by Guy Stagg
I became convinced that I was safest alone. This was my mistake.
Thessaloniki’s old town was huddled on a hillside north of the city centre. The sloping streets were quiet – few cars, few restaurants or shops – and the stone houses painted in chalky yellows and pastel reds.
My hostel was a modern building with a garden out front, the flowerbeds a mess of juniper and broom. There was nobody here, except for a small lady napping on the common-room sofa. When I entered the room, she sprung off the sofa and began tidying. She was in her early sixties, but reminded me of a baby, with chubby cheeks and unblinking eyes. Her name was Dora.
I explained why I was here. ‘To Istanbul?’ she asked, so I replied, ‘Yes, Istanbul.’ ‘And Jerusalem?’ she asked, so I replied, ‘Yes, Jerusalem.’ ‘With foot?’ she asked. ‘All alone?’ she asked. ‘How many kilometres a day?’ I began to answer – ‘Twenty-five, thirty,’ – but was cut off: ‘Not enough.’ ‘Well, more if I have to,’ I said, but again I was cut off: ‘You have to.’ She went on, ‘When I was a girl my school was twenty-three kilometres from my home. In Kavala. If our car was broken, I went with bicycle. If our bicycle was broken, I went with foot. One day I walked all the way to school in the morning and all the way home in the evening. In Kavala. Yes?’
Dora thought that, from Istanbul, I should fly the final leg of the journey. ‘Not safe,’ she told me. ‘Syria, Lebanon, Turkey – not safe.’ I asked why Turkey was unsafe. ‘The Turks are very hospitality, yes, but you cannot trust them. My mother always say: You can eat with a Turk, but you cannot sleep with a Turk. My mother. Yes?’
I laughed and promised I wouldn’t forget.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We never forget.’
Dora was very hospitality too. She referred to the hostel guests as her children and boasted about who was staying: an academic and an architect from Italy; a Dutch father and son on a cycling holiday; a Cypriot woman studying to become a doctor; and a Marxist activist named Michael. He was from Middlesbrough.
That evening Dora cooked for her children (‘Turkish food. It’s true. Greek food is Turkish food.’) We ate on the patio, the academic lighting candles and the architect opening wine. Dora sat at the head of the table, urging us to try different dishes, or else arguing that the Greeks should leave the eurozone and return to the land, to the fields and farms and olive groves. As she spoke, the two cyclists nodded along, their blond heads bobbing in the candlelight. Sitting among these strangers, the blind determination that had carried me across Greece began to calm, for here I was just another tourist.
After the meal Dora cleared the table, refusing all offers of help. When Michael asked where she found her energy, she replied that God gave her strength.
‘God never gives me strength.’
‘How many times have you asked him?’
Michael hesitated. ‘Actually, I’m an atheist.’
‘No, I know there is a God.’
‘How?’
‘When I gave birth to my son, I have a thrombosis. The doctor said, Dora you must have surgery, but I said, No surgery. In my room was an icon of Theotokos, the Mother of God, and when the doctor left I began to pray. Please, please, let me be a mother to my children. So I stay in the hospital and after two months the thrombosis is gone. Two months. Yes?’
Michael did not answer. Dora tried again. This time she told the story of a couple she knew who waited thirteen years for a daughter. Shortly after the child was born, Dora’s son crashed into their car and the girl was injured. While she was in hospital, the son stayed in church, praying for her recovery. Once the girl was sent home, he remained in church to give thanks. ‘Even now he visits three times, four times a week. Even now he gives thanks she is alive.’
The table was quiet. I could not tell if this was embarrassment or surprise. The academic frowned, her lower lip stained with wine, and then stretched and sighed and moved off into the night. The rest of the table followed, the cyclists bickering with Dora over the washing-up.
When Michael was the only person left, he took out a tin of tobacco and started rolling cigarettes. His skin was pale and pinched, his manner polite to the point of surprise.
