The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  I tried to picture the scene. The monk like a schoolboy on his first day of term. The father’s expression fixed, giving no hint of the regret he felt. And a moment of devotion, of sacrifice, as they said goodbye to one another.

  ‘It’s very rare that a parent will do this for their child,’ Fr Panaiotis added.

  I tried to work out whether he ever felt guilty. If the monastic calling was a sacrifice, the monk did not bear this burden alone. Like a young man going to fight, or a young martyr going to die, his family waited at home for the child who would never return. And I realized that this model of religious life – as some grand act of abandonment – could no longer justify my own journey. Maybe I left Canterbury looking to forsake the world, yet I needed a better reason to reach Jerusalem.

  At twilight we assembled in Stavrovouni’s main courtyard. Thirty brothers crowded round the abbot as he sat reciting prayers. By this point I could recognize the different stages of the liturgy – the creed, the psalms, and the Kyrie eleison repeated forty, eighty, one hundred and twenty times – yet I could not tell how long the service would last. After three quarters of an hour my legs were numb and the minutes had slipped from my mind. But, when I looked up, I felt a sudden shock of wonder, for we were high above the ground here and the sky was foiled with stars.

  It was dark when the monks shuffled into the church. A silver cross stood in one of the alcoves, framed by an arch of gilded scrollwork. The surface was embossed with the final scenes of the Passion, lamplight twinkling off the metal like a casino slot machine. The piece of the True Cross was sealed inside.

  I watched the brothers queuing at the alcove. Thirty heads bowed to kiss the shrine. Thirty bodies knelt for the abbot’s blessing. Then they stepped out into the still-warm air.

  When I returned to my dormitory the lights were off. Through an open window I could see the dark pool of the Mesaoria Plain sprinkled with headlights. Nicosia glimmered in the distance, its buildings outlined against the night. It seemed so unlikely that, less than forty kilometres away, the city was alive with people, while I had spent the evening gathered round a splinter of wood. Maybe there was something miraculous about this: not the sacred relic, but the ritual itself. Although it was a fragile thing – just a few words and gestures – it had outlasted centuries of conquest. I still thought of monastic life as a substitute suicide, yet here was a pattern much older than Stavrovouni; and one which does not decay, though buildings decay, and churches empty, and nations crumble into dust. Perhaps the monks’ calling was not a willed sacrifice, but a way of outlasting death – a single life given up to a shared ritual. And perhaps pilgrimage was not an escape from this world, but a surrender to something larger than ourselves.

  On the floor beside the bed was a lamp. I switched it on and knelt to darn my shorts. When I looked up again the view from the window was fading, made faint by the brightness within.

  Next day I walked to the sea. As I approached the coast, the land became blistered. Olive trees crawled over the hillsides and the fields were sown with stones. The parched terraces resembled ivory piano keys, their edges shrunken with age. In each village the streets were empty, the houses still. Dogs lay in the shade like dead things; otherwise I saw nobody, not a living soul. I hitched my T-shirt to my rucksack and hiked topless down the road, skin greasy with suncream and shoulders rubbing beneath each strap. Sometimes a breeze crept in off the shore, but whenever it flagged I could feel the thickness of the air, the weight of the heat, and smell the rubbish bags cooking in roadside bins.

  Early that afternoon my route lifted onto a low hill. From the crest of the hill I saw the broad arc of a bay and the blazing Mediterranean beyond. Larnaca lazed along the shore, built from sheet metal, plate glass, and apartment blocks fifteen storeys high.

  South of the city the sky looked creased. At first I thought the clouds were hanging flat above the horizon, but then I realized it was not cloud. It was not sea, nor sky, nor folded plates of empty air. Instead it was the mountains of Lebanon rising up two hundred kilometres away.

  Or maybe I was imagining things in the stunning afternoon heat.

