The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  Money, manpower, military resources – now all they needed was a kingdom.

  Cyprus was the key stopping point for pilgrim traffic to the Holy Land, and Richard the Lionheart’s accidental occupation gave them the perfect opportunity to claim it. However, the Third Crusade was under way and the order was stretched. Despite raising local taxes to pay for their purchase, they failed to garrison the place properly. Riots broke out, knights were attacked, and by the end of the year Cyprus had been handed on to Guy of Lusignan, deposed King of Jerusalem.

  The Templar presence on Cyprus remained, with castles and convents in Nicosia, Limassol, Gastria and Templos. And, as I learnt while crossing the island, it played a key role in the order’s downfall. Something of this history seemed to linger in the stale air, the worn light, in the dust that brushed the back of my throat. Looking round the Church of the Archangel Michael, the past felt close, as if I could dig my nails into the earth and scratch away centuries of suffering.

  Circle round Mt Olympus, onto the southern side of the Troodos Range, and you will notice signs for the Mesa Potamos waterfall. Near the waterfall lies a monastery dedicated to St John the Baptist. Its guest master, Fr Prodromos, was in his mid-thirties, but seemed younger, his eyes wide and blinking, his mouth never quite closing shut. His movements were wide open too, limbs sewn loose to his body.

  We took a tour of the monastery, but there was little to see. The chapel was made from the same rough-cut stone as the Church of the Archangel Michael, while every other building had cream-coloured walls and timber verandas. Some had been recently renovated, and one of the cellblocks was fenced in behind scaffolding. The interiors had been renovated too, their polished surfaces shining.

  After vespers the guest master escorted me to the refectory, bringing out plates of seasoned rice and a tray of pumpkin-stuffed pastries. He ate nothing himself, only picked at a bowl of fruit and talked about the two years he spent living in London, studying music and singing in bands. Aged twenty-one he left the city, moving to Thessaloniki to study theology. Then he felt his calling: ‘To begin with I wanted to join the monks on Mt Athos, yet when I visited it was not right. Instead I came to Machairas, here in the Troodos, where I learnt that a few brothers were repopulating the Monastery of St John the Baptist. Then I felt sure that God was guiding me, because I knew the monastery! When I was a boy, my priest organized camping trips to Mesa Potamos. Even though the buildings were abandoned, we would hear vespers in the chapel and sleep in the courtyard. Some of the children thought there were ghosts, but for me it was a magic place.’

  I mentioned that, on my own visit to Mt Athos, I learnt of monasteries being restored and sketes being revived. Fr Prodromos nodded, his expression blissful, grateful, vacant.

  Then he started talking about a bishop called Fr Athanasios: ‘The bishop grew up in Cyprus, but left to become a monk at Vatopedi. After sixteen years the Patriarch asked him to return home. Fr Athanasios was a humble man. He wanted to spend his days in prayer, but instead he was made Bishop of Limassol and Abbot of Machairas. Now our services are full of families. Now young men stay in our monasteries every week. And do you know who founded the community here at Mesa Potamos? Yes, it was Fr Athanasios.’

  ‘What’s his secret?’ I asked.

  ‘The bishop has reminded us that religion is more than just the habits of faith. It is a spiritual exercise. He has reminded us all, not only the monks: the whole Church.’

  When I finished eating, the guest master led me into the rear courtyard. A pavilion occupied the centre of the yard – a ring of benches with a tiled roof. We sat facing one another, the evening air becoming cool between us. In the refectory his gestures were restless, but now Fr Prodromos sat without moving, leaning back against the pavilion’s wooden frame.

  I said that I was surprised monastic spirituality could make the church more popular. I would never have the courage, the conviction, to enter a monastery—

  ‘We’re not here because we’re strong,’ the guest master replied. ‘We’re here because we’re weak. If my faith was stronger, I could have stayed in the world.’