Michael had been living in Thessaloniki for several months, working with local communists to free Greece from the hated Troika. He used that phrase – the hated Troika – often. Pose the question of power was another favourite, turning up in sentences like: ‘Call a general strike, demand an end to austerity, and pose the question of power. See? It sounds so easy.’ By it Michael meant revolution. He was optimistic about its chances in Greece. ‘I’m fifty-five,’ he told me, ‘and never have I seen so many of the right conditions in a single country.’ At that point his eyes lost focus and his voice became quiet. I caught only fragments of what followed – ‘The purpose of politics is a world without want . . . Democracy can never be an end in itself . . .’ – until he started discussing online activism and his voice was loud: ‘People think because I’m working class I don’t understand collateralized debt. They think because I swear on Twitter I didn’t go to Oxford. And suddenly it’s three in the morning and I’ve written two thousand words under a Daily Mail article and I can’t sleep for all the hate.’
It was not hard to imagine Michael plotting revolution from his laptop, but I struggled to picture him marching in the streets. However, when I learnt that he had been an alcoholic for five years, I experienced a tug of remorse. It was not pity so much as recognition, for he had the stunned shyness of one still wounded and the quiet mania of the unconsoled. And, when he said that he would never return home, that he would lose his life for this cause, I thought of Lord Byron, coming to Greece to fight for independence and dying before he reached the battlefield.
‘Sounds so easy,’ Michael said again. ‘Easy-peasy.’
I left him rolling cigarettes and went down to the shore. It was late on Saturday, and I wanted to walk the promenade before bed. There was relief in wandering alone through the warm evening, no bag on my shoulders, no boots on my feet. I felt the unhurried ease of a Mediterranean holiday, as if the boundaries of the day were looser now, or time had relaxed its grip.
The centre of Thessaloniki consisted of monumental squares linked by wide avenues. Its Neoclassical office blocks and Art Deco hotels resembled cruise ships parked up beside the pavement. Near the port I found an older neighbourhood, the houses converted into bars. There were wooden tables and wooden floors, metal chairs and metal lamps, music pumping from speakers and rainbow colours projected over the cobblestones.
One of the bars faced the promenade. I sat outside, angled towards the sea. Though I was planning to order coffee, when the waiter suggested ouzo, I paused.
Thessaloniki was halfway to Jerusalem. My sickness from Meteora was gone. Tomorrow I would take the day off. So why not say yes?
The ouzo came in a frosted bottle. It tasted sweeter than I expected, and thicker too. As I drank I watched the city lights reflecting on the water. Out in the gulf the waves glittered like burning oil, distant flares.
When the first bottle was finished, I ordered another, and another. Then I wandered the cobblestone streets with a swelling sense of purpose. The buildings rose and fell around me, as if the tide had drawn in over the land, or we were drifting out to sea. I kept circling the neighbourhood, stopping at half the bars I passed, until the last one closed and there was dawn in the sky.
For the next few days I was drunk the whole time, roaming round the city and feeling sorry for myself. Everything had gone wrong in Greece: leaving the pilgrimage route, falling ill in Meteora, and now this spree in Thessaloniki. I regretted coming to the Balkans, because I had lost all sense of purpose here. And I regretted the rest of my journey, too, for I had not healed during the walk, but spoilt any chance of recovery. As I circled the city, my self-pity became despair. I wanted to cry out – A mistake! A mistake! I did not mean to drink again! – but instead my thoughts collapsed into a single desire: to push myself past rescue.
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br /> The Via Egnatia ran down the middle of Thessaloniki. On my second evening in the city, I tripped while crossing the road.
As the ground swept up towards me, I tumbled back through time, back to the earliest days of the depression. Before I lay in a London bedroom, turned from the window. Before I hid in a Buenos Aires flat, frightened to go outside. Back to the summer I left university. Back to the night of the fall.
It was the end of August. I was walking between parties on a road in south-west London. At one point the houses lining the street became a brick wall, separating the pavement from a railway cutting. The wall was low enough to climb and coped with slabs of stone. For some reason I was wearing a suit, and, when I lifted myself onto the wall, a button snapped off the cuff. Then I stood over the cutting with arms spread wide and eyes turned down. Streetlamps traced the tracks below, a gleaming seam two or three storeys down.
