Crucea.ro

The Times, March 4, 2009
Boys in the hood: the fight for religion’s soul

The Esphigmenou monks of Mount Athos are battling against what they see as the ultimate heresy – religious unity

Tom Whipple

Outside the church of St Antoni, a small domed chapel on the cliffs
above Esphigmenou, a chilly grass snake struggles along a cold rock.
From here, the monastery looks like a fortress, its sea-face a blank, turreted
wall against the Aegean. This wall has protected the riches and relics within
from pirates and Muslims alike. It has weathered the humiliations of the Ottoman
Turks, and gloried in the triumph of Byzantium. And yet Esphigmenou now finds
itself embroiled in a battle so formidable that its occupiers believe that the
outcome will determine the very future of humanity.

The tale of the Esphigmenou monks is one that should exist only in the pages of
a Dan Brown thriller. Divided from the Orthodox establishment by a theological
disagreement, and living in an isolated monastic peninsula, they are fighting a
lone battle for the soul of their religion. Esphigmenou is a community under
siege. Its lands have been seized, its bank accounts frozen, and it has severed
all contact with its 19 brother monasteries throughout Mount Athos, the obscure,
semi-autonomous monks’ republic of northern Greece. In that time, the monks have
faced warships, marines, the police and the coastguard, and engaged in
hand-to-hand combat with rival monks, while at night they take part in stealthy
sorties into the surrounding forest and in a speedboat that smuggles in
essential goods. All of this to beat a blockade imposed by the Patriarch of
Constantinople, the leader of their own church.

Put simply, the conflict is down to what the monks consider is Patriarch
Bartholomew’ s cosy relationship with the Pope. The monks believe that ecumenism
- the search for religious unity, in their case with Roman Catholicism – is not
just heresy, it is the final heresy that precedes the end of the world. After
years of debate with Constantinople over it, the monastery ceased to pray for
the Patriarch 30 years ago, and since then he has been trying to evict them.
When a warship was dispatched by the Greek Government to cut off the monastery
by sea Esphigmenou faced them with a black banner: Orthodoxy or death.

Because of their views on the papacy, there are limits to the monks’
hospitality.

“You are Catholic,” states Dimitrios, after I arrive at the monastery, having
lied about my destination to the Greek officials controlling entry to Mount
Athos and walked 10km through the forest. “The father wants you to know you
cannot go in the church, and you cannot eat with the monks in the trapeza
[dining hall].” Between us, a thick booklet shows pictures of the Patriarch,
Bartholomew, embracing the Pope and other Catholic leaders. Its caption
Dimitrios translates with a slightly embarrassed smile. It reads: “The kiss of
Judas.”

Dimitrios, who usually works in a pizza restaurant in Thessaloniki, has come
here for spiritual fulfillment, but also because he is trying to quit smoking,
banned in the monastery (“I hit two targets with one bullet,” he explains). We
sit talking together in the wooden-roofed guest quarters, warming ourselves on a
wood-burning stove and eating Turkish delight – although I suspect they don’t
call it that. There are a few biblical pictures on the wall, but most are of
stern men with excellent moustaches: “Greek heroes,” Dimitrius explains. Another
pilgrim is more descriptive. “They kill Turks,” he says, grinning as he makes a
throat-cutting gesture.

The monks here belong to a small minority of Orthodox called Old
Calendarists, who reject the Gregorian Calendar, by which most of the world
counts its years. Although superseded half a millennium ago, their alternative -
the Julian Calendar – does at least have the virtue of not being introduced by a
Catholic, Pope Gregory XIII.

It may seem absurd, but the monks regard themselves as the guardians of their
faith. For them, it is deadly serious.

Father Savvas was asleep the last time what he calls the “false
brotherhood” attacked. One of seven monks stationed in one of
Esphigmenou’ s outlying buildings, he had been expecting trouble. At 6am it
came.

Monks, asked by the Patriarch to restore the monastery to his control, were
trying to break in. “We had finished the morning service an hour before,” Father
Savvas recalls from his office overlooking the monastery’s central courtyard.
“And then someone heard people using crowbars on the lock. He shouted `Fathers,
fathers, they are coming,’ but they were already in the basement.”

