by Guy Stagg
However, its decline really began in February 1913, when the entire skete was excommunicated.
First, a little background. In 1907, the year Rasputin published The Life of an Experienced Pilgrim, another strannik’s memoir was also printed. In the Mountains of the Caucasus, by a former brother from St Panteleimon, described a hermit’s solitary wanderings in the high region between the Caspian Sea and the Black. It also celebrated the Jesus Prayer, claiming the prayer’s miraculous power was contained in the very word Christ.
The book was popular among Russians on Mt Athos, who were enchanted by the descriptions of mountain wilderness and impressed by the idea that simply saying God’s name might manifest His presence. This seemed to purify Hesychasm, while stamping the practice with its own Slavic identity.
Before long, these supporters formed an unofficial movement known as the imiaslavie, or name-glorifiers. Their leader was Fr Antony Bulatovich, a former guards officer and celebrated explorer of Ethiopia, as well as a military aide to its emperor Menelek II. Bulatovich had resigned his commission after killing an enemy soldier and joined the brothers at St Andrew’s. On reading In the Mountains of the Caucasus, he became convinced that the imiaslavie were the true defenders of the Hesychast tradition. However, his critics argued that the book encouraged idolatry and branded its supporters imiaslavtsy, or name-worshippers.
By 1912 half the brothers at St Panteleimon were part of the movement, and the majority at St Andrew’s. When the skete voted to replace their abbot, he refused to leave, until Bulatovich ousted him and installed an ally. Soon there were reports of monks being denied communion and thrown from windows. Complaints were made to the Russian consul in Thessaloniki, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, and the Holy Synod in St Petersburg. Next year Mt Athos’s governing council excommunicated every member of St Andrew’s and ordered a blockade of St Panteleimon, its imiaslavie forbidden money, post and food.
In April 1913 the Patriarch of Constantinople accused the movement of heresy, but this only strengthened their conviction. After all, the Hesychasts were heretics once.
Although the Jesus Prayer dated back to the Desert Fathers, its most important revival was on Mt Athos in the first half of the fourteenth century. As brothers began isolating themselves to practise the technique, Byzantine clerics accused them of valuing contemplation over Church sacraments. The Greek protos, the Holy Mountain’s most senior monk, was even called – surprise, surprise – a Bogomil. This dispute threatened to split Eastern Christianity, but in 1351 an ecclesiastical council ruled in favour of the Hesychasts. Ever since, monastic mysticism, and in particular the Jesus Prayer, has been embedded in Orthodoxy. The imiaslavie took courage from this fact, for even though the Church condemned their beliefs, they knew Hesychasm could raise a pilgrim above a patriarch. They also knew the Gospels teach Christians to expect persecution, even welcome it. This is the courage of the martyr: holding true to your faith in the face of the world. That said, on breaking with the Church they must have felt a rush of reckless purpose, like swimming off the coast until the shoreline slips from sight, or walking without stopping until your life is left behind.
The blockade of St Panteleimon failed, so the Russian synod asked the government to act. Nicholas II had little interest in the affair, but his advisers feared that the empire’s regional influence was at risk. As with the Cathars, a political anxiety was projected onto a theological dispute, and the result was persecution.
In June 1913 an Imperial Navy gunboat pulled up off the coast of St Panteleimon. The Bishop of Vologda was sent ashore, making one final attempt to convert the heretics. His sermon was shouted down, however, the monks crying out, ‘Imia Bozhie est’ Sam Bog! The name of God is God!’
After him came 118 marines, who set up water cannons and machine guns and ordered the imiaslavie to gather in the katholikon. The monks refused, barricading themselves in their cells. What happened next is unclear. Official reports claim that Russian forces were attacked, unofficial reports that they opened fire. How many were killed, how many injured – all this is disputed. However, forty brothers ended up in hospital, St Andrew’s Skete surrendered without a fight, and by early July eight hundred imiaslavie had been shipped to Russia.
In Odessa the Imperial Police interrogated the monks. A small number were put in prison and a small number distributed to local monasteries. The rest had their habits stripped and their beards shaved, and were sent into exile.
