From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. William Dalrymple

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you managed to have a word with the Abbot about my seeing the manuscript?’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Christophoros. ‘The Abbot’s away in Constantinople. He’s in council with the Ecumenical Patriarch. But you’re welcome to stay here until he returns.’

      ‘When will that be?’

      ‘He should be back by the Feast of the Transfiguration.’

      ‘But that’s – what? – over a fortnight away.’

      ‘Patience is a great monastic virtue,’ said Christophoros, nodding philosophically at Kallistos, a rather scraggy, bow-legged old tom-cat who had so far failed to catch a single fishtail.

      ‘My permit runs out the day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘They only gave me a three-day diamonitirion. I have to leave by the morning boat.’ I looked at the old monk. ‘Please – I’ve come all the way just to see this book.’

      ‘I’m afraid the Abbot insists that he must first question anyone who …’

      ‘Is there nothing you could do?’

      The old man pulled tentatively at his beard. ‘I shouldn’t do this,’ he said. ‘And anyway, the lights aren’t working in the library.’

      ‘There are some lamps in the guest room,’ I suggested.

      He paused for a second, indecisive. Then he relented: ‘Go quickly,’ he said. ‘Ask Fr. Yacovos: see if he’ll lend you the lanterns.’

      I thanked Christophoros and started walking briskly back towards the monastery before he could change his mind.

      ‘And don’t let Yacovos start telling you his life story,’ he called after me, ‘or you’ll never get to see this manuscript.’

      At eight o’clock, I met Fr. Christophoros outside the katholikon. It was dusk now; the sun had already set over the Holy Mountain. In my hands I held the storm lantern from my room. We walked across the courtyard to the monastic library, and from his habit Fr. Christophoros produced a ring of keys as huge as those of a medieval jailer. He began to turn the largest of the keys in the topmost of the four locks.

      ‘We have to keep everything well locked these days,’ said Christophoros in explanation. ‘Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats at the Great Lavra. They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot. They got into the library and stole many of the most ancient manuscripts; they also took some gold reliquaries that were locked in the sanctuary.’

      ‘Were they caught?’

      ‘The monks managed to raise the alarm and they were arrested the following morning as they tried to get across the Bulgarian frontier. But by then they had done much damage: cut up the reliquaries into small pieces and removed the best illuminations from the manuscripts. Some of the pages have never been recovered.’

      Three locks had now opened without problem; and eventually, with a loud creak, the fourth gave way too. The old library doors swung open, and with the lamps held aloft, we stepped inside.

      Within, it was pitch dark; a strong odour of old buckram and rotting vellum filled the air. Manuscripts lay open in low cabinets, the gold leaf of illuminated letters and gilt haloes from illustrations of saints’ Lives shining out in the light of the lantern. In the gloom on the far wall I could just see a framed Ottoman firman, the curving gilt of the Sultan’s monogram clearly visible above the lines of calligraphy. Next to it, like a discarded suit jacket, hung a magnificent but rather crumpled silk coat. Confronted dragons and phoenixes were emblazoned down the side of either lapel.

      ‘What is that?’ I whispered.

      ‘It’s John Tzimiskes’s coat.’

      ‘The Emperor John Tzimiskes? But he lived in the tenth century.’

      Christophoros shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘You can’t just leave something like that hanging up there,’ I said.

      ‘Well,’ said Christophoros irritably, ‘where else would you put it?’

      In the gloom, we found our way past rank after rank of shelves groaning with leather-bound Byzantine manuscripts, before drawing to a halt in front of a cabinet in the far corner of the room. Christophoros unlocked and opened the glass covering. Codex G.9 was on the bottom shelf, wrapped up in a white canvas satchel.

      It was a huge volume, as heavy as a crate of wine, and I staggered over to a reading desk with it, while Christophoros followed with the lamp.

      ‘Forgive me,’ he said, as I lowered the volume gently onto the desk, ‘but are you Orthodox or heretic?’

      I considered for a second before answering. A Catholic friend who had visited Athos a few years previously had warned me above all never to admit to being a Catholic; he had made this mistake, and said that had he admitted to suffering from leprosy or tertiary syphilis he could not have been more resolutely shunned than he had been after that. He told me that in my case it was particularly important not to raise the monks’ suspicions, as they have learned to distrust, above all their visitors, those who ask to see their manuscripts. They have long memories on Athos, and if the monks have never forgiven the Papacy for authorising the ransacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade over eight hundred years ago, they have certainly not forgotten the nineteenth-century bibliophiles who decimated the libraries of Athos only a century ago.

      The English traveller the Hon. Robert Curzon is still considered one of the worst offenders: after a quick circuit around the monastic libraries of Athos in the late 1840s (in the company, I am ashamed to say, of my great-great-uncle), Curzon left the Holy Mountain with his trunks bulging with illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine chrysobuls; in his travel book Visits to Monasteries in the Levant he writes of buying the priceless manuscripts from the Abbot by weight, as if they were figs or pomegranates in an Ottoman market. Worse still is the memory of the German bibliophile Herman Tischendorff. Some twenty years after Curzon’s trip to Athos, Tischendorff left the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St Catherine’s in Sinai with the Codex Sinaiaticus – still the earliest existing copy of the New Testament – tucked into his camel bags. Tischendorff later claimed that he found the various leaves of the manuscript in a basket of firewood, and that he had saved it from the monks, who were intent on burning it to keep them warm in winter. The monks, however, maintain to this day that Tischendorff got the librarian drunk and discreetly swapped the priceless manuscript – which, like Curzon’s plunder, duly found its way into the British Library – for a bottle of good German schnapps.

      Noticing my silence, Christophoros asked again: What was I, Orthodox or heretic?

      ‘I’m a Catholic,’ I replied.

      ‘My God,’ said the monk. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He shook his head in solicitude. ‘To be honest with you,’ he said, ‘the Abbot never gives permission for non-Orthodox to look at our holy books. Particularly Catholics. The Abbot thinks the present Pope is the Antichrist and that his mother is the Whore of Babylon. He says that they are now bringing about the Last Days spoken of by St John in the Book of Revelation.’

      Christophoros murmured a prayer. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t ever tell anyone in the monastery that you’re a heretic. If the Abbot ever found

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