Roofscape at the Greatest Lavra Monastery

The imperial double-headed eagle still flies over Mount Athos. The peninsula, in northern Greece, has been a self-governing monastic republic for over a thousand years. Robert Byron described it as ‘the composite and living memorial of a great civilisation’, for timeless Mount Athos represents the last gasp of the Byzantine Empire.

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but the Holy Mountain continues to be regulated by a charter of the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. It was the Emperor Monomachos, the direct heir to Augustus and Constantine the Great, who in 1045 confirmed the legal immunity of the Holy Mountain, and famously banned all female creatures from the peninsula, along with eunuchs and beardless boys.

To the consternation of female scholars and feminists, that prohibition still applies. However, having visited Mount Athos twice I am able to confirm the presence there of hens, she-cats, young boys and, indeed, beardless monks – and that it is only one’s passport and diamonitirion (official permit) that are examined at the port of entry.

The oldest, largest and remotest of the twenty surviving monasteries on Mount Athos is the ‘Great Holy Monastery of the Greatest Lavra’. It was founded in 963 by St Athanasios of Trebizond, whose earlier career had been as a teacher in Constantinople. Athanasios had served his noviciate, in a hermitage on Bithynian Mount Olympos, with the future Emperor Nikephoros Phokas (a thwarted-monk-turned-soldier who was known to his trembling enemies as ‘the White Death of the Saracens’), through whose offices the new monastery was richly endowed, not only with lands and privileges, but also with holy relics from the imperial collection.

Athanasios’s monastery, or lavra, was the first on the Holy Mountain. The very concept of a monastery was frowned upon by the true ascetics – even today there are hermits living there in caves on the sides of cliffs, spiritual athletes who are often driven to madness by their solitude – but Athanasios had ‘found by experience that it is right and beneficial for brothers to live together’.

The Katholikon

The Greatest Lavra resembles a castle with its great battlemented walls and keep, the so-called Tower of Tzimiskes. A necessary defence against pirates, who were long a blight on the place, these enclose a complex of buildings and courtyards, covering three or four acres, and date from the time of Athanasios himself.

Lavra was the template for all the subsequent monasteries on Mount Athos and, despite the intrusion of ugly and oversized buildings from later periods, the core structures from Athanasios’s time are still intact: the mulberry-coloured katholikon or church at its heart, the trapeza or refectory opposite, and, in between, the domed phiale or fountain, still the largest on Mount Athos.

Settling in and off to Church

We found our way to the archontiriki (guest-house), which is set into the walls above the main entrance. On a broad, covered balcony, crowded with visiting monks, we were received by a courteous and efficient lay helper. We entered the required particulars, including the names of our fathers, in the register.

Our attentive host returned with raki, Turkish coffee and glasses of water. He advised us that the service at 5 would be followed by a meal in the trapeza, and that the gates of the monastery would be closed at 8. We were shown to our room, one of four large dormitories that overhung the walls, each containing about fifteen beds, but neat and clean, with large windows looking down to the sea.

The kitchen block

Lavra has a captivatingly timeless atmosphere, despite the hideous modern additions. The most egregious of these is the large helipad outside, done in red asphalt with a large letter ‘H’ in the middle. It seemed to contradict the very purpose of the monastery as a place of extreme seclusion. Perhaps the rot had already set in a thousand years ago, the early monks seeming reluctant to sever all links with the outside world: the hermits who inhabited the neighbourhood had criticised them for keeping their own boat.

The rambling kitchen block, on the other hand, seemed to be a very ancient structure, barely changed in centuries, and there were numerous dark passages, staircases and ramparts to explore.

Entrance to the Katholikon

We observed the service as best we could, propped against the stalls, from the narthex of the katholikon, for the non-Orthodox are not admitted to the body of the church. The Greek services are long and baffling with occasional dramatic interludes – the lighting and snuffing of candles, the swinging of the corona, the censing of the congregation, who otherwise play no part. Music, other than singing, is forbidden. It is important to stand when required and to maintain a respectful posture.

The Trapeza

We were unprepared for the splendour of the trapeza, into which we processed at last for supper. A huge room in the shape of a cross, it was frescoed from top to bottom by the sixteenth-century master Theophanes of Crete, with numerous depictions of the saints and of biblical episodes, including the Day of Judgement. It has a stone-flagged floor and a simple wooden ceiling, cheerfully painted.

Most remarkable are the horseshoe-shaped tables and seats, which are set in stone along the length of the room. The stone base of each has been plastered over and whitewashed. The seats have boards laid on top of them and fastened down, while great grey marble slabs serve as table tops, some with little channels at the rim. Here, as was customary, we ate in silence, while some improving text was read to us from the far end of the room.

