Roumeli Read Free Page B

the two monks were lighting their pipes, we were thick in conversation about the war and the problems of Greece and the decay of Orthodox Monasticism. They made an interesting contrast—the shy, diminutive Bessarion with his ragged cassock and soft skull-cap, the eager benignity of his eyes behind thick lenses, and the abbot’s great stature, his shrewd and humorous glance, the lean sardonic features repeated on the wall in a gigantic shadow embowered in clouds of smoke. A thread of raciness and worldly-wisdom ran through his discourse. His family had been priests in Kalabaka for centuries. Quitting this traditional sequence of the secular clergy, he had become a monk of St. Barlaam at the age of thirty-two, and then, which sounded unusually swift, he had been ordained deacon and priest and appointed archimandrite and abbot three months later. He was now seventy-six, and had never suffered more than a few days’ illness in his life. His remedy for an occasional cold or a touch of fever was, he maintained, infallible—five days up in the mountains with the flocks belonging to the monastery, innumerable okas of wine, sleep every night in the shepherds’ brushwood huts, and then—he extended his vast hands in the gesture of Samson embracing the columns of Gaza—he felt as strong as a giant once more. Father Bessarion, he hoped, would succeed him in his abbacy. Stroking the great tortoiseshell tom cat in his lap—there were two in the monastery, Makry, now sleepily purring, and a little black female with a white face and a red ribbon round her neck, called Marigoula—he described the monastery in winter, when the mountains were deep in snow and the jutting timbers stalactitic with icicles. “Some of them are many yards long and more than two feet thick. When the thaw starts, they break off and tumble into the valley with a noise likecannon-fire. Sometimes the clouds are so thick that Bessarion and I bump into each other in the church while singing the office....” How strange and lonely this bachelor life sounded! Other monks were mentioned, but we only saw one during the whole of our stay, a man of unbelievable age who tapped his way slowly into church one morning with a walking-stick.
    After the hard planks on which I had been sleeping in the villages of the Pindus, the bed in my white-washed room was a great luxury. When the wind dropped I could hear the deep level breathing of the sleeping abbot in the room next door, and, occasionally, a sigh of contentment. Then the wind began to moan once more round our tapering mattress of rock. Outside, the moon rimmed the tiled cupolas of the church, filling the empty slanting leagues that ran southward from these columnar mountains with a pale and glimmering lustre.
    At luncheon next day, the abbot’s chair was empty. He had risen in the dark and ridden off to harangue some charcoal burners working in the monastery woods on the slopes of the Khasian mountains; a journey involving six hours in the saddle each way. We were alone with Bessarion. Outside the extreme severity of Mount Athos there seems to be no distinction of sex in the hospitality offered by Orthodox monasteries, and Joan was as welcome a guest here as any of the male visitors. Bessarion’s large eyes kindled behind his glasses as he told the stories of the local saints of Thessaly—the miracles of St. Dionysius of Karditza and the death of the patron of his native place, St. Gideon of Tyrnavos, martyred just over a century ago by Veli Pasha, son to Ali, the famous tyrant of Yanina. His own life story was interesting enough. After our retreat from Greece in 1941, he had hidden two British soldiers for a number of months in the foothills of Mount Olympus, later increasingtheir number with a wing-commander who had baled out of his burning aircraft on to the Thessalian plain. When this became too dangerous, he escaped with them by submarine from Trikeri, south of Mount