The Anglican Hostel, Nazareth, 20 November
Around 570 a.d., after he was first professed as a monk at the Abbey of St Theodosius, John Moschos withdrew into the wilderness and spent ten years in the remote cave monastery at Pharan, to the north of Jerusalem.
Pharan, the modern Ein Fara, is reputedly the oldest abbey in Palestine. It was founded in the early fourth century by the great Byzantine hermit St Chariton, who, it is said, settied here in a cave above a pool of pure spring water. There he gathered a community of like-minded ascetics around him, living a life of silence, self-abnegation and severe fasting, interspersed with long hours of prayer. Two hundred years later, Moschos appears to have been drawn to the site less by its antiquity than by the wisdom of its then hegumen, Abba Cosmas the Eunuch. In a crucial passage in The Spiritual Meadow, Moschos credits Cosmas with first giving him the idea to collect the sayings of the fathers: 'Whilst he [Abba Cosmas] was speaking to me about the salvation of the soul, we came across an aphorism of St Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria. And the elder said to me, "When you come across such a saying, if you have no paper with you, write it on your clothing" - so great was the appetite of Abba Cosmas for the words of our holy fathers and teachers.' It was advice that was eventually to lead Moschos to compiling The Spiritual Meadow, and so to preserve the otherwise largely unrecorded history of the monks of Byzantine Palestine.
By a remarkable coincidence, at the beginning of this trip, on Mount Athos, I had met a monk who claimed to have been the last hermit to have lived in the very same cave as Moschos at Ein Fara. Fr. Alexandros was a tall, rubicund figure with a faded serge cassock, a short Orthodox pigtail and a grey beard, matted and tangled like John the Baptist's on some early Byzantine icon. I had stumbled across him on a walk one afternoon, soon after digging out the manuscript of The Spiritual Meadow from the library at the Monastery of Iviron. He lived alone in a small wooden hut in a clearing in the forest, high above Karyes. It was an idyllic place, a bright and silent retreat, fringed with lilies and ilex and commanding an astonishing view down over the silver domes of the Russian Skete to the deep, fragmented blue of the Aegean far below. But this, Fr. Alexandros told me, was not his home, nor where he longed to be: he had moved to this Greek hilltop only a decade before, after being driven out of his hermitage in the Holy Land.
For most of his adult life, he explained, he had followed the ways of the desert fathers in the cave at Ein Fara, a millennia and a half after St Chariton first founded the monastery. But Fr. Alexandros had been the last of the line. About ten years after the Israeli conquest and occupation of the West Bank, he had begun to receive death threats which he believed came from a group of Israeli zealots who had established a settlement nearby. Then one day in the winter of 1979 his spiritual father and distant neighbour, a Greek monk named Philloumenos, was hacked to death in his cell at Jacob's Well near Nablus; someone had poisoned his dogs, attacked him with an axe, then incinerated his remains with a grenade. Shortly afterwards, Fr. Alexandras returned from a trip to Jerusalem to find his cave-chapel desecrated and his books and possessions scattered and burned. The pulpit in the chapel had been axed into a hundred pieces. The hermit fled, caught ship to Athens, and had eventually found his way to Athos. The cave and spring had apparently since been wired off and absorbed into a new settlement.
Like many hermits, Fr. Alexandras was a deeply eccentric man, a holy fool who talked to his pet owl, fed the lizards, and claimed to receive occasional visits from angels. He was a man whose statements could not, perhaps, be taken entirely at face value. I was therefore a little surprised to discover, on my visit to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in the Old City of Jerusalem, that much of what he had said had indeed been true. A bearded Greek Metropolitan who had known both Philloumenos and Alexandras showed me a file full of reports and correspondence about the desecration of the cave of St Chariton and the violent murder in Jacob's Well. A mentally ill Israeli from Tel Aviv had been charged with the Jacob's Well murder, I learned, as well as with two other killings. I was even directed to the Martyrion at the Orthodox Seminary on Mount Zion where Fr. Philloumenos's shattered skull and axe-cloven bones lay on permanent - if rather grisly - display, dressed in his old habit, awaiting potential canonisation.
'He is a saint,' I was assured by Fr. Aristopoulos, the earnest young monk who showed me into the Martyrion. 'Fr. Philloumenos received many telephone calls from the Jewish zealots saying he must leave Jacob's Well, that it was their holy place, not ours. After his dogs were poisoned the Patriarch said that he should come away and live in Jerusalem where it was more safe, but every time Philloumenos refused. He was saying vespers when the killer found him and started to chop at him with the axe.'
'He didn't kill him outright?'
'No,' replied the monk, 'but with many cuts: hands off, then feet, then legs. In pieces. Very nasty. Only at the end he threw the grenade.' Fr. Aristopoulos crossed himself in horror. 'But you know, when they held a small service for him four years after his death, they exhumed his relics and found that his body was uncorrupted.'
'But how could it be uncorrupted,' I asked, 'when he had already been chopped up and incinerated?'
'Well not totally uncorrupted,' admitted the monk. 'But it was still a very miraculous preservation. After this there were miracles - including healing of the sick - and many visions of Fr. Philloumenos. Some I have seen myself.'