The entrance to the Trapeza, from the Phiale

The food was delicious – a thick reddish broth, filled with rice, of indeterminate flavour (perhaps red cabbage), with Coquilles de St Jacques, boiled eggs painted red for Easter, bread, plenty of red wine and oranges. When the meal was over, we filed past a row of monks, those in charge of the kitchen, who had their heads bowed,  graciously but needlessly assuming postures of penitence for their unworthy fare.

We stole back in for a closer examination of the trapeza, and were saddened to witness the deterioration of the frescoes. According to my companion, this was caused by rising moisture, the stone-flagged floors being about three feet below the ground level outside.

I congratulated an attendant (a Romanian who spoke good English) on the excellent supper, and asked for the ingredients. He would not, or could not tell me, and laughed at my suggestion that the recipe was perhaps a secret.

A grumpy monk, and a kindly one

A few minutes later we were waved back into church for a further service. We assumed our usual positions in the narthex, but discovered that much of the proceedings was to be conducted from thence – an intoning by half a dozen monks, positioned in opposite corners, of various texts, while the rest of the congregation and monks were otherwise engaged in the body of the church, from which we were separated by a curtain.

We had noticed the desultory manner in which the offices were read, but were surprised when, soon into the service, we were engaged in conversation by an elderly monk, though to all outward appearances we were deep in contemplation or prayer.  The fellow enquired curtly, in a loud, gruff voice, whether we were German. We satisfied him that we were not. His suspicions were, nevertheless, aroused. Where we, perhaps, Roman Catholic?

I had instructed my amiable companion, an old Amplefordian, to deny his Catholicity for the sake of a quiet life. (The Pope and all his cohorts have never been forgiven for the sack of Constantinople in 1204.) For about the fifth time in three days, Hamish dutifully declared himself an Anglican.

The surly fellow had been a monk of Lavra for twenty years. He explained that he had known England well, from visits to his sisters in Barry, near Cardiff. Did we know Barry? Hamish claimed, most unconvincingly, to have ‘driven through it’.

He then asked us what we did. ‘I am a writer,’ I said.

‘What do you write?’

‘History.’

‘Why do you bother?’ he said. ‘All history has been written.’

‘There are always new ways of looking at things,’ I stammered.

‘But the past is απολυτος,’ he said. ‘Fixed, unchangeable.’ I reflected wistfully on my  modest corpus of work, even of Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture, my tragi-comic account of a typical English town, seminal in its way. Yet worse was in store for Hamish.

‘I am an I.T. consultant,’ he announced. ‘To do with computers,’ he added, helpfully.

‘Aagh!’ said our friend, with an expression of disgust. ‘The computer is the μηχανισμος του Σατανου – machinery of Satan.’ Before Hamish could defend himself, the gruff monk, fully confirmed in his belief that we were incorrigible heretics, had walked away.

At the end of the service, the other congregants pressed forward for the purpose of examining the holy relics. A younger, more kindly monk encouraged us to join them. We took the opportunity to examine the frescoes, which are also attributed to Theophanes. Those in the narthex, of which we had had our fill, were inferior nineteenth-century work.

The kindly monk knew all about the buildings and their history. He pointed out the portraits of Nikephoros Phokas and of his nephew John Tzimiskes, who murdered him and took his throne. The two men seem to glare at each other across the doorway. The defensive Tower, named after the Emperor Tzimiskes, can only be entered through the monks’ own quarters. It contains four floors, but is not used. We learnt that the sakkos (embroidered vestment) and crown of Nikephoros Phokas, which I was most curious to see, could not be viewed as they were locked away, with all the other contents of the library. A new library is being built to house them. The noise and clutter of the construction work were all around us.

The kindly monk showed us Athanasios’s tomb in a side chapel. I asked why Athanasios’s death in this very building, from falling masonry, was not thought to be a sign of divine displeasure. He explained that Athanasios had evidently been ready for his reception into Heaven, having dressed appropriately for the occasion. The saint’s body was miraculously preserved and was partly visible in its silver casing. We were shown the iron rod, propped against the adjacent wall, with which the saint had performed one of his miracles, smashing open a rock so that it flowed with water.

The kindly monk had to hurry away, but we were grateful indeed that he had been so generous with his time.

The new library

We took a closer look at the construction work. With its concrete frame, basement and lift shaft, the new library looked like being another unnecessary modern intrusion.

Was it really worth the disruption and expense? Could they not have renovated an existing building? The monastery possesses an invaluable collection of charters, but these have been comprehensively edited and published by Madame Rouillard and her collaborators in their Actes de Lavra. Though it would have greatly gratified my curiosity to have had a sight of the originals, I had no pressing need to do so, and wondered how many scholars could be expected to make use of such a library at any one time. Even Madame Rouillard (a proscribed woman) had relied on photographs that were taken in 1918.