‘In the Latin Church people need to understand before they can believe,’ said Fr Philotheos, when I told him I was finding Orthodoxy much harder to grasp. ‘In the Eastern Church they need to believe before they can understand.’
It was Monday morning, my last on Mt Athos. We were sitting in a polished room with marble floors and panelled walls. Outside, men in overalls were putting up scaffolding. The sound of a chisel scraped through the open window and a clock tick-tocked on the mantelpiece, but otherwise the room was still, with the chilly hush of a museum. I perched on the edge of my chair, skin prickled with goosebumps.
In 1992 St Andrew’s was repopulated by monks from Vatopedi. It resembled a rundown chateau, with gutted cellblocks and rubble-strewn courtyards. Rooftiles were stacked by the walls, sacks of plaster lined the corridors, and a pair of pilgrims heaved shattered furniture into a skip out front.
Fr Philotheos was tall and slender, his movements delicate and his face fixed without expression. Raised an Anglican, on his third visit to Mt Athos he converted to Orthodoxy and entered a monastery. Now he spoke English with a Greek accent and answered my questions with riddling queries of his own. How did it feel to leave the religion he grew up in? ‘How does it feel to be born?’ Had he ever found the discipline of monastic life – all those endless hours in church – difficult? ‘Is it difficult to spend time with your father?’ But he must have found something hard about converting? ‘We don’t believe there are many paths to God. We believe in Holy Tradition.’
When I mentioned that I was reading The Way of a Pilgrim, Fr Philotheos touched his fingertips together. I knew that Orthodoxy drew authority from tradition, but wasn’t sure how this fitted with the contemplative life. If a mystic could achieve direct access to the divine, I asked, what need for religious institutions?
‘Here everything comes second to prayer,’ he replied. ‘Scholarship, ritual, charity – they are all in the service of prayer.’
At that point I began to gabble. I said that I used to think of prayer as a pious habit, but on Mt Athos it seemed the foundation of the faith. And that I used to think of monasteries as an escape, but now I wondered if monks quit the world to confront themselves. Regardless of what I said, Fr Philotheos’s face remained fixed. It occurred to me that we had less in common than any monk I had met so far. If belief was the path to understanding, these questions were meaningless, for I could not reason my way across a leap of faith. And the longer we spent together, the more defeated I felt, until my voice sounded no louder than a whisper.
Eventually Fr Philotheos spoke. ‘Here we are dead to the world,’ he said.
That phrase again. That awful phrase. I did not know whether monks came to Mt Athos to extinguish themselves, but if they left this life to escape from suffering, their calling was a substitute suicide.
My companion was silent now. There was no noise except the rasping chisel, the ticking clock, and the chilly hush in the corners of the room. His hands rested on his knees, so brittle he might have been made from glass. When the clock started to chime, I half expected him to crack, but he did not even flinch.
I stood to leave.
‘There’s no need to go.’
I explained that my pass had run out.
‘We can extend your pass. You may stay as long as you wish.’
For a moment I did not answer. When I closed my eyes, another life opened up in front of me. Never finish the pilgrimage or reach Istanbul. Never leave the Holy Mountain, but spend my days binding books in Vatopedi, or tilling all
otments in Iviron. All ambition, all desire, all fear for the future – all forgotten, just like that. I felt as if I was floating light through the air instead of walking. As if I was falling through dark clouds without landing. I knew this feeling. It was vertigo.
The clock chimed the hour again, and I opened my eyes. Before Fr Philotheos could make his offer a second time, I thanked him and rushed from the room, from the marble floors and panelled walls and the monk sitting still as a dead man.
An hour later I was on the boat to Ouranoupolis, sailing back up the coast. When we came to St Panteleimon, I looked across at the enormous cellblocks: seven storeys high and forty windows wide, capped with domes and spires and roofs of glistening green. I had hoped that, by working out where Hesychasm shaded into heresy, I might better understand Orthodoxy’s mystical tradition. But my interviews left me confused, with a sense that, in their devotion, their self-sacrifice, most heretics resembled the pious. If faith is the echo of our longing, cast against an empty heaven, these men should be called martyrs, but because they strayed from the straight path of dogma, they were exiled from the Church instead.
