Stations of the cross

On the other side of the mountaintop, there's a giant cross, and the path leading up to it has 14 marble shrines representing the Stations of the Cross.

I don't think I've thought about the Stations—representing the events in the Passion of Christ—for decades, but when I was in grammar school we went to the church every Friday afternoon during Lent to do the stations. It started with the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death, and ended with the Fourteenth, Jesus is laid in the sepulchre, and there was a set of prayers we recited for each station. Our family bible had a set of fairly disturbing and graphic paintings (I used to have nightmares about the Eleventh Station, Jesus is nailed to the cross) but the church just had fourteen metal plaques. I actually liked the Stations of the Cross liturgy, the chanted prayers and the Benediction at the end with incense and music, and especially coming out into the sunshine afterwards and getting to go home early.

I left the church intellectually and emotionally when I was still in high school, but you never forget the rituals. When I took the picture of the Third Station, I knew automatically that it depicted Jesus falling for the first time.

And there were goats

I'd mentioned that at Delphi we heard goats but never saw them. Filerimos made up for it; there were at least a dozen goats hanging out on the hillside with the peacocks.

View from the top

The monastery is on top of a mountain with beautiful views of the island on every side. The tunnel of cypresses leads from the monastery to the overlook where I took this picture.

Another day, another monastery

The Filerimos monastery in Rhodes. The monastery was built in the 15th century by the Knights of St. John; there's a ruined temple to Athena from the 3rd century BC in the front yard.

Bright sun at midday is never the best for photography, but when you're a tourist that's usually what you have. I could, and did, lighten the harsh shadows in this picture, but it looks as though it was taken in the evening. Which is actually a nice effect.

Cats in Greece

A cat outside the monastery walls because of course there was a cat.

Random things I saw at the monastery

Two more pictures I happen to like.

Icons

The icon on the right portrays Constantine and his mother, St. Helena. In general, I love that icons of saints usually show a kind of weary wisdom and weight of experience that I much prefer to the ecstasies of St. Teresa, for example. But St. Helena appears resigned to a greater than usual number of griefs.

The Katholikon

The church of the monastery was built in 1587. It's small, beautiful, and absolutely serene.

The refectory

This was also the scene of a mass slaughter during the battle—there are bullet holes in the door and you can see the marks of both swords and bullets on the tables.

And I had a hard time with that. I can understand wanting to memorialize what happened here, but this is still a working monastery. I imagine generations of monks eating at those tables, looking at the bullet holes, and it doesn't seem likely that they would have been filled with warm feelings for their fellow man.

It may be that I had been thinking too much about Gaza to feel comfortable with one more long-standing historical grudge, or to understand wanting to preserve every last bullet hole. Maybe how we remember is as important as what we remember.

The Bullet Tree

This is the courtyard of the monastery. It looks like something in the southwestern U.S. to me, with the peace of mid-afternoon when everyone has disappeared inside for a siesta.

Except for that little white arrow you can see on the old blasted tree on the right, which points to a bullet hole from the 1866 battle.

Arkadi Monastery

This monastery near Rethymnon was the focus of the tour. It's not only a beautiful place, but was the site of one of the more horrific episodes of the Cretan revolt against Ottoman rule in 1866. Hundreds of women and children had taken refuge in the monastery; after a battle lasting for two days, the Turks were able to enter the monastery.

This is how Victor Hugo described what happened:

“Finally the last resistance was broken through; the masses of the Turks took the convent. There only remained one barricaded room that held the powder and, in this room, next to the altar, at the center of a group of children and mothers, a man of eighty years, a priest, the hegumen Gabriel, in prayer...the door, battered by axes, gave and fell. The old man put a candle on the altar, took a look at the children and the women and lit the powder and spared them. A terrible intervention, the explosion, rescued the defeated...and this heroic monastery, that had been defended like a fortress, ended like a volcano.”