Besides, entry to Athonite libraries is hardly encouraged. In the seven monasteries on the peninsula that I have visited, I have only ever been admitted to one library, that at Gregoriou, which was represented to me as an exceptional privilege.

Back at the Archontiriki

The Guests' common room

The monastery proclaims its deep conservatism in the Guests’ Common Room. The room is stark and dimly lit, with a central chandelier, but the walls are crowded with pictures. A series of crude, colourful prints commemorates the heroes of the War of Independence. There are group photographs of the monks, with their lay servants and attendant evzones, dating from the 1920s and 30s; a couple of oil paintings of sailing ships apparently floundering off the peninsula; and, arrestingly, a set of portraits of the former kings of Greece, including the last, a young Constantine in black and white. Asked what his countrymen might make of that, a fellow pilgrim, a Greek, thought that they would be ‘disappointed’.

We retreated at last to our dormitory, where most of our room-mates were already preparing for, or in bed. I had a cold shower in the bathroom downstairs, but am British, so that was all right. We had a disturbed night, as one of the Russian pilgrims snored incessantly like a walrus, reducing us at first to giggles. I awoke to the put-put of a motor-scooter being started up, but this turned out to be our snoring friend. We arose early and caught the seven o’clock bus back to Karyes.

Breakfast at Karyes

See also http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/byzantine-genealogy/nikephoros-phokas-white-death-of-the-saracens-the-siege-of-chandax-and-the-foundation-of-the-greatest-lavra-on-mount-athos/.

H.M.S Edgar (in which Charles Dent was the First Lieutenant) with the R.Y.S. Eva in Corfu Roads, the Island of Vido and the mountains of San Salvador in the background, by Forster

‘If I wrote a book about Corcyra it would not be a history but a poem.’ That is the promise that Lawrence Durrell fulfils in his beautiful Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu. First published in 1945, the book is one of the fruits of his Alexandrian exile during World War II.

Among the curiosities of the island, Durrell mentions ‘the remains of a Venetian aristocracy living in overgrown baronial mansions, buried deep in the country and surrounded by cypresses’. More curious still is Corfu’s relationship with the British, who ruled the Ionian Islands, of which it is part, for fifty years from 1814 to 1864, when they were ceded to Greece. Britain’s legacy to ‘Corcyra’ today includes, apart from some ‘nostalgic love and admiration’ (notwithstanding their resentment of them at the time), an addiction to cricket – ‘a mysterious and satisfying ritual which the islanders have refused to relinquish’ – and to ginger beer.

A blending between the decaying aristocracy of the island and its ‘bluff rulers’ – Durrell quotes Viscount Kirkwall’s description of them as exasperatingly self-satisfied with their paper-chases and tea-parties – occurred in my own family. Admiral Charles Bayley Calmady Dent, born at Plymouth in 1832, was my grandfather’s great-uncle. My grandfather was brought up by Charles’s sister. Steeped him in naval lore (the Dents had been serving continuously since the late 1600s), my grandfather himself embarked on a naval career at the age of only thirteen.

H.M.S. Valorous in 1851. Charles Dent served in her in the Baltic campaign during the war with Russia

Charles Dent’s period of service had been full of incident. The youthful First Lieutenant of H.M.S. Valorous during the war with Russia (the so-called ‘Crimean War’), he had been posted not to the Black Sea but to the Baltic, and had led a raid on the port of Uleaborg on the Gulf of Bothnia, destroying its stores and installations. The citizens of Uleaborg had already abandoned the town, leaving a ‘large number of spirit-stores open’, but Charles’s marines had maintained their discipline, despite the ‘great trials and temptations’ to which they were exposed, not to mention ‘the almost uninterrupted sleet’.

Transferring to H.M.S. Gorgon, which, like Valorous, was a paddle-steamer, Charles saw further action in the Baltic, in September 1855. In command of a detachment consisting of the pinnace, the cutter and a gig from Gorgon, together with forty of her crew, he was sent ‘to examine the Siela Sound, entrance [to the] Gulf of Riga, with directions to take possession of a small islet in that quarter; a position for stopping the trade passing in or out, as also forming a good shelter for the boats’.

In a period of five days, Charles succeeded in capturing ‘nine small vessels’ with their cargoes, and was able to report that ‘no vessel had escaped the line referred to, although the weather was rather unfavourable for boating operations’. These were actions almost worthy of Charles’s father, Rear-Admiral Charles Calmady Dent, a naval officer of the heroic age, who had assisted in assaults on Possitano and other Italian ports in the Napoleonic War, at the capture of Port d’Anzo (where there was heavy loss of life) and, later, in the boarding of a pirate vessel in the Persian Gulf, in which a misplaced thrust in the head from a boarding-pike is said to have ‘half-killed’ him.

