The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The way from Karakallou to Lavra is one of the longest journeys in the peninsula. There are no intervening monasteries, owing to the rocky coast, and the great snow-capped mass of Athos is overhead and shining in the sun all the way. The road climbs up and down again over cliffs and headlands, and sinks into bays, combes, leafy valleys and dark gorges down which mountain streams dash, some of them so deep and narrow that one wonders if the sun ever gets there. I walked all day in the bright sun, only passing two people, a woodman with a laden ass, and the other a monk on his way to Iviron on a little horse. When I asked them the time, I got incomprehensible answers, as on the Holy Mountain old Byzantine time, which has died out everywhere else, is still in use; the monk told me it was nine o’clock, although it was mid-afternoon: the sun sets at twelve, apparently; one gets used to it in a few days.

  I came across a saddled horse wistfully cropping the leaves of a low bush, quite by himself, and on seeing me he trotted off down the path, looking back over his shoulder. There was nobody in sight. I don’t know what he could be doing there, but for several miles, despite my efforts to get him to stop and return, he trotted on a few feet in front, breaking into a nervous gallop when I tried to catch his bridle. In the end, I managed to outwit him by cutting off a descending serpentine corner so that thinking me behind him, he suddenly saw me in front. He turned about and started back the way he had come, sped by a whack on the hindquarters.

  The birdsong was glorious, as it is forbidden to kill wild animals on the peninsula, and they all roam free over the mountain. I saw a hawk hovering up in the sunny haze overhead, and a large eagle too, sailing on outspread wings round the peak of Athos. A couple of white-sailed fishing boats sped over the sparkling waves now so far below.

  The path seemed endless. It had degenerated into a rocky track made of a blood-red, earthy stone, coated with bright green moss and shaded by the smooth leaves of rhododendron and ilex. At last towards sunset, the grey walls of the Lavra appeared above the trees, perched above a spiky, surf-fringed bay. It is the oldest of the monasteries of Mount Athos, and the chief one, and as I drew near, its crumbling and venerable walls, its ramshackle tiles and its peeling frescoes seemed to speak of the dawn of Christianity: a hallowed place perched between the white crag and the stormy sea, like an eagle’s nest.

  One of the fathers came out and took my rucksack and coat, and soon I was sitting before a fire in my room. I went for a walk around the courtyard, where the monks, their hair coiled up under their cylinder hats, and their hands hidden in their flowing sleeves, had come out for a breath of air before the sun set. They nodded gravely and said good evening as I passed. Poised near the tip of this wild peninsula, and only approachable by the rockiest and most difficult of paths, the Lavra has an air of utter remoteness, and a stronger feel of age-old survival than any of the other foundations.

  A young brother brought me supper, and said that the roads from here are quite impassable owing to snow, and that there is great danger from the wolves: he said the word – ‘λύκοι’ – several times, his eyes popping out of his head, baring his teeth, and making rapacious passes with his hands, and appeared delighted at my comprehension. He took great trouble for my comfort, piling logs high in the stove, and asking me if there was anything I wanted, before saying goodnight. It is very moving to see the solicitude of the monks towards their guests.

  My growing proficiency in Greek, day by day, is an added delight. I have written enough for today, and I can scarcely keep my eyes open, after my long march, so I’ll go to bed.

  6th February, Megisti Lavra

  I woke very late. When I asked if I could see the library, they told me to wait a couple of hours, as the librarian had been to Karyai for a few days, and was expected back that morning. It was a lovely day. One of the monks told me that a Rumanian monastery or skete was only three quarters of an hour from the Lavra, so I walked over the wooded hillside and soon came to the monastery, where a porter greeted me in Greek with ‘Καλημέρα σας κύριε’ and was taken aback and delighted when I gave him ‘Bûnä dimineaţa, Domnule’ and broke into Rumanian. Then he started chattering away in Rumanian. He led me upstairs, and produced a few of the brethren, who were very pleased with my few words of their language, and questioned me exhaustively about my wandering in Rumania. There were two of them from the part of Transylvania I know – or rather the Banat – one from Temesvár,[15] the other from Turnu Severin, and they all asked me what Rumania was like. None of them had been there since many years before the war, and they remembered only the twin states of Moldavia and Wallachia, recently elevated to a kingdom, and would be surprised at the enormously expanded country it is now, with the annexations of Transylvania’s Banat, Bukovina, Bessarabia and the Dobrudja. They were very friendly and hospitable, with quick Rumanian faces, and eyes that missed nothing, and very different from those Russians I saw the other day. They have a great charm.