  Four hours later I stopped in the centre of Larnaca. Earlier that week I had been given the address of a cafe owner with a bed for pilgrims, but I could not find the place. Although I wanted to avoid the tourist strip on the waterfront, soon I was marching down the esplanade, wondering what to do. Hotels were piled up on one side, their walls pulsing with colour, while restaurants and bars filled the spaces beneath. Some were lit a searing white, the rest a screaming neon. Holiday crowds horded the tables, shouting at one another in a dozen languages, and the warmth of the day hummed off the buildings.

  I waited for the panic to begin, but all I experienced was weariness. For two months I had walked in the summer heat, anxious about the crowds on the coast and anxious about another collapse. Now those crowds were passing through me without leaving any mark. Now summer was ending and the walk was entering its final stage. But, unlike the thoughtless optimism that carried me over the Alps, this fear seemed honest – an admission of my own vulnerability. And that honesty made me hopeful about finishing the journey without another crisis. Tripoli and Beirut. Haifa and Tel Aviv. Nine hundred kilometres to go.

  After dark I came to a square at the southern end of the esplanade. The Church of St Lazarus occupied its centre, a Byzantine shell with a Romanesque bell tower.

  An overweight man sat on the bench opposite, his breathing slow, his eyes barely open. The man’s hands and beard were stained with paint. His name was Mitch.

  Mitch was an American sculptor spending the summer at an art school in Larnaca. When I asked about his work, he did not answer, but launched into a confused history of the city, claiming that Plato was born here, Othello was its governor, and a mosque in the suburbs was among the holiest sites in Islam. Almost everything he said ended with the phrase, it is what it is, as if no matter how improbable the story, he could not be blamed for telling it. As we sat on the bench together, he skipped between subjects at random. The fact that he left all his artwork unfinished – it is what it is – or that his wallet was stolen twice in one week – it was what it was – and gun crime and global warming and the industrial medication of American toddlers – they were what they were, I am what I am, it is what it is.

  Mitch found the pilgrimage hard to believe, however. When I talked about walking the Troodos, he made faces and stuck out his tongue. When I described the monasteries of Kykkos and Machairas, of Mesa Potamos and Stavrovouni, he gave a frightened laugh. And, when I mentioned that I left Canterbury almost thirty-three weeks ago, he peered at his trainers to avoid my eye.

  Then, for no reason, he asked: ‘How much you know about the Templars?’

  The Templar connection with Cyprus ended in 1571, when the island was seized by the Ottoman Empire and the order’s archives were destroyed. This preserved their unsavoury reputation better than any rumour, because it made allegations against the knights much harder to disprove. To a suspicious mind absence is a form of evidence.

  However, it was not until the eighteenth century that Templar legends were reworked into contemporary conspiracies.

  During the Enlightenment the number of members’ clubs, professional guilds and scholarly societies grew rapidly. A few of these organizations operated in secret, most notably the Masonic lodges founded across Britain, America and continental Europe. In German-speaking countries the lodges were popular with the nobility, who expanded the ritual element of their meetings with ceremonies based on Templar traditions. The more eccentric even claimed an unbroken lineage with the order’s better-known knights.

  Other fraternities started to imitate this chivalric play-acting. For example, the Bavarian Illuminati borrowed elements of Freemasonry’s ritual flummery, but recruited from the professional classes. When the Bavarian government tried to shut the organization down in 1784, and again in 1785, its membership of judges, politicians and civil servants caused a scandal.
The magicians had infiltrated the establishment.

  You might expect Enlightenment thinkers to pardon medieval heretics. Voltaire called the trial of the Templars one of many ‘conspiracies against the people’ performed by persecuting governments, comparing it to Innocent III’s Albigensian Crusade. Unfortunately this sceptical response lost out to popular superstition. And, when Europe’s political order began breaking apart, the idea that the knights had survived in secret became a subject of public fascination. Dead Templars merged with living Masons in the popular imagination, and before long a number of extravagantly named occultists were coming up with the evidence.

