Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online

resurgence by the strand of the Peneios, where a massive blue-grey outcrop rose like a basking whale. An eagle, soon followed by his consort, floated languidly round the pedestal of St. Barlaam, their motionless feathers almost touching the precipice. The midday sun struck their still wings and stretched their long perpendicular shadows down the rock face. I repeated Bessarion’s words about the trajectory of the Meteorite. Sister Kyriaki was astonished. “Just fancy,” she said, crossing herself in wonder, “on the back of an eagle!”

    â€œWell, he was a saint,” the abbess said, threading a needle with authority. “How should he travel?”
    To a stranger accustomed to the discipline and the quiet activity of the monasteries of the Catholic Church (those rigours destined to organize monastic life so that its central purpose may be fulfilled in greater peace and silence), much in the monachism of the East, and especially in these reduced communities on the Meteora, seems haphazard and improvised. When one remembers that scarcely a dozen monks now inhabit a region which was once the home of many hundreds, it will become more understandable. Foreign travellers observed the symptoms of decay a hundred years ago. [9] Now, even in the inhabited monasteries, all that remains is a handful, perhaps only a couple, of monks, one or two peasants devoted to the service of the monasteries, and a tiny floating population of shepherds. The best impression of Orthodox monasticism as it must have been in its apogee (though even here the symptoms of decline are not lacking) must certainly be sought in the great monasteries on the slopes of Athos and from the dwellers in the solitary hermitages, approachable only by rowing boat and rope-ladder, excavated in the face of the mountain high above the Aegean waves.
    The monastery of St. Stephen is the most accessible of the Meteora, and for this reason it may have been the first of the great rocks to harbour an ascetic, a twelfth-century hermit calledJeremiah. Though it is one of the highest, only a little draw-bridge separates its ivy-mantled walls from the bulk of the mountain. A climbing cobbled pathway led us obliquely from the entrance under a dark vault into the courtyard. The place, except for the youngish monk who had answered our tugs on the bell-wire, seemed deserted. The cobblestones, the wooden galleries and the fig tree with its fading leaves were drowned in sunlit sleep and only towards the evening did we explore the buildings. The late eighteenth-century church of St. Charalambos appeared strangely naked and blank after the jostling frescoes to which we had grown accustomed. There was nothing there except the fine Epirote woodwork of the iconostasis and the throne, where censer-swinging mannikins and cranes with vipers caught in their bills could be singled out from the hewn foliage. The church is the guardian of the head of St. Charalambos, an inch of whose pate is visible through the silver-work of a reliquary. This resembles, in craftsmanship, the casket in which the monks of the Transfiguration preserve fragments of the True Cross, the Sponge and the Winding-Sheet. The Meteora are rich in relics, vestments, mitres and jewelled crosiers and also in manuscripts and chysobuls and codices, many of them of great beauty. I remember studying with wonder the detail of their illuminations before the war. Most of them remained hidden for a long time in their war-time caches; some are in the National Library. [10]
    The old church of St. Stephen, after the white-washed planes of St. Charalambos, seemed immensely old: a dark, low basilican chamber of which the walls were once entirely covered with ochreous and smoky paintings. Wall inscriptions speak of an early monastic benefactor, Mitrophanes, and of a late restorerliving in the early sixteenth century, called John of Kastraki. The church must have been built in the fourteenth century, successor to the