  I enquired after a young monk from Lugoj, whom the grocer’s son near Orșova had spoken of as a friend, but nobody seemed to have heard of him. It was great fun talking Rumanian again. I like the language, and wish I knew it better. I’m soon out of my depth, but I can fake it up a bit.

  I ran most of the way back, as it was downhill and it is great fun jumping from stone to stone, with one’s heart in one’s mouth. I discovered it was quite late; I was just in time for vespers, and I abandoned the idea of leaving Lavra today. The singing was very fine, and the singers seemed to rock themselves rhythmically in their stalls, leaning on their elbows, in perfect time. How they sing it all so accurately is a wonder, as the tunes sound extraordinarily elaborate and irregular, and if they didn’t sometimes sing it all together in perfect unison, one might take it for improvisation. The notation in their prayer books is quite extraordinary, looking rather like Arabic, with squiggles and curls above the text, and quite unlike any other score. The musical line returns continually to a single deep backbone note, ascending and descending elaborations, and amazing half-tones, in unaccompanied voices. It makes an effective and rather unsettling impression at first. The ceremony is already becoming familiar and I am beginning to know at which points the candelabras will be lowered from their obscurity to be lighted or extinguished, when the officiating priest will cense the community, and when the monks will begin to leave their stalls for their long ceremony of prostrations, ikon-kissing, and multiple signs of the cross, before going out.

  The library, like the monastery itself, is the largest and oldest on the Holy Mountain. It is in a little building by itself, and full of manuscripts of great interest. One, of the fourth century, is the chief treasure of Mount Athos, and written in the same century as the Codex Sinaiticus. The cloth of gold and embroidered vestments are numberless, and there are whole cases full of archiepiscopal staves, topped with a cross and two intertwining serpents; whole rows, too, of abbots’ mitres, glorious gold and jewelled headdresses, in shape something like an imperial crown or the high priest’s hat of bible illustration. The man who showed me them was rather a character, with bright, sparkling eyes and knowing a word or two of English. He proudly showed me a card, with a picture of the codex, from Sir Arthur Hill, director of the Botanical Gardens at Kew.

  Brother Paul accompanied us round, and invited me to tea, when it was through. He had been a doctor, born at Trebizond, and fled Turkey under Atatürk. He inveighed feelingly against the Young Turks[16] and their treatment of the Armenians, as well as of the Greeks. He was rather a surprising, cultivated man, very oriental, with olive skin and hooked nose, soft eyes, a long silky beard and a deeply stooping back. He seemed abstracted from worldly things, however, and spent his time writing an enormous journal, thirty or forty pages a day; he had kept it up for five years; he pointed to row on row of uniform and neatly written volumes, all carefully numbered and catalogued, the pages already in five figures. He told me he would leave them to the monastery, as it was a review of the times as well as a minute record of his own life. His
firmest ideal was the reunion of all Christians into a single Church, and a great deal of his work was devoted to it. He spoke in a very soft voice, as if he wasn’t quite aware of my presence, and might almost have been talking to himself, as he pottered among his papers. His walls were covered with replicas of old ikons and manuscripts and prints of the monastery, all traced neatly and accurately. He rather surprised me, when I left, by giving me a long rosary of glass beads. I will always remember him, in that odd, untidy room overlooking the rocky Aegean coast.