  I tried to imagine the anxious student, the failed musician, giving up his life for God. Since Mt Athos I understood how belief might be built from practice, yet was unsure what sustained this discipline. Does a calling last a lifetime, or does faith fade – like ambition, like desire? If so, how does a monk keep to his solitary course? I was hoping Fr Prodromos’s answer would give me a reason to keep walking, for though I knew pilgrimage was more than a distance covered, I had no language for what lay beyond the ritual. ‘But you must feel doubt at times,’ I said. ‘You must feel lonely, or wonder if you made the right decision.’

  Fr Prodromos did not answer. Evening was coming on, the cellblocks sliding into shadow. ‘A monk is very lucky,’ he said after a while. ‘The monastery lets him devote his whole life to God, without any distractions. In the rest of the world people have responsibilities – to family, to work – and they can’t ignore those responsibilities, they can’t, it’s impossible. But here even our daily duties help us to become a better monk.’

  I asked for an example.

  ‘Anything I want to do I have to receive the abbot’s permission. We call it blessing, the abbot’s blessing. Sometimes he gives me a job I do not want, or the same job every single day. He is not trying to punish me, but to teach me. If I feel – not anger, that’s too strong, but negative feelings – then I know there is still pride in my heart.’ Once more, the emptying of self.

  Once more, the substitute suicide. Yet it seemed this was less freedom from emption than a willed return to innocence. ‘Like being a child again,’ I said.

  Darkness was pouring down from the sky, the courtyard growing dim, the guest master dissolving. ‘Everything in the monastery is teaching us humility.’ His body was gone, the black habit extinguished. ‘When Christ died he was the lowest of the low, a criminal on the cross – yet he was the Lord of Creation.’ His eyes were shining, the cheekbones wet with tears. ‘Today there’s nobody to crucify us. Today we have to crucify ourselves.’

  I left Mesa Potamos on Monday morning and spent two days crossing Pitsilia, the highlands to the east of Olympus. In places the landscape was rugged; in places it was barren. Although this scenery was familiar from Greece, I no longer marched along with my head bowed, impatient to reach the next village. Since Turkey I felt little sense of urgency, but paced slow through the blunt heat, the bare light. My route took in more painted churches – in Pelendri and Palaichori – as well as the grand old monastery of Machairas. Otherwise I travelled alone on mountain roads, stopping at half the hilltop chapels and roadside shrines.

  Come the end of the week I would approach the island’s eastern shore and face the holiday crowds in Larnaca, but up here the only people I met were locals. When I explained that I was walking the Troodos Range, they urged me to change course. I must visit the Byzantine catacombs at Kyrenia, and the Ayia Thekla chapel near the Cape Greco peninsula. And the House of Eustolios, and the Soli Basilica, and the ruined abbey of Bellapais. Then there was the hermitage of St Neophytos outside Paphos and the cave of the forty saints outside Famagusta – certainly I must go there.

  I noted the suggestions down and promised to try my best.

  Others told stories about their favourite saints. Did I know that St Paul travelled to Cyprus twelve years after the death of Christ, where he was taken to a synagogue, bound to a pillar, and whipped? And that St Barnabas was martyred in Salamis: stoned, suffocated, or perhaps set alight? And that the Empress Helena stopped off here on her way home from Palestine, bringing a fragment of the True Cross and an army of cats, for the island was plagued by snakes? I was also told about the Persian Conquest of 526 BC, the Jewish uprising of AD 117, the seventh-century Arab invasion and Isaac Komnenos’s 1185 rebellion. And surely I knew that Cyprus was the true scene of the Templars’ downfall?

  In the year 1291 the city of Acre was conquered by the Mamlu
k sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil. This was the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s final stronghold; once lost, the Templars forfeited their status as guardians of the Holy Land.

  A number of contemporary chroniclers held the knights responsible for the defeat. Some blamed their military strategy, some their corrupt practices – for they were widely suspected of performing pagan rites. In 1306 a Venetian geographer called Marino Sanuto started to write a history of the crusader states containing many of the more lurid rumours about the order. He claimed that, when a knight died in battle, the body was cremated, his brother knights drinking the dissolved ashes. The babies born of Templar orgies were also cremated, the infants’ roasted fat smeared onto the golden idol that they worshipped.