I was planning to jump into the path of a train, but once I had climbed onto the stone slabs, my plan seemed ridiculous. When a set of carriages screamed by, I laughed as I pictured myself bounding onto the back like an action hero. A man in a suit, alone in the world, running from his life – no, I would not jump.
Instead I waited for the train to pass and stepped out into the empty air.
I remember the sound of rushing all around me. And the night slipping by like spilled ink. And fast, how fast my body fell.
The second I stepped out was the second I crumpled onto the track. That was the sensation. That was the sensation which returned to me in Thessaloniki, as my hands slapped hard against the tarmac. A fall faster than thought.
It stayed with me as I crawled off the road. As I limped along the pavement. As I sat in a bar, picking grit from my palms and ordering ouzo in confused Greek. As I sipped the glass with thick lips and stinging fingers. I could remember it now, that wretched London night. Remember coming to with blood on my face, in my mouth and my eyes. Remember the numbness all over, the taste of my teeth, and the pressure gone from both ears. My ribs were sore, the lungs seizing each time I inhaled, so I lay on my back without moving. The sides of the cutting framed the night, making the clouds seem very close. But, when I tried to touch them, I realized I could not lift my hand. The left hand – I could not even feel it.
Later I found a route up from the cutting. Later still I found directions to a hospital. I told the nurse who stitched my forehead together that I had been mugged. To the doctor who fitted my arm in a cast, I said that I was beaten up. My family heard that I was thrown down some stairs, for wearing the silly blue suit.
I stuck to this story because I was ashamed of what had happened. I thought that, by telling the lie often enough, it might undo the truth. This was easier than trying to make sense of my behaviour, for there was no hurt which could explain the attempt, nor any disappointment that might justify it. Yet I did not realize how the depression had warped my thoughts, turning every doubt into a defeat and every slight into a reason to fall free from this life. Nor did I realize how my deceit was making worse the damage, the lie becoming its own dreadful burden. But, wandering through Thessaloniki, I felt no sympathy for my younger self, only an appalled sense of shame. I wanted to fix it, wanted to be rid of it, wanted to rewrite the past.
In the months that followed the fall, though my injuries healed, the secret stayed sharp within me. I could not forget the thrill of holding tight to a life and then letting go. Or a decision that was no decision at all, but something deeper, like surrender.
It felt this way to drink again. A letting go. And the more I drank, the more vivid the memories of that London night. Everything I saw in Thessaloniki reminded me of the attempt – of a road crossing over a railway, of a fall faster than thought. The crooked trunk of a palm tree was the kink in my sleeve from where the wrist had snapped. The grating sound that the waves make was the fizzing of blood as it pushes through sheared skin. The sky was a purple-stained jacket, the cobblestones polluted clouds. Exhaust fumes clotted in my mouth, and a cupped glass weighed no heavier than a human heart. Yet I kept drinking until the two cities blurred, until the unlit avenues were a railway cutting, and the shimmering promenade was a train track, and the newspapers by the roadside were a body shrouded in a blanket – a tramp maybe, or a pilgrim, or a corpse wrapped in white like the one that was crucified.
We were on a boat, sailing down the eastern leg of Chalkidiki, a sixty-kilometre peninsula which ended in the limestone peak of Mt Athos. On the upper deck a bearded Russian and his son let seagulls swipe pieces of bread from their fingers, three teenage boys posed for photographs with a priest in a ragged cassock, and an elderly beggar laid out prayer beads on a black cloth – six euros each, ten for a pair. But there was no theme to them, the pilgrims on that boat, except that not one was a woman. Women were forbidden from the Holy Mountain.
The coast skimmed by on our left, a thin strip of sand with wooded hills above and forest-green water below. Two buildings crouched at the water’s edge, beside a jetty of yellow concrete. I looked for the monastery these buildings belonged to, but it was hidden among the hills. However, as we approached the jetty our driver called out its name: ‘Zographou!’