'You've seen Fr. Philloumenos?'
'In my dreams I have seen him,' said Aristopoulos. 'Also I have smelt him.'
'I don't understand,' I said. 'I thought you said his body hadn't corrupted.'
'No, no,' said Fr. Aristopoulos. 'It was a good smell. During the Gulf War the Greek Consulate ordered all Greeks to go home. The seminary was closed and all the students left. I was here alone. I locked up the chapel and for three months I stayed upstairs in my room with my gasmask because of Saddam's Scud attacks. Then in March, when the war was over, I came and unlocked the door and walked in here for the first time since the New Year. It was as if the church was full of incense: a heavy smell, so nice, so sweet. It was coming from Fr. Philloumenos.'
So this, I thought, was how miracle stories began.
I told Fr. Aristopoulos about my meeting with Fr. Alexandras and his story of the assault on his cave. Aristopoulos replied that attacks on Church property were far from unusual. During the Six Day War, he said, the room in which we were standing had been attacked by a lone Israeli soldier who had fired off several shots at the iconostasis before being wounded - so at any rate claimed Fr. Aristopoulos - by a miraculous ricochet from an icon of the Theotokos, the Holy Virgin.
Checking these stories in the more sober Jerusalem Post archives and with the different Church authorities in Jerusalem, I found that from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s there had indeed been a wave of attacks on Church property. A Jerusalem church, a Baptist chapel and a Christian bookshop had all been burned to the ground, allegedly by ultra-Orthodox haredim, while students from a nearby yeshiva had committed serious vandalism at the Dormition Abbey. There had also been a series of unsuccessful arson attacks on the Anglican church in West Jerusalem (the old wooden doors had had to be.changed to steel to thwart repeated attempts at igniting them), as well as on two churches in Acre (a Greek Orthodox church in the Old City and a Protestant chapel in the new Israeli suburbs) and an Anglican church in Ramleh.
In addition to this, the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion - already damaged between 1948 and 1967 when it stood in the no-man's land between Israel and Jordan - had been further desecrated no fewer than eight times. I visited it afterwards: the tombstones had almost all been shattered, metal crosses lay twisted in their sockets, and some of the sepulchres had been broken open; the one standing mausoleum was riddled with bullet-holes. As Canon Nairn Ateek of St George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem put it after he had spent half an hour listing all the incidents of desecration he knew about: 'Israel would like to give the impression that it champions religious tolerance, but the whole country was built on the usurpation and confiscation of Christian and Muslim land. To this day the confiscation and desecration of Church land and buildings continues.'
Canon Ateek's views are widely held by the Palestinian Christians I talked to in Jerusalem, but there is another side to the story. The Israeli authorities have always roundly condemned the vandalism of Church property and assisted the churches to recover from any serious damage. While ultra-Orthodox Jewish haredim remain the chief suspects for most desecrations - and their presence is further indicated by the nature of the Hebrew graffiti sprayed on several of the desecrated sites - their involvement is rarely proven, while in some cases, such as the desecration of the cave of St Chariton, it is not impossible that the attack could equally well have been carried out by disgruntled Arabs. Moreover, while Christian institutions still tend to suffer from abusive graffiti - when Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently visited Jerusalem, for example, the gates of St George's were daubed with 'Go home dirty black Nazi pig' - the wave of arson and vandalism that took place during the seventies and early eighties now largely seems to have ceased, and there has been only one major arson attack in recent years: the gutting of a church in Tiberias.
Certainly, none of these unconnected incidents in any way proves the Palestinian Christians' contention that there is a concerted campaign to drive them out of their ancestral homes. But what they do undoubtedly reveal is a degree of prejudice and intolerance in Israel reminiscent of several other Middle Eastern countries - notably Turkey - where a religiously homogeneous majority is able to lord it over a relatively powerless minority community. Few Western Christians are aware of the degree of hardship faced by their co-religionists in the Holy Land, and the West's often uncritical support of Israel frankly baffles the Palestinian Christians who feel their position being eroded year by year. As Fr. Aristopoulos at the Martyrion put it: 'Had we been Jews and our churches been synagogues, the desecration we have suffered would have caused an international outcry. But because we are Christians no one seems to care.'
The day after I saw Fr. Philloumenos's axe-cleaved remains, I found a Christian Palestinian driver, Sami Fanous, who agreed to take me to see the cave at Ein Fara. I very much wanted to see the ruins of the lavra where Philloumenos used to visit his friend Fr. Alexandras, and where, fourteen hundred years earlier, John Moschos had retired to spend a decade of his life in silent meditation.
Since Alexandros's departure, the new Israeli settlement of Pharan had absorbed the cave, the spring and much of the surrounding countryside, and to get to the ruins we had first to get into the settlement. At its entrance, a massive yellow-painted electric steel gate blocked the road; on either side tangles of razor wire led off across the hills as far as the eye could see. Sami stopped the car and we were questioned by the guard. I showed him the monastery marked on a map, and he went off to a sentrybox with my passport. There he conferred with someone on a telephone. He replaced the receiver and came back to tell us to wait. After twenty minutes, the telephone rang, permission was granted, and we were waved through.
- From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium by William Dalrymple.