The ‘heroic age’ was further recalled when Charles, by now a Commander, was appointed, on 11 July 1862, to the two-decker battleship H.M.S. Edgar, again as First Lieutenant. This was a time when ‘the transition from sails to steam was being gradually accomplished’. The Channel Squadron, of which she was part, consisted of ‘a mixture of wooden ships and ironclads: most of the former could not steam, none of the latter could sail. Nevertheless the Admiralty, who always have an eye to economy, decreed that, as the ships had masts and yards, they must sail.’ In the midst of all the advances in technology for which that era is famous, H.M.S. Edgar was a steamship, yet wooden-hulled and fully masted, looking exactly like something from Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar, nearly sixty years before.

It was during a cruise of the Mediterranean in the summer of 1862 that Charles sailed in the Edgar into Corfu Harbour, to a fateful meeting with his future wife, Corinna Kourkoumelles. Born on Corfu on 21 November 1840, she was the eldest of the three daughters of Sir Demetrios Kourkoumelles, K.C.M.G., an Advocate, who served as Regent of the British Military Protectorate of Corfu from 1862 until the end of British rule in 1864, after which he became a Member of the Hellenic Parliament.

Sir Demetrios’s picturesque family seat at Afra (‘Breeze’), in the centre of the island, had been built in the 18th century in the Venetian style, above the cloisters of a deserted monastery – the family having migrated to the island from Kephalonia in the about 1750. The house at Afra is, or was until recently, still in the possession of the family (and occasionally visited by Corinnas’s descendants), but may be the old mansion there that is currently being offered for sale – http://rrcorfurealestate.com/pages/en/sales.php?prod=291&cat=5. It is just the sort of ‘overgrown baronial mansion, buried deep in the countryside and surrounded by cypresses’, to which Durrell refers.

Ioannes Kapodistrias, the Corfiot who was Greece's first President - the great-uncle of Corinna Kourkoumelles

The family had impeccable Corfiot connections. Corinna’s mother was Elisa, daughter of Nicolo Rodostamo, member of the Ionian Parliament, by his wife Maria, daughter of Count Antonio-Maria Kapodistrias, Doctor of Laws at Pavia, Member of the Grand Council of Corfu, Senator, and sometime Ambassador to the Sultan and the Tsar. Antonio-Maria was the brother of Ioannes Kapodistrias, undoubtedly Corfu’s most famous son – Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Tsar’s service (1816-22), and first President of Greece between 1827 and 1831 (when he was assassinated).

Charles and Corinna’s wedding took place in London, at Kensington Parish Church, on 6 August 1863 – the Edgar’s First Lieutenant was able to absent himself from a summer cruise around the British Isles. His address was given as 1 Norwood Place, and that of his bride as 40 St James’s Place. The then master of the Edgar was no doubt present – the future Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, a grand Victorian figure (and a connection by marriage), who was to be celebrated, at the end of a long naval career, for never having fired a shot in anger.

Corinna’s family clearly did not share the general distrust of Corfiots for the British. Her father is said to have preferred to be called ‘Sir Demetrios’ rather than ‘Count’ – the Order of St Michael and St George, to which he belonged, is nowadays doled out to diplomats and others serving overseas, but had been instituted in 1818 specifically to reward natives of the Ionian Islands and of Malta. While in England, Sir Demetrios matriculated an elaborate coat of arms at the Herald’s College which included a variant on the Dent family motto – to their Ne Cede Malis he had added Sed Contra. Corinna’s younger sister Euphrosyne was also to marry an English officer, a Major Jettars.

The newly-wed Corinna had quickly to inure herself to the prolonged absences of her husband, the Channel Squadron spending the winter of 1863-4 between Madeira, Teneriffe, Gibraltar and Lisbon. At Portland on 25 April 1864, it was to receive a visit from Garibaldi and his entourage. They were entertained to a substantial late lunch – it began at 6 p.m. – aboard the Edgar, as flagship of the commander-in-chief, Admiral Dacres.

From the middle of the following August, the headquarters of the fleet was at Portsmouth, where the ships remained until 27 March 1865, ‘when the Edgar came out of harbour under sail – the last line-of-battle ship that ever sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour’. The crew of the Edgar were no doubt unconscious at the time of their moment in history. The squadron had cruised down to Lisbon by 22 April, bearing a mission (under Lord Sefton) to invest the King of Portugal with the Order of the Garter. The ensuing festivities included a visit by the King himself to the Edgar, and a match against the Lisbon Cricket Club, in which the naval team was victorious. Perhaps Charles and others of his crew had already played a part in inculcating the Corfiots with a love of the game.

