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April 1998: Monk on a Meteora

Wakened by my musical dog, I had discovered it was a dachshund, singing in chorus with the bells of early mass, it was time to leave Pleven and head south. Flat farmland as far as the eye could see rolled past us with the chestnut trees in the villages literally bursting into leaf in the hot weather. A man was trying his luck to find a customer for a fish by dangling it over the road on the end of his rod. One is never far from the mountains in Bulgaria and it wasn't long before the peaks of Paskal, Baba and Vezen loomed large on the horizon. The country fell away into lush valleys clothed in green spring velvet. Through the small industrial town of Lukovit, we turned East into the hills at Jablanica.

During the Russian advance over these mountains in December 1877, the High Command sent three columns of troops, the centre one heading for Mount Baba. Having made his way up to the ridge in the most appalling conditions, the Colonel of the Pskov Regiment sent a messenger back to his general. " Out of 520 in my command, 170 are frozen right through. And the storm is not abating." After a few more hours, he sent another message: "If my Regiment is not called back, there will be none to be called back – all will have froze to death, doing their duty". He received the order to fall back.

There were a lot of gypsies along the sides of the road, Tsiganes as the Bulgarians call them of which the English word 'gypsy' is a corruption. Dark skinned, almost as black as Tamils or Southern Indians, Efrem told me that they kept very much to themselves, rarely if ever marrying out of the extended gypsy family. Within their society, there are distinct classes to which they belong. According to Sacheverell Sitwell in Roumanian Journey (1937), "they were brought from India, as coppersmiths, by the Tartar hordes of Batu Khan, in the early thirteenth century and are believed to be sun or fire worshippers." He identifies four tribes: Laetzi (not in Bulgaria), Vatrachi, Netoshi and Caldararii.

Through high grassy valleys patchworked with plantations of spruce, dotted with an occasional alpine farm, the road corkscrewed through twists and turns until there before us was a breathtaking view of a wide valley edged with limestone crags, the three Balkan peaks standing like sentinels over the watershed of the River Vit. It was only when we reached Glozene that we discovered that one can't reach the monastery from the town and we had to take a 17 kilometres detour through two alpine villages until the road gave way to a narrow dirt track. Curling up the side of a hill thickly covered with beech and larch woods, I knew that Glozene was going to be in the most dramatic location of all the monasteries we had seen. First glimpse as we rounded a bend was of a nest of houses constructed on top of a chimney of rock; a monks' nest, joked Efrem. As I approached it on foot up a narrow track, there was not a sound to be heard except the song of the chaffinches. It was totally still.

Two young monks were chatting together by the main door. I asked if either spoke English. With an infectious smile, the bearded one said:
"Yes, me, learn English – school"
It was the beginning of an intense relationship that was to last the next ninety minutes. After introducing himself, his name was Yoanikii, he took me to a guestroom and placed a plate of oranges and bananas in front of me. I felt mean about eating them for after all someone had brought them all the way up here.
"So, how many are you here?" I enquired.
"In 1995: one abbot and one monk. In 1996: one abbot and three monks. In 1997: same. This year: one abbot and four monks but three are away today"
"Who is the abbot?"
"I am"
"How old are you?"
"Thirty three".
"Is that young to be an abbot?"
"Not in this monastery because no one is really the abbot – St George is the real abbot!" he said and changing the subject he proudly showed me a shoulder bag for books he had knitted out of wool.

Yoanikii was writing a history about the monastery, which had been started by a prince of Kiev, banished by the Tartars in the 13th century. He had been granted lands on the river Vit by the Bulgarian Tsar and when a miraculous icon of St George appeared one day on a high rock overlooking the valley, Prince Glozh ordered a monastery to be erected on the spot. For centuries the only access was up the side of the steep gullies; it was not until 1934 that the road was built.

It survived many manmade tribulations throughout the centuries but was severely damaged in the earthquakes at the turn of this century. The little church of St George was rebuilt in 1931 and the residential buildings many years later in 1965. The restorations were entirely sympathetic to the original monastery and the atmosphere is steeped in history.

Yoanikii gave me an enthusiastic conducted tour, starting in the reception room where he pulled up the carpet with a Hey Presto flourish to show me the trap door of Vassil Levski's hiding place. This was the stuff of Balkan legends. I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the rocky darkness.
"There is a tunnel, maybe one kilometre for the escape", Yoanikii whispered with his dark eyes darting furtively around the room.

