Fotis Kontoglou – Summer on Mt Athos

(Excerpt from Nea Estia magazine, year 77 [1963], vol. 875, pp. 251–255)

I have been to the Holy Mountain many times. The first time, I stayed for more than two months and made acquaintances with many fathers and laymen, for there are also Arvanite muleteers there, dockworkers, and boatmen who load timber onto ships. At Daphne, the port where the steamers dock, there were also some worldly fishermen, and there I met three men from Aivali, and we had a wonderful time together. From there I went to Karyes, but I did not stay long, for I was seeking the sea.

I went to the Monastery of Iviron together with an elder who sold books in Karyes and was called Averkius the Rosary-Maker. I stayed at that monastery for quite some time. What drew me most was the arsanas—that is, the place where they keep the boats and the fishing gear. I let my beard grow, forgot everything, and became a fisherman myself. I ate, drank, worked, and slept together with the fishermen, who were all monks, most of them from Bougas, meaning from the straits of Constantinople. What a carefree life I led! I formed a special friendship with three of them. One was about twenty-five years old, a good soul, honorable, thoughtful, eager in every task, and he had become a monk from a young age: his name was Bartholomew. The other was about forty, a fisherman from his village, short and stout, simple, quiet, soft-spoken, guileless, “poor in spirit,” humble, and his name was Basil. The third was an old man like Saint Peter, cheerful, a joker, and his name was Nikanor. Bartholomew also read books about sea voyages. Among other things, he had in his cell two or three books by Jules Verne. With him I fished for lobsters. He also brought up corals and showed me how to fish for them.

The arsanas was a long house built right over the sea in a cove sheltered by a cape, with black slabs for tiles. In front there were some rocky shoals where the waves broke whenever the north wind blew, and above, the cliffs descended, overgrown with myrtles, holm oaks, and every kind of wild shrub. The arsanas had five or six chambers in a row, and in front a balcony resting on beams of wild wood. There we slept. Below there were low vaulted rooms where they pulled in the boats. They spread the nets on the railings of the balcony. There where we slept, we could hear beneath us the sea entering the vaults and rolling the pebbles, lulling us to sleep. Old icons hung inside the arsanas, and an ever-burning lamp flickered.

I bid farewell to the Ivirites and set off on foot to the Monastery of Karakallou. There too I passed the time very well; the fathers treated me as one of their own. That monastery is coenobitic, and at that time they had as abbot a holy man, Kodratos, a quiet elder, peaceful, a true shepherd, originally from Alatsata. The arsanas of Karakallou was impressive, a Byzantine tower built atop a rock. I stayed there as well for several days. From there I went to the Monastery of the Great Lavra, where many relics are kept along with the marvelous frescoes of Theophanes the Cretan.

“Then you arise as well, and take your staff,
you walk and come to the holy Lavra.
And you rest there as long as you wish,
until you find company and a ship to set sail.”

From there, then, I too took my staff and set out to go to Kafsokalyvia. With me came a simple monk, tall and thin, even though he was the baker at the monastery. The path passes through holy and beautiful places until it reaches above some God-built capes that look out toward the south, onto the open sea. From the land side, Athos stands above your head. In one place you see the skirt of the mountain standing sheer above the sea, as if cut with a knife, as though a piece of mountain had just broken off and fallen into the sea. And truly, as the Kafsokalyvites later told me, the mountain broke one day in 1900, falling in one piece into the sea and burying two or three fishing huts with about ten fathers. The earthquake shook all of Macedonia.

At Kafsokalyvia I stayed longer than at the other monasteries. The fathers treated me so much as their own that whenever they held an assembly, I had to sit in the council where they discussed “the affairs of the skete.” They have even recorded me among the founders and commemorate me along with my wife and children. I formed a special friendship with Father Isidoros, who kept me in his cell. Another time I wrote much about him. At that time he was about thirty-five years old and had as his novice old Charalampos from Kastellorizo, about seventy, a sea customs officer who had lived wildly on ships and traveled as far as the Yellow River in China.

