William Dalrymple – From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (страница 2)
‘Outstanding … To be a good writer takes courage. To be a good travel writer may take more. Dalrymple is a good writer in an absolutely unpretentious way. The trouble with many good modern minds is that they ignore the past. Dalrymple does not, and by telling us of the past as it is enveloped by the present he is also telling of the future. He is not a prophet, simply one of the very few good, honest writers left’
DOM MORAES,
Table of Contents
THE MONASTERY OF IVIRON, MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE 29 JUNE 1994. THE FEAST OF SS. PETER AND PAUL
PERA PALAS HOTEL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 10 JULY 1994
THE BARON HOTEL, ALEPPO, SYRIA, 28 AUGUST 1994
HOTEL CAVALIER, BEIRUT, LEBANON, 23 SEPTEMBER 1994
THE MONASTERY OF MAR SABA, ISRAELI-OCCUPIED WEST BANK, 24 OCTOBER 1994
HOTEL METROPOLE, ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1 DECEMBER 1994
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINCIPAL SOURCES
THE MONASTERY OF IVIRON, MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE 29 JUNE 1994. THE FEAST OF SS. PETER AND PAUL
My cell is bare and austere. It has white walls and a flagstone floor. Only two pieces of furniture break the severity of its emptiness: in one corner stands an olive-wood writing desk, in the other an iron bedstead. The latter is covered with a single white sheet, starched as stiff as a nun’s wimple.
Through the open window I can see a line of black habits: the monks at work in the vegetable garden, a monastic chain-gang hoeing the cabbage patch before the sun sets and the wooden
All is quiet now but for the distant breaking of surf on the jetty and the faint echo and clatter of metal plates in the monastery kitchens. The silence and solemnity of the place is hardly designed to raise the spirits, but you could hardly find a better place to order your mind. There are no distractions, and the monastic silence imposes its own brittle clarity.
It’s now nine o’clock. The time has finally come to concentrate my thoughts: to write down, as simply as I can, what has brought me here, what I have seen, and what I hope to achieve in the next few months.
My reference books are laid out in a line on the floor; the pads containing my library notes are open. Files full of photocopied articles lie piled up below the window; my pencils are sharpened and upended in a glass. A matchbox lies ready beside the paraffin storm lantern: the monastery generator is turned off after compline, and if am to write tonight I will have to do so by the light of its yellow flame.
Open on the desk is my paperback translation of
This morning, six days after leaving the damp of a dreich Scottish June, I caught ship from Ouranoupolis, the Gate of Heaven, down the peninsula to the Holy Mountain.
We passed a monastic fishing boat surrounded by a halo of seagulls. Opposite me, three large monks in ballooning cassocks sat sipping cappuccinos under an icon of the Virgin; over their grey moustaches there rested a light foam of frothed milk. Behind them, through the porthole, you could see the first of the great Athonite monasteries rising up from sandy bays to crown the foothills of the mountain. They are huge complexes of buildings, great ash-coloured fortresses the size of small Italian hill-towns, with timber-laced balconies hanging below domed cupolas and massive, unwieldy medieval buttresses.
The first monastic foundation on Athos was established in the ninth century by St Euthymius of Salonica who, having renounced the world at the age of eighteen, took to moving around on all fours and eating grass; he later became a stylite, and took to berating his brethren from atop a pillar. Some two hundred years later – by which time St Euthymius’s fame had led to many other monasteries and
Today this rule is relaxed only for cats, and in the Middle Ages even a pair of Byzantine Empresses were said to have been turned away from the Holy Mountain by the Mother of God herself. But 140 years ago, in 1857, the Virgin was sufficiently flexible to allow one of my Victorian great-aunts, Virginia Somers, to spend two months in a tent on Mount Athos, along with her husband and the louche Pre-Raphaelite artist Coutts Lindsay. A letter Virginia wrote on her visit still survives, in which she describes how the monks had taken her over the monastery gardens and insisted on giving her fruit from every tree as they passed; she said she tasted pomegranate, citron and peach. It is the only recorded instance of a woman being allowed onto the mountain in the millennium-long history of Athos, and is certainly the only record of what appears to have been a most unholy Athonite
This unique lapse apart, the Holy Mountain is still a self-governing monastic republic dedicated to prayer, chastity and pure, untarnished Orthodoxy. At the Council of Florence in 1439 it was Athonite monks who refused to let the Catholic and Orthodox Churches unite in return for Western military help against the Turk; as a result Constantinople fell to the Ottomans within two decades, but Orthodoxy survived doctrinally intact. That deep pride in Orthodoxy combined with a profound suspicion of all other creeds remains the defining ideology of Athos today.
I disembarked at Daphne, caught the old bus to the monastic capital at Karyes, then walked slowly down the ancient foot-polished cobbles, through knee-high sage and clouds of yellow butterflies, to the
The monks had just finished vespers. As it was a lovely balmy evening, many were standing around the courtyard enjoying the shade of the cypresses next to the
‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
Yacovos was a garrulous, thick-set, low-slung monk, bearded like a brigand. On his head, tilted at a jaunty angle, sat a knitted black bonnet. He took my bags and led me to the guest room, where he poured a glass of ouzo and offered me a bowl full of rose-scented
‘Christophoros will be down at the Arsenal at this time,’ said Fr. Yacovos, looking at his fob watch, ‘feeding his cats.’
I found the old man standing on the jetty, holding a bucket full of fishtails. A pair of enormous black spectacles perched precariously on his nose. Around him swirled two dozen cats.
‘Come, Justinian,’ called Fr. Christophoros. ‘Come now, Chrysostom,
I walked up and introduced myself.
‘We thought you were coming last week,’ replied the monk, a little gruffly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had trouble getting a permit in Thessaloniki.’
The cats continued to swirl flirtatiously around Christophoros’s ankles, hissing at each other and snatching at the scattered fins.
‘Have you managed to have a word with the Abbot about my seeing the manuscript?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Christophoros. ‘The Abbot’s away in Constantinople. He’s in council with the Ecumenical Patriarch. But you’re welcome to stay here until he returns.’