Charles never achieved a command of his own, and the Edgar was his last ship. He retired from the service on 16 December 1865, and took up a post with the London North Western Railway, as their Marine Superintendent at Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey. He was nevertheless to enjoy promotion on the superannuated list (having commuted the pay), eventually attaining the rank of Admiral in 1893. He died at Chester on 20 March 1894. Corinna died at a cottage called ‘Decoy’, near Beaulieu, on 27 January 1918.

The product of a hard school, Charles was no doubt a tough, stoical seaman and stern disciplinarian. The log-book of one of his officers in the Edgar, G.S. Rolph, was recently sold by a dealer and offers insights into the routine of life aboard in 1864: ‘Sailmakers repairing mainsail… Carpenters variously employed’; ‘Mustered by divisions. Performed Divine Service’; ‘Punished Wm. Shipper with 36 lashes as per warrant.’ ‘Fired Royal Salute.’ (http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/ship-s-log-ralph-george-s-/illustrated-manuscript-log-of-the-h-m-s-edgar/83728.aspx) Charles’s son Douglas Lionel Dent, who served in a successor to H.M.S. Edgar and also became an Admiral, was a notorious martinet, known in the service as ‘The Rogue Elephant’; a daughter, Cora, was the formidable Matron of the Royal Infirmary, Bristol, known as ‘The Acid Drop’. The men of the family were conspicuous for their height and build: one piece of family lore that has passed down to me is that Charles could contain Corinna’s tiny waist within the span of his hands.

(National Archives, ADM 196/13/Vol.I, p.257; Navy Lists; The Russian War, 1854: Baltic and Black Sea. Official Correspondence, ed. D. Bonner-Smith and A.C. Dewar (Navy Records Society, 1943), pp.64-5, 74-5, 79; The Russian War, 1855: Baltic. Official Correspondence, ed. D. Bonner-Smith (Navy Records Society, 1944), pp.320-3; Mihail Dimitri Sturdza, Grandes familles de Grèce, d’Albanie et de Constantinople: Dictionnaire généalogique (Paris, 1983), pp.251-2, 286; Rupert Willoughby, ‘The Naval Dents and their Marriages’, Genealogists’  Magazine, Vol.25, No.12 (Dec. 1997).)

In the summer of 960, the great Byzantine general Nikephoros Phokas set sail for Crete. Occupied by the Arabs since 826, the island had become a nest of pirates who were the curse of the eastern Mediterranean, paralysing its economy. Nikephoros had been campaigning for years on the eastern frontiers of the Empire. The emirs of Aleppo, Tarsus and Tripoli had all been humbled. The youthful Emperor, Romanos II, had recently appointed him ‘Domestic of the East’, commander-in-chief of the forces of Anatolia. Confident that Nikephoros would finally re-take the island, Romanos had entrusted him with an overwhelming force, consisting of 307 warships and hundreds of smaller vessels, with 77,000 oarsmen and soldiers on board.

Nikephoros swept through the island, killing a reported 40,000 Arabs, and laid siege to Chandax (modern Heraklion), their well-fortified capital. Both sides suffered terrible privations that winter, but in March 961 the Byzantines broke into the city. The Cretan emir was taken, along with the accumulated spoils of a century and a half of piracy. Nikephoros put the rest of the population to death and the city was burned to the ground. With the island restored to imperial rule, missionaries set about re-converting it to Christianity. It was the greatest Byzantine victory in centuries.

Born in 912 into one of the great military dynasties of Anatolia, Nikephoros, known to his enemies as ‘the White (or Pale) Death of the Saracens’ was personally unprepossessing, with unusually long, curly black hair and a straggly beard. He was rough-mannered and sullen, and lived a remarkably simple, ascetic life, habitually sleeping on the floor. When not covering himself in glory on the battlefield, Nikephoros spent his time in prayer or consorting with holy men. A widower, whose only son had been killed in a tragic accident, he had taken a vow of chastity and hoped one day to become a monk.

Instead, owing to Palace intrigue, Nikephoros was to be crowned Emperor in St Sophia on 16 August 963, following the death of Romanos at the age of 23. To ensure his legitimacy, he was married within the month to Theophano, Romanos’s widow, and became step-father to her sons, the co-emperors Basil and Constantine. Theophano, a publican’s daughter, was extraordinarily beautiful, but unprincipled in the pursuit of her ambitions. Romanos had been completely under her spell. Ill-matched with the dour Nikephoros, she took a lover, his nephew John Tzimiskes, who brutally murdered him on the floor where he lay in 966. He was buried secretly in the Church of the Holy Apostles. An epitaph attributed to John of Melitene was later circulated. It ends with a pun on Nikephoros’s name: ὠ πλην γυναικος τἀλλα δ’αὐ Νικηφορος (Mark Diederich Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres, Texts and Contexts, Vol.I, Vienna 2003, pp.305-16.) – which I venture to translate as ‘bringer of victory over all in turn, save a woman’.