One day a monk came to Kafsokalyvia from a fishing hut between Cape Smerna and Kafsokalyvia, and Father Isidoros hosted him, and we met. His name was Neil, and he was from Mytilene. As he left, he invited me to visit his cell. In two or three days, I went. On the Mountain one sees many unusual things and buildings, but the cell of Father Neil was among the strangest. In that place, two rocky ridges descended and formed two capes that stretched far into the sea, one very close to the other, so close that you would say the water between them was a river and not the sea. There where one cape met the other, two ridges of rock rose, so near that they darkened that spot, even though the sun shone in summer.

In that place, inside that crevice, was built the arsanas of Father Neil. The waters were bottomless and dark in that channel. They had built the house a little above the sea, founded on the rock, with balconies and vaults, as is customary on the Mountain from old times, with black slabs instead of tiles. A little higher up was the church, small, with a carved iconostasis and all the fittings. Above hung a wooded mountain, and at its peak a sheer rock with a cave. In that cave, a few years earlier, an elder had lived as a hermit who in his youth had been a captain in the Macedonian Struggle. Now vultures had nested in the cave, and I watched them circling around the ridge.

Neil and his brotherhood had two trawlers and two boats. There were seven or eight souls, five adults and two or three young monks. All were sun-scorched, black as Arabs. Father Neil had a quietness and simplicity about him that made you love and respect him. Soft-spoken, yet his face was always smiling, with thick lips like an Arab's, black and dense beard growing down from his eyes and covering his cheeks. With the skoufi he wore, he looked just like a Babylonian. Barefoot, as they all were, he wore a dark shirt above and oriental breeches down to the knees below.

During the days I stayed there, Neil and one novice did not go out with the trawler so as to keep me company. There was also an old man, Father Athanasios, who always guarded the house. When they returned from fishing, they hauled out the fish, selected a few large ones for us to eat and others for salting, piled the small ones together and left them to ripen for salting. They salted many large groupers to have for the winter. Of the small ones—anchovies and sardines—they salted many barrels and sent them to Thessaloniki. They sat cross-legged around the pile and salted them. The whole house smelled of such fishiness that at first my stomach turned upside down. But little by little I grew accustomed, and soon I hardly noticed the fish smell at all. I even thought that Christ and the Apostles must have smelled the same way. The people and everything you touched—all smelled of fish. Even inside the church you could sense that scent.

In the hours when the others were out fishing, I talked with Father Neil about religious matters and the history of his house, what storms they had endured, what monster fish they had encountered, what boats had sunk since he settled in that place, and all sorts of other tales. At other times, while caulking a boat pulled ashore, he would chant with his sweet voice, he as the right chanter and I as the left. We sang the Katavasies of the Transfiguration (for it was those days of August): “The choirs of Israel, with unmoistened feet, crossed the Red Sea and its watery depths,” the Pasapnoaria with the doxastikon “Christ took Peter, James, and John,” and then slowly and with melody the koinonikon “In the light of the glory of Thy countenance, O Lord, shall we walk unto the ages.” But in the end we always sang “Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, who hast revealed the fishermen as most wise, having sent upon them the Holy Spirit, and through them hast netted the universe; O Lover of mankind, glory to Thee.” I cannot describe how moved my heart was when I heard the fisherman Father Neil chanting, barefoot, with his tarred breeches, seaweed stuck to his bare feet, chanting with that ancient melody and reciting iambic verses, while beyond, the age-old Greek waves foamed and the wind roared festively over the God-built rocks and trees!

But the deepest and strangest emotion seized me on Sundays and other feast days when Father Neil the fisherman celebrated the Liturgy and became a priest of God Most High—he whom I saw on other days salting fish, caulking boats, splicing ropes, rigging sails, setting anchors, mending nets, together with his brotherhood! And in the Liturgy he became like a patriarch, with the epanokalimavchon, the golden phelonion, the epimanikia, the epigonation, and he prayed mystically before the Holy Table “for the ignorances of the people,” “as one granted the grace of priesthood.” Oh! What exquisite and awesome mysteries our humble Orthodoxy holds! But my heart truly wept with holy joy and compunction when they set the table for us to eat and Father Neil blessed it with his sea-hardened fingers, while those simple fishermen stood around with crossed arms, weary, wave-beaten, forgotten by the world in that abyss. And with his humble voice Father Neil said: “O Christ our God, bless the food and drink of Thy servants, for Thou art holy always, now and ever and unto the ages of ages,” while the prow of the trehantiri shaded us and the salt spray came from the stormy sea.