The sun was now high in the sky and without a breath of wind, it was becoming very hot. He could see me longing for a glass of water.
"No water in monastery"
"Oh, it doesn't matter, I've got to go soon"
"No, no. No water in monastery; water 700 meters down hill. Come".
He bounded ahead of me down a grassy path, black robes fanned out behind him. The well was in a glade of old beech trees, a small wooden structure protecting it from the heavens. Yoanikii told me that in the summer, he would come down here to pray and sleep: " Half hut is church; half hut is kitchen and bed".
"What is it like in the middle of winter?"
"It's same – monastery has no water. Me, I get very cold but must come down here in snow each day and then back up"
"What do you eat?"
"No animal. Me, I'm vegetable"
To prove this point, vegetarian I mean, he picked a handful of young nettles from the side of the track and also a daisy. I knew about the nettles but what on earth was the daisy for? Sore throats, I was reliably informed, were dealt with promptly and efficiently by munching the little white flower. Further on from the waterpoint, on the site of an older monastery, was the kitchen garden where the monks grew fruit trees and summer salad plants. His was a hard life indeed and without a car, the village shop was six kilometres down the hill - and six back up he stressed. But he wasn't complaining. I could see he loved the monastery with a passion and was dedicated to its survival. He told me that he had been sleeping in a room in the east wing of Preobrazhenie two days before the whole edifice shot down the mountainside. En passant, he assured me that the abbot there, my 'shooer', was a very funny and wonderful man.

It was time to part company and we left Abbot Yoanikii together with St George on the top of the meteora he called home. What an engaging and magnetic man he was. His great wish was to build a set of gates for the entrance, which would give the monks both more privacy and protection from the elemnets.

Down the hillside, past orchards of plum trees, we came across a cemetery; not an unusual sight in itself but the barn next to it was ominously stacked high to the roof with new wooden coffins. 'Were they expecting an epidemic?' I wondered and told Efrem to put his foot down! We nearly had a head on collision with an old lady who had persuaded her milking cow to tow her cart. The poor creature was very bad tempered and obviously took a dim view of this double workload. 'Since when had anyone milked a horse in this part of the world?', the cow must have thought.

Time was running out and it was with infinite sadness that I looked at the passing images of this beautiful countryside and its stoic people. The farms became very neat, almost one could have been in Germany or Switzerland, tools stowed away, wood piled high in stacks. This wasn't the controlled chaos of the typical Balkan rural landscape. We came to the Malki Iskar River and followed it south to Etropole, an ungainly town of brightly coloured tower blocks in the middle of an alpine valley. Etropole monastery lies to the East, on the northern slope of Cherni Peak. It is dedicated to the Holy Trinity but is also known as Varovitets, the limewaters. The cathedral church was built in 1858-60 and the residential wings in 1833, 1924 and 1929. Apart from the beauty of its location, Etroplole was a disappointment, lacking atmosphere, but then after Glozen, it did't have a fair chance.

After seven days and over 1800 kilometres, my enduring memories of Bulgaria and its monasteries, of the characters that I encountered along the way, are those of secluded churches and cloisters steeped in a tradition of courage and selflessness . The heady mixture of religion and history, of resistance to oppression and imbuing the young with Christ's values, of fertile valleys and snowbound mountain tops all blend into a mystical potion of spirituality tempered with humanism.

As a fleeting visitor, I feel unqualified to summarise the role of the monasteries in Bulgarian history. So it is apt to quote a distinguished Bulgarian academic to end my journey. Professor Ivan Bozhilov writes: "The history of the Bulgarian monasteries has already spanned a period of eleven centuries. But their significance cannot be measured by time alone. Maybe this is the only national institution which has always shared in the destinies of the Bulgarian people, both at times of independence and magnificence, of foreign domination and despair. In the absence of a State and a Church the monasteries were the spiritual haven, the places where the nation was given shelter, a tower of strength for showing resistance, a point of departure along the road to the future. Being centres of Orthodox Christianity, guardians of the Bulgarian literary culture, treasure troves of religious art, the monasteries have remained, even to this day, 1050 years after the Dormition of St John of Rila, those symbols of the Bulgarian spirit that are best identified with the Nation"

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