In the ensuing struggle, Father Savvas was the only one of the seven
monks to escape hospital. “It was extremely violent; they punched,
kicked and used iron bars. One of us still has problems with his back.

But they did not think who was inside; we had filled the building with very
powerful men. People say: `You are monks, you must tolerate everything.’ We are
not obliged to be idiots, though. We did not have the blessings of the abbot to
punch – only passive defence – but it was enough.”

At this, he looks a little wistful, and points to a large man in the
courtyard. “You see him; he used to be a bodyguard. He is like a
gorilla. If I had given just him permission to punch, we could have
incapacitated them all.

Although the attack was two years ago, if anything the situation has
worsened. Since 2005 the monastery has existed without any official
external funding. It produces most of its food in fields and vineyards around
the main building, and ships in the rest – avoiding the coastguard with
night-time smuggling runs. Any external holdings, which include a farm just
outside Athos, are kept permanently occupied. And whenever monks are rotated
from this service they have to sneak through the woods – crossing a border
controlled by the police.

While European Union funds have converted surrounding monasteries to
near-hotel standard, with showers, electricity and modern kitchens,
Esphigmenou now gets by, it claims, on a daily budget of EUR130. Why, many have
asked, would they make such sacrifices, simply because the leader of their
church is friendly with the Pope? “The Patriarch tells us that we have no love
for Catholics – no love in our hearts,” explains Father Savvas who, after 20
years in the monastery, is one of the more senior monks. “Well, is it an
expression of love to let people live in deceit?

In Europe, with your Protestantism and your Catholicism you are in…” he stops,
to find the mot juste in his English-Greek dictionary. “Oh yes, perversion.” The
word pleases him. “Popism is a perversion of Christianity.”

The churches of East and West finally split in 1054, for political as much as
theological reasons – the latter centring on apparently minor differences in the
Creed. But Esphigmenou’ s fight is about so much more than a dislike of
Catholicism – it is about an entire worldview, in which the stakes could not be
higher. They believe that after the churches eventually unite (and they are
convinced that they will), the day of judgment will be upon us. “One day, one
government will control all the world,” Father Savvas says. “Only once will this
happen, and this government will be run by the Antichrist, the Messiah of the
Jews.”

For this to happen, there must be globalisation – and for true
globalisation there must be unity of faith. “The European Union offer money,
much money, to restore the monasteries,” Father Savvas says. “But it is a trap -
to make friends and destroy us. Our fathers hate ecumenism; they are against
globalisation. And anyone who hates globalisation is an enemy of the EU.

“The coincidences are so many that you cannot turn a blind eye. For
example, globalisation requires the barcode system.” He finds a magazine and
points to two lines on its barcode that are longer than others, repeated three
times. “Do you know which number each double bar is?”

This is conspiracy theory bingo, and I am about to get a full house. 6?

“Yes ! It is 6!” 666: the mark of the beast. Technically, I later learn, those
lines do not represent 6 but I doubt that the monks, who proudly call themselves
zealots, would have taken my word for it.

That said, it would be wrong to consider them hostile. Throughout my
stay they are friendly, welcoming and unfailingly hospitable – even if initially
their rules made me feel isolated. Before my first meal and, sitting on the
stone steps of the church, I wait with the cats -for the leftovers after the
others have eaten. Meals on Athos are an austere affair, even if you are
Orthodox. Beans and rice, wine and fruit – maybe fish on Sundays. In
Esphigmenou, they sit in silence while, from a pulpit, a monk reads from the
Bible in Greek. When the reading is over, the meal is over.

And then, crowding out of the trapeza with the other monks, Father
Chrysostom beckons me inside. The oldest surviving building, the
centuries-old frescoes of the trapeza are blackened from the indignities of
occupying Turkish troops, who in the 19th century briefly used it as a kitchen.
Sitting me down on a wooden bench away from the clatter of tidying up, Father
Chrysostom, the head of the kitchen, brings plates of rice pudding, chickpeas
and kiwi fruit. Other monks put sweets and wine in front of me, with a wink,
like over-indulgent uncles.