What was it like to give yourself over to a single cause, only to learn too late that you had followed the wrong course, that your devotion was in fact deviancy? The idea left me with a feeling of stunned sympathy, for I feared it was my own mistake: setting off from home in a misguided act of faith. Perhaps this fear was behind my sudden wish to stay on Mt Athos, because here I had found another way to escape this world.
As we passed the monastery, I tried to picture that June morning one hundred years ago. Soldiers in black uniforms fanning through the cellblocks and beating down the doors. Gospodi pomilui, Lord have mercy. Monks scattered in the courtyards, their habits drenched, their robes bloodied. Gospodi pomilui! Lord have mercy! The air splintering with gunshot, and a prayer echoing off the buildings, louder and louder. Gospodi, Gospodi, Gospodi!
Fr Antony was away from Mt Athos during the crisis. He continued to campaign for the imiaslavie, but when Russia went to war the next summer he left St Andrew’s to become a chaplain on the Eastern Front. After the Revolution the movement’s status was still unresolved and Bulatovich retired to his family estate, living as a hermit.
In January 1919 he broke all contact with the Holy Synod. By the end of the year he had been murdered – the crime never solved, the culprit never caught.
Nicholas II regretted the raid and urged the Metropolitan of Moscow to treat the heretics leniently. It is unclear whether anyone was behind this change of heart. We know that his wife, the Empress Alexandra, believed unrepentant imiaslavie should be allowed to receive communion. And that his sister-in-law, Princess Elisabeth, funded the second and third print-runs of In the Mountains of the Caucasus. And what about that charismatic strannik whose own career was dogged by the charge of heresy, yet whose prayers seemed to heal the tsar’s son? According to one biography, Rasputin interceded on behalf of the imiaslavie. According to another, he was a member of the movement. I have never been able to confirm these stories, nor the rumour that Rasputin returned to Mt Athos towards the end of his life. However, in 1927 the Abbot of St Panteleimon’s secretary described just such a visit to the English travel writer Robert Byron. No biography mentions it, so perhaps the secretary was mistaken, yet it is interesting that he places Rasputin’s pilgrimage in the year 1913, a date etched in the memory of every brother at that monastery.
Once I left Mt Athos, the remorse from Thessaloniki returned. Marching up the eastern side of Chalkidiki, I doubted I would make Jerusalem without another mishap. It was the last week of May, and the temperature was rising: twenty-four degrees, twenty-five, twenty-eight. Setting off in midwinter, I had given no thought to hiking in the heat, but now I became listless. Though I walked in T-shirt and swimming trunks, my boots were heavy, my feet hot, and my eyes ached behind sunglasses.
An overexposed light haunted the coast, making the shoreline look stripped, the settlements neglected. The hotel doorways were boarded up and the cafes had newspapered windows. Beach grass grew shaggy on the sand, while the sea was banded like rock strata – layers of cobalt and azure, purple and black. Each afternoon I knelt in the shallows to wash the sweat from my face, or else dived into the dark water and hid from the sun.
At the end of the month I reached Asprovalta and started moving east again – three hundred kilometres to the border. On the plains of Thrace, I wandered down roads with no signs and through hamlets with no names, or entered villages in the noonday still and felt like I was trespassing. No birds sang in the heat, no shadows formed in the light. The men smiled when they did not understand me, the children stared but would not meet my eyes. I saw no women. And I missed the settled rhythm of Mt Athos, for here little seemed lasting.
In early June I arrived at the Nestos Delta, a flat expanse of farmland at the foot of the Rhodope Mountains. Villages floated on the wheat fields – gliding closer towards me, drifting farther away, closer towards me, farther away – and the cornhusks made a burning noise in the breeze, their dry hairs crackling. I kept pushing east, though my knees clicked and my ankles ticked, as if the machinery in my legs were coming loose.
Lagoons punctured the shore beyond the Nestos River, breaking the land into spits and bars, islands and islets. Swarms of midges turned the air opaque, obscuring the rushes and reedbeds. Sunshine floated like soap scum on the water.
