like the curtain walls of a castle are banks of balconied cells. The brethren are called to prayer by a monk who circles the katholikon three times while balancing the six-foot semandron horizontally at the shoulder. This stout board he hammers in a rhythmic tattoo echoing the sound of Noah's tools. His first circuit calls forth the reptiles and crawling creatures, the second is for the four-footed animals, and the third summons the Sons of Man to the symbolic Ark of Salvation.
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| Facing the altar |
Afterward we were led up flights of creaking stairs to a sunny reception room where we signed the guest book and were welcomed with ouzo and spoon sweets dispensed by brother Kosmas, the guest-master. The room had a magnificent view of the sea but was a complete, though harmless, misfire at worldliness. Old-fashioned gilt furnishings, mostly threadbare, bespoke a naive and mannish idea of elegance.
More poignant were the ranks of heavy picture frames hung too high on the walls. They bore sepia-toned portraits of men and women in court dress and orders of chivalry, the mostly defunct royal families of Europe, the Balkans, and Russia. In the reception room, time had come to a distinct halt around the turn of the century, an aberration in the otherwise timeless aura of the Holy Mountain.
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| The Kantakouzenos chrysobull |
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| The coronation of John I Tzimiskes |
Even that, however, was sufficient time to give a hint of the legendary treasures of Mount Athos. One dusty glazed case displayed a chrysobull bearing the scarlet autograph signature of John VI Kantakouzenos (d. 1383), the historian-emperor. Another contained a richly embroidered sakkos (dalmatic), part of the regalia worn by emperor John I Tzimiskes at his coronation in December 969 a few days after murdering Nikiphoros Phokas, his predecessor in title.
Following dinner (macaroni swimming in watery olive oil accompanied by bread, olives, and kefalotiri cheese), six of us and a squadron of houseflies were assigned to a spacious corner bedroom for the night. Our sleep was interrupted three times either by the banging of the semandron or the clanging of church bells announcing nighttime offices at 2 AM and 4 AM and matins at 6 AM.
The next morning I rose at eight o’clock feeling as though the day were already half finished. Nighttime prayer is more efficacious, we were told.
The image of the coronation of John I Tzimiskes is from a 12th or 13th century manuscript of the Synopsis Historiarum by John Skylitzes (fl. 1081) in the National Library of Spain [http://www.wdl.org/en/item/10625/view/1/327/].
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