From The Holy Mountain Read online

  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 The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos, the unlikely little book which first brought me to this monastery, and the original manuscript of which I saw for the first time less than one hour ago. God willing, John Moschos will lead me on, eastwards to Constantinople and Anatolia, then southwards to the Nile and thence, if it is still possible, to the Great Kharga Oasis, once the southern frontier of Byzantium.

  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 sketes springing up around the saint's original foundation - it came to the ears of the Byzantine Emperor that the monks were in the habit of debauching the daughters of the shepherds who came to the mountain to sell milk and wool. Thereafter it was decreed that nothing female - no woman, no cow, no mare, no bitch - could step within its limits.

  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 menage-a-trois.

  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 lavra* of Iviron.

  The monks had just finished vespers. As it was a lovely balmy

  * Explanations of all ecclesiastical and technical terms can be found in the glossary.

  evening, many were standing around the courtyard enjoying the shade of the cypresses next to the katholikon. Fr. Yacovos, the guestmaster, was sitting on the steps of the domed Ottoman fountain, listening to the water dripping from the spout into the bowl. He stood up when he saw me enter the courtyard.

  '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 loukoumi. As he did so, he chattered happily about his life in the merchant navy. He had visited Aberdeen on a Cypriot ship in the winter of 1959, he said, and had never forgotten the fog and the bitter cold. I asked where I could find the librarian, Fr. Christophoros. It had been Fr. Christophoros's letter - surmounted by the great Imperial crest, the double-headed eagle of Byzantium - that had originally lured me to Athos. The manuscript I was looking for was in Iviron's monastic library, he had said. Yes, it had survived, and he would try to get the Abbot's permission for me to see it.

  '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, wisswisswisswiss ... Come on, my darlings, ela, come ...'

  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.' "When will that be?'

  'He should be back by the Feast of the Transfiguration.'

  'But that's - what? - over a fortnight away.'

  'Patience is a great monastic virtue,' said Christophoros, nodding philosophically at Kallistos, a rather scraggy, bow-legged old tom-cat who had so far failed to catch a single fishtail.

  'My permit runs out the day after tomorrow,' I said. 'They only gave me a three-day diamonitirion. I have to leave by the morning boat.' I looked at the old monk. 'Please - I've come all the way just to see this book.'

  'I'm afraid the Abbot insists that he must first question anyone who . . .'

  'Is there nothing you could do?'

  The old man pulled tentatively at his beard. ‘I shouldn't do this,' he said. 'And anyway, the lights aren't working in the library.'

  'There are some lamps in the guest room,' I suggested.

  He paused for a second, indecisive. Then he relented: 'Go quickly,' he said. 'Ask Fr. Yacovos: see if he'll lend you the lanterns.'

  I thanked Christophoros and started walking briskly back towards the monastery before he could change his mind.

  'And don't let Yacovos start telling you his life story,' he called after me, 'or you'll never get to see this manuscript.'

  At eight o'clock, I met Fr. Christophoros outside the katholikon. It was dusk now; the sun had already set over the Holy Mountain. In my hands I held the storm lantern from my room. We walked across the courtyard to the monastic library, and from his habit Fr. Christophoros produced a ring of keys as huge as those of a medieval jailer. He began to turn the largest of the keys in the topmost of the four locks.

  'We have to keep everything well locked these days,' said Christophoros in explanation. 'Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats at the Great Lavra. They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot. They got into t
he library and stole many of the most ancient manuscripts; they also took some gold reliquaries that were locked in the sanctuary.' 'Were they caught?'

  'The monks managed to raise the alarm and they were arrested the following morning as they tried to get across the Bulgarian frontier. But by then they had done much damage: cut up the reliquaries into small pieces and removed the best illuminations from the manuscripts. Some of the pages have never been recovered.'

  Three locks had now opened without problem; and eventually, with a loud creak, the fourth gave way too. The old library doors swung open, and with the lamps held aloft, we stepped inside.