  Next year the French king, Philip IV, used similar rumours to justify his suppression of the order. Which brings us to that infamous date: Friday 13 October.

  The story of the Templars’ suppression has been told many times. The raid on every chapter house in France, the arrest of each member, the mass trials, the torture, the confessions, the bonfires of knights and the burning of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay – this is the dramatic material behind a hundred conspiracy theories. But the role Cyprus played in the story is less well known.

  After the fall of Acre, the Templars moved their headquarters to the island. Inspired by the Teutonic Knights, who were establishing a crusader state in Prussia, they began taking a hand in local politics. In April 1306 they supported an attempt to seize control by Amaury, Lord of Tyre and brother of the Cypriot king, Henry II.

  As soon as the order’s future in the Mediterranean was secure, its European operation came under attack. Philip IV was in debt to the knights, which may account for his behaviour. Or, given that the Templars owned estates in southern and eastern France, had the freedom to march their armies across European borders, and were backing coups in vulnerable Frankish kingdoms, perhaps the perceived threat was less financial than military.

  In November 1307 Pope Clement V endorsed the order’s suppression. Amaury had no choice but to arrest the island’s Templars. In the riots that followed he was murdered by one of his noblemen and Henry II was restored to the throne.

  Henry II immediately destroyed the Templar headquarters on Cyprus, handing the rest of their property to the Knights Hospitaller. Without a base of operations the order could not survive.

  While on trial, the brothers were accused of denying Christ, spitting on the cross, irreligious kissing and homosexuality – the standard charges against heretics. As with the Bogomils, paranoia was disguised as piety, and prejudice became an excuse for persecution. But another, more vivid, accusation was also made: that they worshipped the idol of a bearded prophet called Baphomet. This may have been a recovered relic from the martyred St Euphemia, or a recycled rumour about witchcraft. Whatever the truth, it gave a pagan flavour to the order’s reputation that lasted beyond the Middle Ages.

  In De Occulta Philosophia, published in 1531, the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa compared these profane practices to the ‘disgusting and foul abominations’ of the Gnostic magicians. According to the Byzantine author Psellus – Agrippa’s source on the subject – eleventh-century heretics also burnt their unwanted babies, baking the ashes into a special sort of bread. Gnostics, orgies, baby-seasoned bread – if this sounds familiar it’s because the magicians Psellus had in mind were otherwise known as Bogomils.

  De Occulta Philosophia was one of the most influential works of sixteenth-century scholarship. References to medieval historians and classical rites helped secure its reputation among Renaissance humanists, and thanks to authors like Agrippa, the Templars’ rumoured links with Bogomilism, Gnosticism and pagan mischief endure to this day.

  Cyprus would have suited them. The country seemed older than anywhere else I had visited. Crossing Pitsilia, the landscape looked exhausted: eroded terraces and broken paths; twisted orchards and tangled vines; scabbed earth, muddy shade, and mountainsides ribbed like the lining of an opencast mine. Yet this only deepened the sense of what endured, like an ancient face made stronger by every wrinkle etched into its features.

  Although I remained on the high ground for much of the week, the heat was fierce. As I travelled east towards the Machairas Forest, the sun scorched a hole in the sky. I told myself that I was nearing the end of August and counted down the days until autumn, but my progress had slowed into a sunsick stupor.

  Soon my senses confused and the days began to daze.

  I remember climbing past a dam on a winding tarmac road, its black surface bubbling in the heat. The dam’s reservoir was a flawless blue, the water spangled with light. When a breeze brushed the water, the light scattered, and I turned away with eyes scalded . . . I remember a valley shaped like a bowl, the air blossoming with butterflies. Nearing the valley floor, I almost stepped on a snake, a blunt-nosed viper lying fat across the track. Its body was as long as a man’s, its scales the same shade as the grey-green thornscrub, becoming black at its knuckled head. Then the thorns snapped, the gravel shifted, and when I looked again the snake was gone . . . I remember a village of walled gardens and steep streets, where I listened to a quivering sound that was not birdsong, nor bellchime, nor the chatter of an overheard radio. Eventually I realized it was panpipes, playing from one of the houses, enchanting the whole village . . . Panpipes, butterflies, jewelled water and scaled skin: the place was pagan haunted. Here was Hermes, here Pan, here the footprints of Dionysus. Here the maenads and satyrs and nymphs. Here the mysteries.

