"Are You Orthodox?" (Part 6)

By the time Brother Nestor and I said our good-byes and I resumed my walk  to Stavronikita it was about noon.

Telling time at Vatopedi

By ordinary reckoning noon is twelve o'clock.  But nothing on Mount Athos is ordinary, including the reckoning of time.  In fact, Mount Athos adheres to three different systems for marking the hours.  At Iviron each new day starts at sunrise, a tradition said to have been inherited from the Georgians, who got it from the fire-worshipping Zoroastrians.  So by Iviron's reckoning I parted from Brother Nestor around the sixth hour of the day ("6 a.m.").  At Vatopedi, considered the most westernized of the twenty ruling monasteries, each new day begins at midnight.  Noon at Vatopedi therefore happens when we expect it to, at the twelfth hour of the day.  At the other eighteen ruling monasteries, however, the new day begins at sunset, following the old Turkish custom, which alters the starting time slightly from day to day with the progress of the seasons.

I didn't learn about the three systems till later.  But while I was on Mount Athos I couldn't help but notice that no functioning clock ever remotely matched the time on my wristwatch.  (I never got to Vatopedi.)  Compounding Mount Athos's otherwordliness was that it still adhered (and still adheres) to the Julian calendar, which lags thirteen days behind the Gregorian, which most of the world follows.  So when Brother Nestor and I parted ways, it was September 1st for him but September 14th for me.

*  *  *

After several windings the road to Stavronikita met the road from Karyes.  There I encountered a Greek architect and his son, about 15.  They were also en route to Stavronikita so we continued together.  The boy was the second one I'd seen under age 21.  Rules were obviously being relaxed.

Stavronikita ("The Conquering Cross")

Having been re-established in 1536, Stavronikita is the newest of the twenty ruling monasteries.  It is also the smallest.

Sources agree that it was originally founded in the early 10th century on the ruins of a predecessor foundation dedicated to St. Chariton the Confessor, a 4th century Palestinian monk.  But the origin of Stavronikita's name is much disputed.  Was it for the two monks, Stavros and Nikitas, who lived in nearby cells?  Or from foundation of the monastery by Nikiphoros Stavronikitas, an officer of the warrior-emperor John Tzimiskes?  Or by the patrician Nikitas, whose nameday is celebrated the day after the Feast of the Cross (stavros)?  Or by the monk Stravonikitas ("Squint-eyed Nikitas")?  More certain is that fires and pirate raids destroyed the 10th century monastery more than once before its 16th century re-foundation (or original foundation as some count it) with the support of Patriarch Jeremias I.

Being the only monastery on Mount Athos established after the fall of Constantinople (1453), Stavronikita lacked the largesse of the Byzantine emperors.  But its relatively small size had made upkeep easier.  Stavronikita's stone walls were well pointed, the porter's lodge looked newly constructed, and the interior court revealed three stories of cells with freshly varnished doors and windowframes.  The place's general orderliness and cleanliness stood in sharp contrast to Iviron's ramshackle look.

About ten years before my visit Stavronikita had dwindled to four monks, down from twenty-two impoverished elders and a single novice reported in the 1950s.  In 1964 Viscount Norwich found only eight monks and predicted the monastery "will probably be the first to crumble altogether into ruins and die."  The monastery in fact closed in 1968 for lack of any monks at all.  But it reopened later the same year under a new abbot, Father Vasilios, and changed from idiorrhythmy to cenobiticism.  Father Vasilios's influence is said to have brought greater emphasis to academic study, making Stavronikita more intellectual than the other Athonite monasteries.  By 1980 the house was resurgent with twenty-five monks in residence, some of them even young -- like Prodromos, my seat-mate of a few days earlier on the bus from Thessaloniki.

*  *  *

On entering Stavronikita's precincts the monastery's most striking feature was its 17th century aqueduct built at the expense of Şerban Cantacuzino, a Phanariot prince of Wallachia.  Şerban became a "Defender (or Count) of the Holy Roman Empire" for contributing to the defeat of the Ottomans (his nominal allies) at Vienna (1683) by giving advance notice of their approach, stalling bridge repairs across the Danube, and cramming the Turkish cannons with straw to reduce their concussive power against the city's walls.

Şerban Cantacuzino (1640-1688)

Our small party was greeted by a blue-eyed monk, soft-spoken and strikingly handsome, who looked about fifty but might have been younger.  After passing around plates of loukoumi ("Turkish Delight") and glasses of water he led us into the monastery's tiny and rather unremarkable katholikon, which filled most of the courtyard.  It is said to enshrine St. Anne's left hand set in filigree and enamel.  But what we were shown instead was Stavronikita's most famous treasure, a mosaic icon kept behind a sliding panel in the church's southeast pillar.  It depicts the monastery's dedicatory saint, Nicholas of Myra, "The Wonder Worker" (our Santa Claus).

St. Nicholas of the Oyster

Possibly of the 11th or 12th or even the 13th century, the icon is known colloquially as "St. Nicholas of the Oyster" ("O Streidas”) for the mollusc found embedded in the saint's forehead when the icon was pulled from a fisherman's net in 1553 (or 1589 according to another source).  Still marring St. Nicholas's forehead is the split in the icon's wooden base where the oyster was wedged.  Deeming the mark to be where an iconoclast struck the picture before tossing it into the sea, the monks believe St. Nicholas of the Oyster (like Iviron's Portaïtissa) is another miraculous survivor of iconoclasm.