That evening I stopped at a campsite. Although a light was on above the gates, the place was abandoned. I tramped round in the gloom, between rows of caravans in black cladding. Their metal shells resembled elephant corpses, the campsite some overgrown graveyard. A few had smashed windows or folded roofs, others were penned in behind plastic fencing, but not one of them was occupied. And yet, despite the darkness, I noticed odd signs of life: a blackened barbecue propped on bricks, or a string of fairy lights with broken bulbs, or a fuse box hanging half-open, its circuits glinting like icons in a dingy grotto.
Pine trees divided the caravans from the beach, their cones sewn together with cobweb. As I pitched my tent beneath the trees, I spotted a bonfire down by the water. The flames cast quivering shadows over the sand, where six teenagers were sitting in a circle, laughing exhausted laughs. A seventh teenager danced in the waves, making a sound like a siren.
‘Sleep anywhere!’ one of them shouted. ‘We occupy the campsite.’
Another member of the group asked why I was here. I explained that I had been hiking across the Balkans, via Ohrid, Bitola and Thessaloniki. But, when she asked where I was going, I paused. By this point I was certain I should cut short my pilgrimage in Turkey, so I told her I was aiming for Istanbul.
The girl looked troubled. ‘Istanbul is fire,’ she said, but I did not understand. She began to punch the air, wave an imaginary flag, and then lay on her back as if fainting, but still I did not understand. Eventually a third member of the group showed me his phone. It was playing a clip from the news, the footage cutting between a park covered in tents and a street heaving with demonstrators. Riot police marched through the smoke – but still, still I did not understand.
‘Istanbul is fire,’ the girl repeated. ‘Is fire.’
A dirt road tracked the coastline forty kilometres from the border – a deserted stretch of collapsing cliffs. On Thursday afternoon I discovered a new-built church beside the shore. The work had been abandoned before it was finished, and the renderless walls were corroded by the saltwind off the sea. Inside, marble panels covered the space where the altar should go, but everything else was naked concrete: a great hall of dusty air and stagnant space.
Why build a church in this out-of-the-way place? Why finish two thirds of the work and then leave it to decay? I looked for an answer, picking through the sandbags and sacks of plaster, but found no clues.
Opening my map, I checked for a village or housing development nearby. All I could see were the suburbs of Alexandroupoli, five hours’ walk from here – the last city before the border
. Tomorrow morning I would pass a sign on the outskirts of the city decorated with a double-headed eagle: Constantinopolis 297 km. The day after, I would reach the border, and then it was a week, eight days, to Istanbul. Something was happening in that city, but I did not know what. There was smoke and chanting, but I did not know . . .
A few icons had been propped on a picnic table in one corner of the church. Underneath I noticed a scrap of paper printed with the words Aγιος Ευγε´νιος.
Agios Evgénios. St Eugene. Perhaps that was the church’s name.
Standing before the empty altar, I made up my mind. When I arrived in Istanbul, I would book a flight home. For five months I had walked in the hope that, if I reached Jerusalem, then I would be well. I had carried this hope the whole way from Canterbury, its burden growing heavier on my back. Too anxious to ask for help, I made a virtue of solitary endurance, mistaking my isolation for something heroic. But what I thought of as courage was in fact a kind of fear. There was no need to keep going and risk another breakdown. Safer to finish the journey while I was still in control.
This was not the first time I had imagined ending my pilgrimage early, but that afternoon it did not feel like a defeat. Instead I felt a surging sense of freedom, as if a rucksack weighing more than all the church had slid from my shoulders and gone tumbling into the sea. So I put away my map, stepped outside, and walked to the end of Europe.
PART FOUR
A retired journalist who ran an internet cafe in the border town of İpsala. Who had reported from Russia and Singapore. Who used his twelve-year-old nephew as a translator. Who joked about his nephew’s weight (‘My uncle says I weigh a hundred kilos . . .’), and then seesawed off his chair with laughter. Who gave me glass after glass of sugary tea and called the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a dictator.