  Within, it was pitch dark; a strong odour of old buckram and rotting vellum filled the air. Manuscripts lay open in low cabinets, the gold leaf of illuminated letters and gilt haloes from illustrations of saints' Lives shining out in the light of the lantern. In the gloom on the far wall I could just see a framed Ottoman firman, the curving gilt of the Sultan's monogram clearly visible above the lines of calligraphy. Next to it, like a discarded suit jacket, hung a magnificent but rather crumpled silk coat. Confronted dragons and phoenixes were emblazoned down the side of either lapel.

  'What is that?' I whispered. 'It's John Tzimiskes's coat.'

  'The Emperor John Tzimiskes? But he lived in the tenth century.'

  Christophoros shrugged his shoulders.

  'You can't just leave something like that hanging up there,' I said.

  'Well,' said Christophoros irritably, 'where else would you put it?'

  In the gloom, we found our way past rank after rank of shelves groaning with leather-bound Byzantine manuscripts, before drawing to a halt in front of a cabinet in the far corner of the room. Christophoros unlocked and opened the glass covering. Codex G.9 was on the bottom shelf, wrapped up in a white canvas satchel.

  It was a huge volume, as heavy as a crate of wine, and I staggered over to a reading desk with it, while Christophoros followed with the lamp.

  'Forgive me,' he said, as I lowered the volume gently onto the desk, 'but are you Orthodox or heretic?'

  I considered for a second before answering. A Catholic friend who had visited Athos a few years previously had warned me above all never to admit to being a Catholic; he had made this mistake, and said that had he admitted to suffering from leprosy or tertiary syphilis he could not have been more resolutely shunned than he had been after that. He told me that in my case it was particularly important not to raise the monks' suspicions, as they have learned to distrust, above all their visitors, those who ask to see their manuscripts. They have long memories on Athos, and if the monks have never forgiven the Papacy for authorising the ransacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade over eight hundred years ago, they have certainly not forgotten the nineteenth-century bibliophiles who decimated the libraries of Athos only a century ago.

  The English traveller the Hon. Robert Curzon is still considered one of the worst offenders: after a quick circuit around the monastic libraries of Athos in the late 1840s (in the company, I am ashamed to say, of my great-great-uncle), Curzon left the Holy Mountain with his trunks bulging with illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine chrysobuls; in his travel book Visits to Monasteries in the Levant he writes of buying the priceless manuscripts from the Abbot by weight, as if they were figs or pomegranates in an Ottoman market. Worse still is the memory of the German bibliophile Herman Tischendorff. Some twenty years after Curzon's trip to Athos, Tischendorff left the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St Catherine's in Sinai with the Codex Sinaiaticus -still the earliest existing copy of the New Testament - tucked into his camel bags. Tischendorff later claimed that he found the various leaves of the manuscript in a basket of firewood, and that he had saved it from the monks, who were intent on burning it to keep them warm in winter. The monks, however, maintain to this day that Tischendorff got the librarian drunk and discreetly swapped the priceless manuscript - which, like Curzon's plunder, duly found its way into the British Library - for a bottle of good German schnapps.

  Noticing my silence, Christophoros asked again: What was I, Orthodox or heretic?

  'I'm a Catholic,' I replied.

  'My God,' said the monk. 'I'm so sorry.' He shook his head in solicitude. 'To be honest with you,' he said, 'the Abbot never gives permission for non-Orthodox to look at our holy books. Particularly Catholics. The Abbot thinks the present Pope is the Antichrist and that his mother is the Whore of Babylon. He says that they are now bringing about the Last Days spoken of by St John in the Book of Revelation.'

  Christophoros murmured a prayer. 'Please,' he said, 'don't ever tell anyone in the monastery that you're a heretic. If the Abbot ever found out, I'd be made to perform a thousand prostrations.'

  'I won't tell a soul.'

  Christophoros relaxed slightly, and took off his glasses to polish them on the front of his habit. 'You know, we actually had another Catholic in the monastery earlier this year?' he said.

  'Who was that?' I asked.

  'He was a choirmaster from Bavaria,' said Christophorus. 'He had a beautiful voice.'