Half of the oyster's shell, formerly used by Patriarch Jeremias as a diskos (paten), is venerated among the monastery's other relics.  The other half, made into an engolpion (a medallion worn around the neck by Eastern Orthodox bishops), was sent to Russia long ago and now resides in the sacristy of the Moscow Patriarchate.

*  *  *

My intention that day was to linger at Stavronikita only long enough to catch a ride on the once-a-day coastal caïque to the peninsula's tip and the Great Lavra, Mount Athos's oldest foundation.  The architect and his son had the same idea.   

A tell-tale

With time to kill before the caïque's expected arrival around 3:45, I explored the monastery's grounds.  Dotting the outer walls I discovered dozens of "tell-tales."  These were small shards of glass, each numbered in red and suspended a fraction of an inch away from the wall (usually across a crack) by two dabs of plaster.  They were a simple tool for registering otherwise undiscernible wall movements -- from earthquakes, say.  The slightest tremor would shatter the glass.

Later, I learned that Viscount Norwich hadn't been too far off the mark in predicting the eventual "crumbling" of Stavronikita.  Earthquakes had severely damaged the rock on which the monastery was built.  In the second half of the last century the rock was found to be slowly crumbling and sliding toward the sea.  Complex engineering was brought to bear in conjunction with renovation work conducted between 1981 and 1999, and the rock was somehow stabilized.  Perhaps the tell-tales I saw were an early part of that effort.

*  *  * 

At 3:15 I made my way down to the landing together with the architect and his son.  At 3:45, right on schedule, the caïque appeared offshore.

We waved.  Someone on board waved back.  But the caïque didn't slow down or alter course.  Climbing onto rocks for a better view, I watched it slip away to the south and then turn into Iviron's landing about a mile and a half down the coast.

There was no way to get back to Iviron in time to catch the caïque before it proceeded to the Great Lavra that day.  There was also no guarantee that tomorrow's caïque wouldn't again bypass Stavronikita.  Here were two vivid reminders of how life on the Holy Mountain differed from life "in the world":  rushing around was unknown, and all plans were tentative at best.

*  *  *

Missing the boat meant staying overnight at Stavronikita unless we walked back to Iviron that afternoon.  The shortest route back was the footpath along the sea.  Taking it would give us at least some hope of catching tomorrow's caïque from Iviron.

We opted for the walk and started immediately.  It took more than three hours but rewarded us with a much more dramatic journey than the bland dirt road that had brought us to Stavronikita earlier that day.

The footpath

To our left were magnificent views overlooking the Aegean Sea.  Most of the way the path was fairly well trod and easy to follow.  Where it passed through grassy meadows the path was wide and level.  But where it was laid along a slope or pinched against seaside cliffs the path narrowed to a ribbon just wide enough for one foot to be placed in front of the other.  In places where it dropped sheer away to the boulder-strewn shore far below, a misstep could have been deadly.  Thank goodness it was still summer and the days were long so we could cover the entire distance in daylight.

The Kaliagras Tower (early 16th cent.)

About halfway along we came to the Kaliagras Tower, once the arsanas of the monastery of Koutloumousiou about two miles inland.  The tower was decrepit now but still apparently inhabited.  On the landward side the only windows were many stories above ground near the overhanging roof.  A second-story door gave access to the steep shore by means of a rickety-looking wooden bridge.  High up and directly over the doorway, a katachistra protruded from the face of the wall.  The hole in its floor suggested a means for dropping stones or hot liquids onto attackers.

Beyond the tower the footpath descended to a long stretch of pebbly beach and then completely disappeared into a ragged shale promontory that extended far into the sea where Aegean rollers exploded in tremendous blasts of water.  There seemed no way over or around.  But with the architect leading the way we picked gingerly over the rocky barrier to another beach on the far side, this one littered with immense travertine boulders.  At its far end Iviron's arsanas beckoned. 

*  *  *

Back at Iviron we had a few minutes to chat with the porters before dinner.  At some point during our conversation I crossed my legs.  This drew a wagging finger from one of the monks.  Evidently the only permissible crossing on the Holy Mountain was making the sign of the cross.

The scolding monk turned out to be from Lixouri, the second town of Cephalonia.  On discovering my family's origins there he softened, and a few moments later he was inviting me to stay at Iviron and become a monk. 

Robert Byron (1905-1941)

The conversation turned to the absence of electricity on Mount Athos.  Robert Byron, the British byzantinophile who visited Mount Athos twice in 1926-1927, remarked on a non-functioning electric plant at Iviron.  It was still defunct in 1980.  The architect asked the brothers whether the absence of electricity was by choice or because it was too difficult to bring to the peninsula.  The answer was that it was by choice.  Two monasteries have generators, they said, but none has regular power.  The older monks rejected an offer of electricity from the Greek national power company because they feared it would change life on the Holy Mountain.  Electricity would bring refrigerators, then meat, then radio and television.  The devil would surely follow close behind.

After dinner (rice in thin tomato soup, olives, bread, water) we were assigned to rooms with oil lamps.  Sleeping accommodations were the same as the previous night:  an iron bedstead with a thin pad over thick planks, a single not-very-clean blue sheet, a feather pillow, and a thin wool blanket, which kept me adequately warm with my socks on through the cool damp night.

Viscount Norwich's quotation is from J. Norwich & R. Sitwell, Mount Athos (Harper & Row, New York:  1966) at p. 146.