"Are you Orthodox?" (Part 4)

Sir Steven Runciman
(1903-2000)

Fortunately, the night's interruptions did not include the bedbugs that harassed Steven Runciman, the Scotttish byzantinist, who passed through Iviron in 1937.

Breakfast in the trapezaria, the monastery's refectory, consisted of coffee.  Just coffee.  "Refectory," however, was much too grand a word for this strictly utilitarian room that seemed rarely used.

The reason was that Iviron was one of nine idiorrhythmic houses, where the monks took most meals in the privacy of their individual cells and shared meals communally only on the great feast days.  Idiorrhythmy was introduced in late Byzantine times to attract wealthy aristocrats to the Holy Mountain in an era of uncertainty and lax administration.  It subverted the communal standard, known as cenobiticism, by allowing monks to keep and acquire private property, profit personally from its fruits, and bequeath it to other monks.  Governance was also shifted from a single abbot (who in a cenobitic house was elected for life and exercised dictatorial authority) to a revolving committee of senior monks.

Idiorrhythmic life could be rather grand, even if still pious.  Naturally, worldly abuses crept in.  Secular menus (with exceptional quantities of meat) were cooked and served by private servants and consumed in spacious apartments done up to suit personal tastes and individual means.

Iviron's refectory (2016)

When I passed through in 1980, Iviron still clung to a shabby relic of  idiorrhythmy, enough to curtail communal use of its unadorned refectory to the great feast days.  But a decade later, the need for new recruits, who would not stand for the perceived decadence of idiorrhythmy, obliged Iviron to return to traditional cenobiticism.  Judging by the transformation of the refectory, the change has been for the better.
 

*  *  *

I was joined at one of the trapezaria's long empty tables by a weary sixty-something, a visitor like me.  Conversation soon came around to the false religiosity of Greeks.  Specifically, he had in mind his wife of thirty years, who had “turned bad” and only pretended to be a Christian.  Her great sin, he said, was refusing to help him in his time of need.

In his hometown of Volos, he and his wife had raised a son my age.  He had also raised and educated (in Belgium no less) the orphan child of one of his wife’s siblings.  He owned a used car business and three units in a large apartment building.  As was commonly done in those days, cash-strapped builders had granted him the units in exchange for title to the land on which the apartment building was erected.

His used car business had failed.  Now he owed various individuals in Volos 300,000 drachmas.  Sale of any one of the three apartments would be more than enough to pay his debts.  But the land that yielded the apartments had originally been part of his wife’s proika, her dowry, and she wouldn’t consent to sell any of them because she insisted on their son receiving a three-apartment inheritance.  He couldn’t even sell his car because it was registered in the wife’s name.  He was terribly embittered and accused his wife of being an actor when it came to religion.  Like most Greeks, he said, she went through the motions well enough, but was in it only for herself.

After leaving home and family he’d briefly driven a school bus in Athens, but the badly polluted air bothered him.  He had retreated to Mount Athos to clear his lungs and “look for an idea.”  He also came for safety:  On Mount Athos, both he and his 25,000-drachmas-a-month pension were immune from creditors.

* * *

Sulphation

Incrustation

I could easily sympathize with his pollution-related complaint.  In those years, any time spent in Athens meant burning eyes and a scratchy throat.  The air was so noxious it was eating away the Acropolis, both its marvelous Periclean sculptures and the structure itself.  Sulfur oxides from car fumes and oil heating had consumed more marble since 1960, it was said, than the combined wear and tear of all the preceding centuries.  Since then, strict anti-pollution measures have been wisely imposed, and the air quality has greatly improved.

*  *  *

A dormitory wing at Iviron

The many cups of Greek coffee I downed while listening to my breakfast companion's tale of woe had worked their magic, and I could no longer avoid using the bathroom.  Brother Kosmas had guided us to it the evening before.  It was down an immensely long hallway lined on both sides with empty cells.  Through open doors I glimpsed spare kitchens and wooden built-ins serving as closets and bookshelves.  There were also stoves for winter use.

The lavatory assigned to us was in a long narrow room lit with a single window at the far end.  Below the window, a shallow depression in a whitewashed square of cement flooring announced the room's purpose.  A steady gale blew upward through a five-inch hole that pierced the bottom of the depression.  Peering down against this breeze revealed a patch of ground about four stories below.  On either side of the hole, cement footpads protruded slightly above floor level to indicate the proper stance for operations.  Balancing on one footpad while leaning slightly to the side brought a can of lye within reach, but brother Kosmas had given no instructions for its use, and no one had dared to ask.  Closer to hand was toilette tissue.  But instead of a roll, a few 4-inch-square pieces of newspaper hung from a nail.  Fewer pieces, in fact, than the number of people in our party, promising for a perverse form of musical chairs during our stay.