  I sat all evening in the little shelter outside the monastery gates, watching the sun set over the waves, and breathing the mountain and sea air. The young monk who is looking after me brought me, to my amazement, a plate of limpets for supper. Apparently they are a usual dish here. They tasted like nothing on earth, and I had to eat them, to save his feelings, as he stood and chatted while I swallowed them. He is so kind and thoughtful that I should hate to offend him. Afterwards, I spent the whole evening with Byron in front of the fire. Then bedtime. Outside my door is a gallery overlooking the courtyard, its chapels and rambling cloisters, walls and balconies interspersed with yew and cypress trees. I’ll just walk round and smoke a cigarette before sleeping.

  7th February

  I was woken this morning by my friend, one of the two laymen I drank so deep with at Iviron. He is an amusing type, a great cynic, and speaks excellent French: he asked me where I had been since our last meeting, and hearing that I was setting out that day for St Paul’s monastery, he invited me to accompany him by boat, as he was sailing to Daphni. He is an amusing chap, and we laughed a good deal together. As soon as I was dressed, we set out down the hill, to his little dwelling by the pirates’ watchtower. Our lunch, in his little house among the rocks by the tiny harbour, was very snug and civilized, with a blazing fire, armchairs, and a gramophone. We had an excellent meal, served by a servant who does everything for him. His name is Vrettas, and he is a sort of general trader for the monasteries in wheat and other supplies.

  The boat was a little wooden one, sailed by a heavily bearded skipper, and when we were out of the bay it began to pitch like a leaf in a mill race.

  The scenery we passed was amazing for its wild masses of jagged rocks, round which the waves thrashed themselves into white foam. These rugged, grey and red cliffs are much higher than elsewhere in the peninsula and as we rounded the cape the most astonishing hermitages came into view, each perched on a perilous ledge of rock, looking scarcely big enough for a bird’s nest. They are the wildest, remotest and saddest-looking dwellings I’ve ever seen, and the thought that people spend their whole lives in them baffles me. There are not even paths leading up to them, only rungs and pegs driven ladder-like into the rock, and food is sent up to them every week or so, in baskets on the end of ropes. Each of these little eyries appeared more fantastic than the last, some at an enormous height on the mountainsides and overlooking sheer and jagged chasms.

  Rounding the cape into the Sithonian Gulf, I decided to sleep at Dionisiou, not at Agios Pavlos, and when we drew near, the boat curved inland, and I jumped on to the little quay as we were about to sail past it. The road to Dionisiou winds up and up behind the monastery for some minutes, as it is built fortress-like on an overhanging crag, and its huge windowless walls, jutting battlements and machicolated tower smack of the Dark Ages.

  I passed through a tunnelled archway into the courtyard, and saw, to my consternation, that the huge ironbound doors were closed. Looking over the parapet, I saw the little boat rounding a headland, already tiny in the distance, and so I started knocking and shouting at the gate until a black-capped, bearded figure appeared at the window-slit, and popped back again. After a long time, probably involving a conference with the abbot, a light appeared through the chinks under the doors, and soon, after unbelievable clanking and shooting of bolts, a small rectangle of the wood swung back, and a monk with a lantern peered at me through it. It was scarcely big enough to get through, and when I was the other side, all was locked and barred again, and the monk, his swinging lantern casting fantastic shadows on the walls, led me up some stone stairs, and into a lamp-lit room, where several monks were seated.

  I was welcomed warmly and given a seat, and after coffee, γλυκό and raki, they told me that a special exception had been made in opening the gates after sundown, as I was a foreigner. I produced a letter of introduction; it was for one of the monks present, a jovial, heavily bearded, Friar Tuck-like monk, who spoke Rumanian, and kept the table in constant peals of laughter. He saw that everything was fixed up, and after supper, chatted awhile, then left me to my work. My window overlooks the Aegean, gleaming under a new moon, which looks very frail and slender, surrounded with fidgeting stars.

  8th February, Simonopetra

  The road from Dionisiou was the roughest and steepest I have seen yet on the Holy Mountain, going up and down like a switchback over bleak and rocky headlands, and down into green, leaf-shaded canyons. This coast faces the afternoon sun, and the cactus and prickly pear give it a tropical air.