There were twenty monasteries in total, housing some two thousand monks. Otherwise the peninsula was deserted, except for an ever-changing population of pilgrims. Although an isthmus connected Mt Athos to the mainland, its border was closed, and the only access by boat. A place on the boat required a three-day pass stamped with the triple seal of the monastic republic. Before leaving England I had applied for a pass, and in Thessaloniki I realized it was dated Friday 24 May. This was what brought my binge to an end. I packed my rucksack, paid my bill and walked hard across Chalkidiki, arriving at the ferry port of Ouranoupolis late on Thursday afternoon.
Next morning, sailing down the coast, I watched the hills grow steeper and more thickly wooded, studded with the remains of hermit cells. By now the teenagers had joined the seagull game, while the bearded Russian was haggling over some prayer beads for his son.
Then I saw the monasteries.
The first one looked like a castle, topped with towers and cupolas and cellblocks painted nursery blue. ‘Dochiariou!’ the driver cried. The second resembled a fort, its stone buttresses and timber balconies stretching along the beach. ‘Xenophontos!’ The third was a great white palace, its copper roofing a tarnished green, its domes and spires gilded. ‘St Panteleimonos!’
Our ferry slowed to let the father and son off. ‘St Panteleimonos!’ the driver shouted again. ‘Rossikon!’
Rossikon. The Russian Monastery. At the end of the nineteenth century a third of the monks on Mt Athos were Russian, and for many St Panteleimon was their home. The monastery also hosted the Holy Mountain’s most infamous visitor: a strannik, or pilgrim, who had hiked here from Siberia.
A decade after that visit, in May 1907, the strannik published an account of his journey titled The Life of an Experienced Pilgrim. It records how he used to walk forty to fifty versts a day (a verst is just over a kilometre) and once marched the whole way from Kiev to the Siberian capital of Tobolsk – a distance of roughly 2,500 versts – without ever changing clothes. He also claims to have worn chains, prayed bare-chested in swarms of mosquitoes, and been chased by wolves and would-be murderers.
The Life of an Experienced Pilgrim does contain some useful tips. It recommends going on pilgrimage for months rather than years and wearing a hat while worshipping in the snow. It also warns against evil spirits that cause depression and disease, or inspire dangerous feats of endurance. And it’s not all hardship. The author mentions the farm workers who gave him food and shelter, and the holy men who cured his insomnia and chronic bed-wetting. He treats travelling as an education, delighting in everything he learns. And at times his experience mirrored my own, as when he recalls that living wild ‘was my bliss and consolation. I walked outside and found consolation in nature.’
Our experienced pilgrim was illiterate. His account was dictated
and makes for a difficult read. And, once you know a bit more about his biography, the gaps begin to show. The author expresses doubts over the value of monastic life, but never admits that he joined the monks at St Panteleimon, until he witnessed an older brother abusing one of the novices and left in disgust. He recommends humility when being introduced to senior members of the clergy and nobility, but never explains how his own travels so impressed the Bishop of Kazan that he was welcomed into the highest reaches of Russian society. He even refers to an audience with Tsar Nicholas II, but brushes over the meeting’s remarkable outcome. Yet the strannik’s reputation for holiness was such that he was invited to heal the emperor’s haemophiliac son.
All the same, Rasputin’s rise through the Romanov court only makes sense when you take into account his pilgrim past. Wandering was a sacred calling in Russian Orthodoxy, because the scale of the country placed a unique demand on roving preachers. Thus the very qualities which should prevent a Siberian peasant from befriending the royal family – modest background, minimal education, coarse manners, odd habits and total lack of ecclesiastical status – became his proof of piety.
I knew nothing about the contemplative tradition from which the stranniki emerged, but that tradition was called Hesychasm, and Mt Athos was its home. As our ferry eased into the peninsula’s main port – a cluster of red-roofed buildings with a jetty of piled rubble – I began jotting down questions. My hope was that, by learning more about the practice, I might bridge the distance I felt from the Orthodox faith.
‘Orthodoxy’s not a philosophy; it’s not a theory; it’s a way,’ said Johnny. ‘It can’t be explained, only experienced.’
Johnny was in his early twenties, with freckled skin and the reddish beginnings of a beard. His definition was, I suspect, learnt by heart, because it sounded stiff even in a Glasgow accent.