  The first was an Italian alchemist known as Count Cagliostro. In 1789 Cagliostro was imprisoned in Rome for his membership of the Masons. Under interrogation he confessed that the organization was working to destroy the Catholic Church and the royal houses of Europe. Why? To avenge the death of the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Unlikely though this sounds, the French Revolution was under way and Roman authorities were easily convinced. Next was Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, a lawyer, essayist, chemist and – according to some sources – the illegitimate son of the French king. In 1796 he published The Tomb of Jacques de Molay, which argued that Templar knights were the founders of Freemasonry and still commanded a network of secret societies responsible for the execution of Louis XVI and the Reign of Terror. Finally, in the year 1818, the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall wrote The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed. The book not only connected Templar practices with the pagan religions of Antiquity – that bearded head was in fact a Gnostic idol – but also linked the order to medieval sects like the Cathars and Assassins, as well as modern fraternities like the Masons and the Illuminati. And it wove them all together into a web of anarchist plotters responsible for Europe’s recent unrest.

  Here, then, was the blueprint for the modern conspiracy theory.

  The book’s evidence was pretty flimsy. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall attempted to involve the Templars with the quest for the Holy Grail – another Gnostic idol – yet his case relied on little more than coincidence. He noted that King Arthur’s round table contained the ‘Templar number’ of twelve knights and that the thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival featured grail guardians known as Templeisen. What gave the book weight, however, was its use of coins, medals and measurements as archaeological evidence. It was even written in Latin for added authority.

  This sham methodology, combined with the Hammer Horror title, influenced an entire industry of pseudohistory. Since its publication The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed has been imitated by bestselling novelists, far-right fantasists and the fretful ranks of online conspiracists.

  Mitch collected these theories. While we sat opposite the church that evening, he listed his favourites. What if refugee knights rescued Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn? Or what if Templar builders helped carve the rock churches of Lalibela? And what about the order’s missing fleet? Perhaps soldier-sailors fled across the Atlantic and constructed a lighthouse on Rhode Island. Sounds unlikely? Hey, it is what it is.

  ‘Or maybe they escaped through the Alps and helped found Switzerland.’ Mitch chortled. ‘Take a look at the Swiss flag – not much of a disguise.’ He chuckled. ‘And who else you think set up those banks?’ He giggled and gaped. ‘I’m telling you, it was the Templars.’

  I left the bench to hysterics.

  Bunting surrounded the Church of St Lazarus, miniature flags of Cyprus and Greece netting the night sky. A full-sized flag of Byzantium hung limp in one corner, its folded fabric a sallow shade of gold. The church was lit the same colour, each limestone block a sickly yellow.

  By now it was past eight, but the door was wide open, with steps leading into clotted darkness. Standing by the door I could make out the Classical gallery at the back of the church and the Baroque iconostasis at the front. A chandelier hung heavy from the roof, its lamps casting no colour. Signs for the tomb of St Lazarus pointed me downstairs.

  I was expecting a Gothic catacomb, but instead found a cramped little cellar. Strip lights made everything look ugly: the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, the cement slabs on the floor, the marble coffins in the centre of the room and the bottles of bleach by the wall. The lid on one coffin was cracked three quarters of the way up, its contents on show.

  Lazarus came to Cyprus after being raised by Christ. He spent thirty years preaching the Gospel here, and according to legend he smiled only once in that entire time. I briefly hoped to see a frowning skull inside the coffin, but it was empty, of course. The saint’s remains were taken to Constantinople at the end of the ninth century, moved to France at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and then lost to history. Or perhaps they were taken to Russia in the sixteenth century and hidden in a monastery on the Estonian border. Or perhaps buried under the church all along and finally unearthed in the year 1972. Unless, that is, Lazarus never visited Cyprus, but travelled to Marseille on a ship with no sails and ended up beneath the altar of Autun Cathedral. To a suspicious mind absence is a form of evidence.

  Conspiracy theories turn disorder into pattern. After the French Revolution the possibility of a secret society directing events proved reassuring to some. It meant an aristocratic elite with clear – if melodramatic – aims was still in control. Brute chaos is what truly terrifies, which is why we prefer a gloved hand to pull the strings of history than admit we are playthings of the storm. Maybe faith is born from a similar fear – of a world made meaningless by chance. And maybe I was walking to print my life with a pattern of its own.

  Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was once a respected poet whose translation of Hafez inspired Goethe’s collection of lyric poems, West-östlicher Divan. By seeking signs of primitive religious practices in Christian worship, he anticipated the work of writers such as James Frazer, Northrop Frye and Claude Lévi-Strauss. To him the dead were not lost but simply waiting to be raised, and this was easier for me to understand now, because since coming to Cyprus I had seen landscapes haunted with gods and rituals make ghosts of men.

  The religion I encountered on Cyprus had seemed ancient too – deep and lasting like the landscape. Hiking between the Troodos monasteries it felt as if I was outside time, and in the Church of St Lazarus I began to wonder if faith could free us from history, bearing its burden, consoling its losses. In the same way that religion rewrites a life, teaching that death is never the end, the pilgrimage had restored my past, suggesting that these memories need not tend towards tragedy, that this history might yet be redeemed.

  The marble coffin was cold to touch. There was nothing inside except for a grainy residue and the chemical stink of cleaning products. Where have ye laid him? Standing in the crypt, I thought back to a February afternoon and a sanctuary beneath the street. This sickness is not unto death. I remembered a bowl of clementines, an open tin of tea, and a ceiling made silver with angels. He that was dead came forth. And I longed to turn the broken pieces of the past into a story.

  PART FIVE

  From Cyprus I took a boat back to Turkey and another boat to Lebanon. The second boat was delayed by a day with no reason given. However, on the night we were meant to sail a Damascus suburb called Ghouta was hit by government airstrikes. The attack used sarin gas, killing some fifteen hundred people. Chemical weapons were one of President Obama’s red lines, and soon the whole region was waiting to see if America would intervene. Although our boat was cancelled hours before the attack, every passenger blamed Assad for the delay. And the threat of war shadowed my time in Lebanon.

  The following evening we were away. Next morning I woke as the ferry washed into Tripoli Harbour, passing metal cranes, concrete wharves and coloured storage tanks stacked like Lego bricks. The taxi drivers at the ferry port warned me about travelling on foot, miming slit throats and sudden explosions. As did the bus drivers in Al-Tell Square, who claimed that northern Lebanon was too dangerous for hiking. Otherwise I met nobody, but wandered anxiou
s round the glossy glass offices of El Mina and the narrow alleyways of the Old City. The apartments by the riverbank were hung with black flags, and the stall owners in the souk – a cramped complex of granite columns and vaulted roofs – avoided my eyes.

  I pushed on, into the hills, and two hours later I was knocking at the door of Balamand Monastery.

  The monastery stood on a shelf of rock three hundred metres above Tripoli. It was white on the outside, white on the inside, with walls of dressed limestone and bare plaster. Founded by crusaders, built by Cistercians, since the seventeenth century it had belonged to the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

  Fr Paul was there to welcome me. He was in his seventies, grey-haired and spare. Each time he spoke his chin twitched, his knees dipped, and his arms jogged in circles. As I described my journey so far – making apologies for the patchwork route I had followed across the region – he slapped his cheeks with surprise.

  Before coming to Balamand Fr Paul had spent time at St Andrew’s Skete on Mt Athos and Stavrovouni Monastery in the Troodos Mountains. When I asked how he ended up in Lebanon, he said, ‘Monks are the nerves of the Church. If a body has no nerves, it’s paralysed.’

  Fr Paul led me into the main courtyard. The cloistered square looked familiar from dozens of monasteries, yet what struck me most was the sense of sanctuary, for we were high above the city here, and fortified from the world outside. A terrace bordered the upper storey, with a row of cells on the left. They had narrow doors, narrow beds, and windows no bigger than cat flaps. There were eight in total, and all except one were occupied, their floors a mess of branded sports bags with plastic logos peeling loose.

  ‘The Syrians are here to stay,’ said Fr Paul. ‘So no room for guests. Understand?’

  I did not understand. But that evening I met the bishop and realized who I was sharing with.