  I came across a group of men squatting among the rocks round a little wood fire, blinking in the noonday sun like lizards. We exchanged greetings, and they made room for me. They were an odd crew, two of them elderly, silent men, with stiff black beards sprouting from beneath their cheekbones, the other two young and voluble, displaying their tattered clothes. They told me they were communists, saying that so were all the poor in Greece. One of them had a fine voice, and sang some Greek songs in one of those deep, easy, effortless voices which are such a delight to listen to. They were a nice lot, and their poverty very depressing. A little later, I fell in with a Macedonian from Strumitza, who didn’t seem quite certain whether he was a Greek or a Bulgarian. He spoke Bulgarian with a strong Macedonian accent, the first time I’ve really noticed it. A melancholy, bearded chap, he grunted and wheezed at every step, most unlike the hardy Bulgarian mountaineers I met among the Rila mountains, or the Rhodope or the Stara Planina. He soon dropped far behind.

  Descending, I could see over the roofs on to the courtyard of St Gregory’s monastery where the foreshortened monks were moving to and fro; I had a chat with some of them; they gave me a cup of tea, and seemed surprised that I was going on further that day. One rather embarrassing thing was a monk who insisted on holding my hand and pressing it affectionately. I didn’t want to seem churlish by snatching it away, so I pretended to slip on the cobbled pavement, disengaged myself, and on recovering buried my hands deep in my pockets. This is the first time I have had the slightest inkling on Mount Athos that abnormality exists, though in a permanently celibate community it is pretty likely that it must.

  The first glimpse of Simonopetra is magnificent. It is perched high up on the mountain, looking as if it grows straight from the peak beneath it, the brick blending as imperceptibly with the rock as a mermaid with her tail; it is the most unlikely-looking thing, shooting up to a dizzy height sheer above the rock in a magnificent sweep, tier after tier of wooden balconies running round the upper parts, supported above the drop of blank wall and the rugged bastions by diagonal props, seeming to spring from the wall’s face like the branches of a tree. Robert Byron compared it to the Potala of Lhasa, and he was quite right.

  The climb is a long and weary one, rocks all the way, the steep pathway twisting again and again up the mountainside till it leads under the low archway of great thickness, opening out into the uneven flagged courtyard. Vespers were not quite over when I arrived, sweating and exhausted, so I got in for the last few minutes. Many of the brothers seemed very poor, bowed with age, their monastic robes in tatters and their black caps collapsed out of all resemblance to rigid cylinders.

  As the evening softened to sunset, I stood on the wooden balcony, gazing out to sea, where the sky, sea and the promontories of Sithonia and Kassandra melted into a soft water-colour blue. The evenings on Mount Athos, with their touch of melancholy, are of an unimaginable quietness and serenity.

 
; To look down brought one’s heart into one’s mouth. There was a drop for several hundred feet on to the jagged rocks and boulders; the tops of trees showed underneath too, and a little stream, white with foam and dashing among the rocks, seemed – optically delayed by the distance – to move sluggishly. I might have been looking down on it from another sphere, and I remembered Rossetti’s lines about ‘the flood of ether as a bridge . . . where this earth spins like a fretful midge’ – it was just such a feeling.

  A year ago, at this time, within the day, I was standing on the ruined keep of Dürnstein, the dungeon of Richard Coeur de Lion, looking at the rugged mountains of the Wachau, the blue sweep of the Danube far below, and the just discernible spires of Gottweig monastery in the distance. It seems a long time ago.

  Yielding to a childish impulse, I got a piece of paper from my pack, folded it into a dart, and threw it from the balcony; it soon got into a tailspin, and corkscrewed into the treetops. The second, however, floated out slowly, and began to descend in wide circles, trembling on the breeze, and sometimes seeming to stop in mid-air altogether. It was wonderful to watch it, descending the void so leisurely, down, down, down, till at last, tiny with distance, it vanished among the leaves.

  The whole monastery is hushed and asleep now, since the monks have retired early, as long before dawn the hammer striking the beam of wood, which usually replaces the church bells here, will rouse them from their beds, to shiver in their chapel stalls for an hour or two, while I am still sound asleep. Sometimes, half asleep, I hear the signal, and am never sure next day whether that, and the awareness of movement near me, were a dream or not.