! 



Photograph by H. G. Dwight 



ONE OF THE SACRED REEICS OF VATOPETHI : MT. ATHOS, GREECE 



Vatopethi is extremely rich in relics and church treasures of all kinds. One of the 

 most interesting of these is "a beautiful communion cup, of a reddish translucent stone, 

 supported by two gold dragons, which was the gift of the Emperor Manuel II Polseologus" 

 (see text, page 264). 



tinople in a black ship, the fathers were 

 filled with sorrow at having' been passed 

 by. That black ship, alas, will never 

 cruise in the Levant again, for it was the 

 Arabic, of recent unhappy renown. We 

 also had opportunity, through the friend- 

 liness of the monks, to see how some 

 of them lived — in big, clean, bare apart- 

 ments, furnished chiefly with endless 

 sofas. There they lead a sort of family 

 life, each elder keeping house with one 

 or more spiritual sons — younger monks, 

 novices, and boys devoted by their fami- 

 lies to the monastic life — maintaining 

 them and sometimes even sending them 

 away to school. 



HAD HE MOMENTS OF REGRET? 



We had the good fortune to become 

 especially well acquainted with two such 

 members of "families." One of them 

 was the assistant librarian, and the other 

 the keeper of the bema and of the prec- 

 ious furniture of the church. The latter 

 took the more trouble for us because he 

 had a brother in New York. Both peas- 

 ants by birth, for whom Mt. Athos prob- 

 ably represented a rise in the social and 

 intellectual scale, they had come as young 



boys to Vatopethi. The latter, in partic- 

 ular, made me wonder if he ever had 

 moments of regret. He was a powerful 

 young islander of the Marmora whom 

 one could more easily imagine in a uni- 

 form than in monastic skirts. But the 

 only trace of bitterness I found in him 

 was when he spoke of his lack of learn- 

 ing. Promised an education by his 

 "father," he had been kept year after 

 year in the service of the church — I sus- 

 pected on account of his good looks and 

 good voice — until it was too late for him 

 to go to school. 



Thanks to our acquaintance with this 

 very kind and intelligent monk, we were 

 free to prowl about the church at our 

 leisure. I might speculate with an air 

 of erudition — cribbed from French and 

 German Byzantinists — about the date of 

 this cruciform structure, the character of 

 its domes, the period of its frescoes, and 

 I know not how many other exact and 

 intricate points of archaeology. For my- 

 self, however, I was rather pleased that 

 the fathers, always a little romantic about 

 their own chronicles, assured us that it 

 was reared by the emperor Theodosius 

 the Great, whose son Arcadius they al- 



263 