  I eased the book up onto a reading stand, and began to unbutton its canvas cover.

  'He said our church had wonderful acoustics,' continued Christophoros, arranging the lamps on the desk. 'So he asked Fr. Yacovos if he could sing a Gloria inside the katholikon, under the dome.'

  'What did Fr. Yacovos say?'

  'He said that he didn't think he could let a heretic pray inside the church. But just this once he said he would let him sing a little alleluia in the porch.'

  I had now got the protective canvas off, and the beautifully worked leather binding gleamed golden in the light of the lantern.

  I opened the cover. Inside, the text was written in purple ink on the finest vellum - strong, supple and waxy, but so thin as to be virtually translucent. The calligraphy was a beautifully clear and cursive form of early medieval Georgian. According to the library's detailed catalogue, the volume had bound together a number of different early Byzantine devotional texts. The first folio I opened was apparently a shrill sermon by St Jerome, denouncing what he considered the thoroughly pagan practice of taking baths: 'He who has bathed in Christ,' fumed the saint, 'does not need a second bath.'

  Only towards the end, on folio 287 verso, did I come to the opening lines of the text I had come so far to see. Its author was the great Byzantine traveller-monk John Moschos, and the book had been compiled at the end of his life as he prepared for death in a monastery in Constantinople, 1,300 years ago.

  'In my opinion, the meadows in Spring present a particularly delightful prospect,' he wrote. 'One part of this meadow blushes with roses; in other places lilies predominate; in another violets blaze out, resembling the Imperial purple. Think of this present work in the same way, Sophronius, my sacred and faithful child. For from among the holy men, monks and hermits of the Empire, I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a crown which I now offer to you, most faithful child; and through you to the world at large

  Turning up the lamp, I opened a fresh page.

  In the spring of the year 578 a.d., had you been sitting on a bluff of rock overlooking Bethlehem, you might have been able to see two figures setting off, staves in hand, from the gates of the great desert monastery of St Theodosius. The two - an old grey-bearded monk accompanied by an upright, perhaps slightly stern, and certainly much younger companion - would have headed off south-west through the wastes of Judaea, towards the fabulously rich port-metropolis of Alexandria.

  It was the start of an extraordinary journey that would take John Moschos and his pupil, Sophronius the Sophist, in an arc across the entire Eastern Byzantine world. Their aim was to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East, before their fragile world - already clearly in advanced decay - finally shattered and disappeared. The result was the volume in front of me now. If today in the West it is a fairly obscure text, a thousand years ago it was renowned as one of the most
popular books in all the great literature of Byzantium.

  Byzantine caravanserais were rough places, and the provincial Greek aristocracy did not enjoy entertaining: as the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it, 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife.' So everywhere they went, the two travellers stayed in monasteries, caves and remote hermitages, dining frugally with the monks and ascetics. In each place, Moschos seems to have jotted down accounts that he had heard of the sayings of the fathers, and other anecdotes and miracle stories.

  Moschos was taking to an extreme the old Orthodox tradition of the wandering monk. In the West, at least since St Benedict introduced the vow of stability in the early sixth century, monks have tended to be static, immured in their cells: as the saying went, 'A monk out of his cell is like a fish out of water.' But in the Eastern Churches, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, there has always been a tradition of monks being able to wander from guru to guru, from spiritual father to spiritual father, garnering the wisdom and advice of each, just as the Indian sadhus still do. Even today, modern Greek Orthodox monks take no vow of stability. If after a period of time in a monastery they decide they want to sit at the feet of another teacher in a different monastery, possibly in a completely different part of Greece (or indeed in Sinai or the Holy Land), then they are free to do so.

  The Spiritual Meadow was a collection of the most memorable sayings, anecdotes and holy stories that Moschos gathered on his travels, and was written as part of a long tradition of such apophthegmata, or Sayings of the Fathers. However, Moschos's writings are infinitely more evocative, graphic and humorous than those of any of his rivals or contemporaries, and almost alone of the surviving examples of the genre, they can still be read with genuine pleasure.