Nikephoros believed that he was fighting a ‘holy war’ against Islam, and that those who perished in it were martyrs, although this was a view rejected by the Church. During the siege of Chandax, he had summoned his old friend, Athanasios, to provide him with spiritual support. Athanasios, a native of Trebizond, renowned for his holiness, had abandoned a successful teaching career in Constantinople to become a hermit, and had settled in 957 on Mount Athos, in northern Greece. The promontory had long been favoured by hermits, as it had no other inhabitants. Thanks to the Cretan pirates, normal life there had become impossible.

The Holy Monastery of Simonos Petras, Mount Athos

Nikephoros heaped plunder from Chandax on Athanasios, who used it to found a small monastery or lavra on the south-easternmost point of the promontory. It was the first of many monastic houses on Mount Athos, as opposed to the sketai, or loose affiliations of hermits, that had existed before. Nikephoros had originally intended to join him there. Instead, as Emperor, he re-founded Athanasios’s lavra as an imperial monastery, endowing it with generous annual grants in money and in kind and with tax-free estates in nearby Chalkidiki. He even sent three holy relics from the imperial collection, including fragments of the True Cross. Athanasios’s humble lavra was thus transformed into ‘the Greatest Lavra’ (Μονη Μεγιστης Λαυρας), with accommodation for eighty monks, despite the objections of the hermits who were disturbed by the immense scale of the construction and by the fact that the new monastery had its own boat, an unwelcome connection with the outside world.

There are surviving sketai on Mount Athos where hermits continue to subjugate the flesh and endure lives of the utmost austerity, some of them perched in caves on the edges of cliffs. I have witnessed them myself. Although I have not been to the Greatest Lavra, I have visited other Athonite monasteries and can attest to the strength of the asceticism there, which has certainly wavered over the centuries. At the monastery of Simonos Petras, for example, the monks spend most of the time at prayer in their tiny cells. These are sparsely furnished, and there are no beds. Like Nikephoros Phokas, the monks at Simonos Petras, who are close to being a spiritual elite, sleep on the hard floor. (See Simopetras, Mount Athos, E.T.B.A., Athens 1991.)

Nikephoros, to whom the twenty surviving monasteries on Mount Athos all owe a debt, left no direct descendants, but has countless blood relations in Western Europe. His sister who married Theodoros Kourkouas was the ancestress of Maria of Bulgaria, wife of Andronikos Doukas. Their daughter, Eirene, was the matriarch of the Komnenos dynasty.

Nikephoros’s brother Leon Phokas had a daughter, Sophia, who married Konstantinos Skleros, and was the mother of the famous Theophano, wife of the German Emperor Otto II.

Leon had another daughter, married to a Botaneiates, who was the great-grandmother of the Emperor Nikephoros III Botaneiates (1078-81), and of his sister who married Theodoulos Synadenos. Their daughter, Synadene, married Gesa I, King of Hungary, who died in 1077.

Through these three Byzantine women, there are innumerable well-established lines of descent to the present day.

Further to my last blog, the Nea Mone, Chios, was not quite deserted when I visited it on Thursday 10 October 1991, as I was reminded on re-reading my diary of the journey.

The previous day I had lunched with elegant Greek friends in Athens, before embarking at Piraeus on the Sappho, bound for Chios at 7 o’clock. I describe the ‘hellish atmosphere’ on board, ‘my class in one communal room with bar & food, television. Shortage of seats, which were cramped & uncomfortable. Many Turks, gipsies (one dirty boy begged from me) and soldiery. Slept badly …’

All was well on my arrival at Chios town. It had a ‘very Turkish atmosphere. Shacks built on top of the ramparts. Giustiniani Museum with a few Byzantine relics.’ On Thursday afternoon, the redoubtable Pandeles Spanos (‘the beardless’) drove me ‘up mountain to Nea Mone – sick-making hair-pin bends, a long drive to a very remote place …’ Pandeles thought we should delay our arrival till 3.45, as the monastery would surely be closed ‘for a long lunch’. He proved to be an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide. ‘A kindly old monk supervised in the church – an illiterate.’ Pandeles ‘explained that I was a writer of Byzantine history, about which he was unfortunately ignorant. Later another, younger monk appeared, & an elderly nun, who gave me Turkish Delight & a cup of water. She had seemed charmed when I doffed my hat to her & also when I said the sweet was “nostimo” – delicious.’

We ‘went on to Anavatos, a desolate, haunted place, inhospitable enough even when inhabited’.

