Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page A

original foundation of Jeremiah. Tradition maintains that its great benefactor, Andronicus Palaeologue the Younger, stayed here a while in 1333. The monastery and church were looted by Italians who carried away the bells; German machine-gun bullets and mortar bombs, fired from the plain on the suspicion that the monastery was harbouring guerrillas, pierced the east wall of the church and destroyed nearly all the fourteenth-century frescoes, the fragments of which, with the broken woodwork, now lie about the floor in pathetic heaps of rubble. The frescoed lineaments of the founder, Antony Cantacuzene, are one of the few mural survivors of this attack. The outlines of the shadowy prince emerged by the light of a taper held in the abbot’s wavering fingers.
    The pale face and wide open eye of the abbot, in their setting of dark hair and beard and eyebrows, were full of indefinable distress. I wondered, as we followed the slight shuffle of his limp from the pretty white guest-chambers to the lamp-lit refectory, what the cause might be. Father Anthimos had been abbot for a number of years, and his kind face lit up at any word of praise for his monastery. Towards the end of supper, he told us how, during the fighting a few years before, the monastery had been attacked by a body of E.L.A.S. guerrillas; owing, perhaps, to the presence of a post of three gendarmes in the monastery. The iron gate by the bridge was first blown open with a bazooka. Then the invaders swarmed in, seizing two of the gendarmes and cutting their throats at once. The third ran across the open space outside the monastery to throw himself over the precipice, but, brought down by a rifle wound, he met the same fate as his colleagues. The abbot was stripped naked and beaten and one of his legs was smashed with a blow from a rifle butt; and his foot remains twisted at a strange angle. In other ways, this experience had plainly left lasting effectson the abbot. He covertly dabbed his eye with a napkin as he finished the story. [11] Then, with hardly a pause, he began a long account of the origin of the legend of the Evil Eye when Solomon was building the great temple of Jerusalem.
    St. Stephen is the easternmost of the Meteora, and the Thessalian plain spreads eastwards from the foot of its rock in an expanse that no eminence interrupts. Seen from the ledge of the monastery next morning, it looked unending. Its eastern limits were the haunt of the centaurs and of the Myrmidons of Achilles, and Trikkala (invisible at the end of the unwavering road and the loops of the Peneios) sent its contingent to Troy. It has always been a battlefield. Caesar defeated Pompey on its southern limits, the Byzantines marched and countermarched, the Bulgarians swamped it in a flood of Slavs, Vlachs proliferated. Not long after the first hermits settled, Bohemond defeated the Emperor Alexis Comnene here, shortly after Bohemond’s countrymen had conquered England. Franks and Teutons and Catalans imported the alien and cumbersome apparatus of Western feudalism. For over a century, it was again the scene of the wars and the jangling dynastic claims of caesars and despots and sebastocrators and krals. The Turkish advance was only halted by Bajazet’s defeat in Asia Minor by Tamburlaine; and then the Ottoman tide swept forward. The themes of Byzantium were hewn into pashaliks and vilayets and sanjaks, submerging the Greeks, except for the irredentist struggles of the armateloi and the klephts, for over five hundred years. I remember peering up at the Meteora from a Bren-carrier in our harassed retreating column in the spring of 1941, and thinking, in spite of the plunging Stukas overhead, how remote and detached they looked, and how immune. The verse I heard in St. Wandrille returns to my mind. Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum, et non accedet ad te malum ....And indeed, since the earliest anchorite,for almost a thousand years of turmoil and war and occupation, no harm came near