  My last monastery was perched on a spire of stone at the eastern edge of the Troodos. Stavrovouni was its name: the Mountain of the Cross. I arrived late on Wednesday, having spent all afternoon sinking into the Machairas Forest – a slope of Turkish pine above the arid farmland of the Mesaoria Plain. It was almost six when I started climbing. The monastery at the top shut its gates at seven.

  Military camps surrounded the base, giving way to steep rises of stony ground. A footpath scratched up one side, running over stone-cut steps. Some were tilted with age, others worn flat from use. Then the path became an animal track and pebbles trickled beneath my boots, the low growth cutting at my shins, my shorts.

  The evening was warm, the going slow. Midway up the mountain my hair was wet, my clothes wet, my socks soaked and my back burning beneath the rucksack. Sweat dripped off my elbows, splashing onto the powdered earth. It dripped off my face too, slick on my forehead, my cheeks, in the socket of each eye. Salt stung the tender flesh at the corners of the lids and my sight began to blur. Yet I pressed on, higher and higher. Five hundred metres and ten thousand paces and still I was climbing.

  After an hour I paused to catch my breath. When I turned round, the landscape swept out in every direction. The sun had dipped and shadows lay on the earth: the thin greens of the Mesaoria Plain made deep by blue shadow, the broken greys of the Troodos made black. How small the country was, how tiny! All those centuries of history, all those empires and kingdoms – just eight days’ walk from end to end.

  The slopes heaved. The shale poured. The air was hot in my mouth. Then I hauled myself up the cracked lip of a cliff and the ground was level again.

  Stavrovouni Monastery occupied the mountain summit, built low and dense as a fortress. The guard waiting at the gate turned me away, explaining that the monastery was closed, but when I refused to leave he became curious. Where was my car? Where was my bike? How would I get down before nightfall?

  Eventually I was directed up another stone-cut staircase to the main entrance. Here I met a second guard, a monk name Fr Panaiotis. He wanted to know if I was Orthodox, if I was married, if I had ever visited the Holy Mountain.

  ‘We live like the monks of Mt Athos,’ he explained, his face stern, his features spare. ‘We live outside the world.’

  Inside it did remind me of Mt Athos. There was an entrance hall with parquet flooring and a clouded smell of polish. And there was a guest dormitory with iron-framed beds, the mattresses thin as
paperbacks. The evening meal was familiar too: boiled beans mixed with parsley and oil, served cold in metal bowls. We ate in the refectory, while a novice read from the Church Fathers. The walls were slung with shadows, but then the sun pierced through the western window, giving the bowed head of each monk a backlit halo.

  When the meal was done, Fr Panaiotis invited me onto the balcony. As we watched the sun ducking behind the Troodos, he explained how the Empress Helena founded the original church on this mountain, endowing it with a piece of the True Cross. By the Middle Ages the church was a monastery, popular with pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. Since then it had been emptied by Franks, destroyed by Ottomans, flattened by an earthquake and gutted by fire. Yet on every occasion the fragment of the cross survived.

  I grew bored listening to Fr Panaiotis list the miracles associated with the relic, so I asked if he missed his family. He told me that he felt close to them whenever he prayed. I asked whether his family missed him. He told me that three times a year – on Christmas, Easter and the Feast of the Assumption – he left Stavrovouni to spend a day with his parents. ‘Some families cannot understand our vocation. They think it is an unnatural way to live. They think their child has been taken from them. A few times parents have come here and refused to leave. They shout at the gates until the novice has to be moved elsewhere—’ He interrupted himself: ‘But my family was not this way. Even though my father had his doubts, on the day I entered the monastery he drove me right to the door.’