It is strange that my strongest memory of this day should be of seeing the Emperor Monomachos’s prayer book, and that, of all details, I should have omitted to mention this in my diary.

Michael I Keroularios was appointed the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1043, during the reign of the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. He is a great figure in the history of the Orthodox Church.

The Emperor Monomachos was keen to ally himself with the Papacy against the Normans, who had overrun his possessions in southern Italy. Unfortunately, the reformed church in the West was now insisting (unhistorically) on the effective primacy of the Pope of Rome, and his entitlement to enforce religious discipline and conformity over the whole of Christendom.

Among other differences, the Westerners fasted on the Sabbath, ate strangled meat and, above all, used unleavened bread, or ‘azymes’, in the Sacrament. These customs accorded with Judaical law, but not with the tradition of the early church, which considered itself to be under a new dispensation. The reformed Papacy was nevertheless determined to impose discipline and ‘correct’ practice throughout Christendom. Keroularios rightly suspected that the alliance would come at a heavy price, and was having none of it.

In 1054, he had an ill-tempered encounter with a distinguished papal delegation, which accused him of disobedience towards the Pope. Keroularios deliberately took no notice of them. As a result, the exasperated legates handed the disdainful Patriarch a bull of excommunication in the middle of a service in Hagia Sophia. Having stormed out of the cathedral, they theatrically shook the dust from their feet. Keroularios responded to this insult in kind, with the full support of the city, and the legates were obliged for their safety to hurry home.

Each side had been careful to direct its excommunications at a small number of individuals; and to represent the affair as marking the final schism between the two churches is a fallacy. It was, however, a landmark in the process of estrangement, when each side was fully and disturbingly exposed to the prejudices and claims of the other.

For the proud Byzantines, it was bad enough to be lectured by ‘heretics’ (the Westerners had tampered with the Nicene Creed by inserting the word ‘Filioque’). It was worse still when they were ‘barbarians’. The legates had addressed a wildly inaccurate tirade against Keroularios, who, in a lofty reply, described them as ‘men who had burst from the evening shadows of the West’ and ‘attacked like some wild boar’. Constantinople, he wrote, was ‘God’s protected city, whence the springs of orthodoxy, the pure waters of the true faith, will flow like streams from a mountain peak to water all corners of the Earth and quench the souls of all men with the divine teachings’. (See Will ed., Acta et Scripta de Controversiis Ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae; Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism.)

Keroularios was not happy when, after the death of Monomachos in 1055, his sister-in-law, the porphyrogennete (‘purple-born’) Empress Theodora, sought to reign alone. Once friendly, she now ‘abominated the man, refusing even to meet him. There was a reason for this: the Patriarch was vexed because the Roman Empire was being governed by a woman. Characteristically he was filled with wrath at this state of affairs, and he spoke his mind freely.’ (Michael Psellos, Chronographia, VI, xviii, trans. Sewter, p.269.) He was no happier with her successor in 1056, the near-senile Michael VI – a mere puppet of the court eunuchs – and helped, by inciting a riot in the city, to engineer his deposition in 1057.

The habitually forthright Keroularios soon quarrelled with the new Emperor, Isaac I Komnenos. Having presented him with the throne, he felt entitled to share in his imperial power and, again, used ‘language that was somewhat bold’. He is said also to have sported a pair of purple buskins, an act of treason, as purple garments were traditionally a prerogative of the Emperor. However, he had met his match in Isaac, a tough general with a no-nonsense approach.

In November 1058, Isaac arrested the troublesome Keroularios and exiled him to Prokonnesos, thus ‘casting the Patriarch off as if he were a load off his shoulders’. (Psellos, Chronographia, VII, 65, trans. Sewter, p.315; Skylitzes, 809, p.644.) Michael Psellos, a trained lawyer as well as ‘Consul of the Philosophers’ in the University founded by Monomachos, was instructed to prosecute him. Psellos’s detailed Accusation sets out the charges both of heresy and treason. However, Keroularios died unexpectedly, before coming to trial. Psellos says that the usually dour Isaac ‘bewailed his loss loudly and mourned him sincerely’, and – guilty at having brought down so great a personage – immediately rehabilitated his family at court.

These included the Patriarch’s niece, Eudokia Makrembolitissa, second wife of the vestarches Constantine Doukas, a nobleman from Paphlagonia. Eudokia was the daughter, by the Patriarch’s sister, of Ioannes Makrembolites, and according to Psellos was ‘a woman of great spirit, and exceptional beauty’. Interestingly, Psellos describes himself as Eudokia’s ‘uncle’ and, elsewhere, as ‘spiritual brother’ to her father, who was presumably his first cousin. Psellos was thus related by marriage, if not by blood, to the Patriarch. (D.I. Polemis, The Doukai (London, 1968), pp.28-34; K. Barzos, Ή Γενεαλογια των Κομνηνων (Thessalonica, 1984), I, p.125; Jean-Claude Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (Paris, 1996), p.275.)