Father Chrysostom almost tries too hard to put me at ease. “I like very much
your English soap,” he says through a long, scraggy beard. I look confused. He
jogs to a friend, then returns – victorious, but no less mysterious. “I like
very much your English swords!” he makes the movement of a pirate removing his
cutlass from a scabbard, and grins.

Later he introduces me to Kitsos, a shabby donkey, who hangs around the
monastery. His ostensible purpose is as insurance, “in case the oil runs out”,
but while the tractors still work he leads a charmed existence eating apples,
being stroked and occasionally pulling his stake out of the ground to canter -
triumphant – across the vineyard.

When I am finally allowed to meet Abbot Methodius – the stern
philosophical scourge of the Orthodox Church – he has a stuffed toy
donkey on his windowsill, looking very much like Kitsos. Methodius, who heads
the monastery, tells me that he believes they stand alone,
upholding the true faith until the time when, perhaps, the Patriarch is declared
a heretic. “Esphigmenou will last, so long as God wants us,” he says. And he
welcomes pilgrims – housed in two rooms, their wood-burning stoves gently
warming centuries of accumulated body odour.

It is here that I meet Alexis Papalexiou – a US citizen who has returned to the
old country, and the old faith. Extravagantly hairy, and wearing a vest, he
looks like a moustachioed Tony Soprano. “For weeks I had these dreams,” he tells
me. “I heard the Holy Spirit, and it said `prodotis, prodotis’ – `traitor,
traitor’,” he stage whispers. “Then, later, `Judas’.

“It stopped when I switched to the Old Calendar. Esphigmenou holds the true
faith: that is why the Devil, and the Patriarch, are against them.”

After evening prayers, hooded monks navigate the cloisters, lighting dim oil
lamps on the stone walls. The cats move inside as well, lurking like malevolent
shadows – waiting to trip up unsuspecting pilgrims on night-time toilet trips.
To enter this world is to be in a place where demons still possess men, where
visions are commonplace and where icons perform daily miracles. With the
zealotry of the convert, they want to save me too. As I am dozing off one night,
Alexis wakes me with an urgent whisper. “Tom, I will not see you tomorrow, so I
must say: remember that prostitution, adultery, seeing a witch – these are
deadly sins.” Silence for a bit. “And jerking off, too, that is bad.”

On my final morning Constantinos, a stockbroker from Athens, negotiates for me
to visit the church. “See this picture,” Constantinos points to a Madonna and
Child. “Many years ago it was stabbed. And look, now it bleeds.” He takes me to
another. “This is our most powerful picture. It has done many miracles.”
Gathered around its base are gold offerings – including a swimming medal.

Constantinos confesses that they are worried about what I will write.

“Thomas,” (he pronounces it Toe-mass), “it is important that you write the
truth. We say, you can fight a war with blood or with ink – so do not lie, you
are powerful. Do not say `they are bad – they would not let me eat with them.’
That is just our rule. When you write, ask the Holy Spirit to help you.”

As I walk through the stone gateway for the last time, I pass an aged monk,
sitting sentinel beneath its frescoes. I offer him a Quality Street – the last
of my bulwark against a beans-only diet. He takes the box and turns it over
carefully, methodically. Then he points to the barcode, and shakes his head, his
long beard accentuating the motion.

The packet is returned, untouched.

Troubled history of a retreat

Mount Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece, is a semi-autonomous monks’
republic. For the past 1,000 years all females, including most domestic animals,
have been banned. Why? One story is that the monks became too frisky with
shepherdesses, another that the Patriarch of Constantinople wanted to remove
temptation

The earliest record of Athonite monks is their attendance at a church council
in 843. The first monastery was founded in 963. It is now a Unesco World
Heritage Site. But some monks claim that Emperor Constantine the Great founded
the first monastery in the 4th century.

Others claim Christian tradition began when the Virgin Mary found refuge on
Athos in a storm. Recently Athos has become a favoured retreat of Vladimir
Putin and the Prince of Wales.

Signaled by the Greek Orthodox Old Calendarist group

Gheorghe Vanau