In the autumn of 1059, a disheartened Isaac himself became ill. Psellos, a proficient doctor among his other skills, convinced him (wrongly) that he was dying. That November, Isaac was persuaded to abdicate in favour of their mutual friend and relative, the amiable Constantine Doukas. The new Emperor entrusted the helm of state to Psellos, his wife’s uncle, who claims that Constantine drank his every word ‘like nectar’. The first duty of his former accuser was to pronounce, in the imperial presence, a glowing funeral oration, somewhat overdue, in honour of the dead Patriarch. An unashamed pen-for-hire and political survivor, Psellos now made him out to be a saint.

It is ironic that after the death of the Emperor Doukas in 1067, his widow Eudokia, niece of the misogynistic Patriarch Keroularios, should herself have assumed sole power, even sidelining her ‘uncle’ Psellos, until practical considerations forced her, in January 1068, to marry again. Her new husband, Romanos Diogenes, was the emperor who was defeated and captured by the Turks at the Battle of Manzikert. Psellos loathed Diogenes and, on his release from captivity in 1072, had him savagely blinded, an act of calculated brutality that horrified contemporaries. It enabled Psellos to resume his controlling influence in the court as chief minister to Eudokia’s son, the feeble Michael VII.

Psellos claims in his funeral oration that the Keroularioi were descended from Herakles. They had been patricians at least since the late 10^th century, when a Keroularios served as a general (Cheynet, p.52, n.2), yet the family name means ‘candle-maker’. Their earlier ancestors were surely guildsmen in Constantinople, practising their craft in the hallowed environs over which Michael himself later presided. The many churches of Constantinople were, of course, vast consumers of candles.

The Pselloi were also a noble family. Their name, meaning ‘stammerer’, is most inappropriate for their most famous member, who was so renowned as an orator and conversationalist. Psellos reveals the little that is known about his immediate family in an earlier funeral oration that he had composed for his young daughter, Styliane Psellaina. She was his only child after many years of marriage, possibly to a woman called Theodote. (In desperation they had already adopted another girl, Euphemia.) In the summer of 1054, whilst Keroularios was smarting over the insults of the Papacy, Constantinople was in the grip of a smallbox epidemic, mentioned by the chronicler Skylitzes. The 9-year-old Styliane succumbed to the disease and died after 31 days of suffering.

Psellos clearly adored her and was heart-broken. He likens her to ‘a young, soft, tiny bird’. He delighted in her love of learning, in pursuit of which she would voluntarily visit school, presumably to sit at the back while the boys had their lessons; and speaks of her natural talents for weaving and embroidery. Skilled doctor that he was, he describes her illness in clinical detail; also the washing, dressing and laying out of her dead body, reduced to ‘one single open wound’. His later oration to Keroularios seems cold by comparison. (Panagiotis A. Agapitos, ‘Public and Private Death in Psellos: Maria Skleraina and Styliane Psellaina’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 101, ii (2008), pp.555-607.) It is the ‘private’ death that brings out Psellos’s innate humanity, and yet, if one thinks of him at all, it is probably not as the victim of a personal tragedy.

What lines of descent can be traced from these families to the present day? Hundreds of thousands, even millions of living people in the West can prove Byzantine ancestry from the eleventh century, through families such as the Komnenoi. Far fewer people, however, are able to establish a link with Psellos and Keroularios.

The Emperor Doukas had by their niece, Eudokia Makrembolitissa, a daughter, Zoe porphyrogennete. She married Adrian Komnenos, brother of the Emperor Alexios I. Their granddaughter, Anna Komnene Doukaina, married Alexios Palaiologos, a member of the last reigning dynasty in Byzantium.

This couple’s great-granddaughter, Theodora Palaiologina, married her third cousin, Andronikos Palaiologos, who died in 1247. They were the parents of the Emperor Michael VII Palaiologos (1259-82), from whom an exclusive number of Western families are able to trace their descent. I myself have a double descent from Michael.

In 1355, Michael’s great-great-granddaughter Maria was given in marriage by her brother, the Emperor John V, to Francesco Gattilusio, a Genoese buccaneer in his service, whom he made lord of Mytilene or the island of Lesbos. (D.M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium (Cambridge, 1972), p.256.) Their granddaughter, Catarina Gattilusio, married Pietro di Grimaldi, Baron of Bueil. Thence the line is traced directly, through thirteen generations, to my French great-grandmother. It is thrilling to think that I am flesh and blood with the likes of Psellos and Keroularios, and, indeed, one of their nearest living relatives.