Around New Year’s Eve of 2014-2015, Herman and I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos with our sons. It was a very special experience because of the snowfall. The first night on the Holy Mountain it had snowed the whole night. The next morning, after breakfast we got involved in a snowball fight with the monks in Gregoriou. We reported on this on the weblog. (see post 1664 and post 1720 on this weblog.) That report generated a huge response; weblogs and news organizations took over the news in various forms.
The story received a new sequel in the late spring of 2023. I had signed up to maintain the old pilgrim paths with FOMA. On the boat from Ouranopolis to Dafni I had an amazing conversation with one of the other participants, Richard Devereux, from England. He told me that he had written a poem inspired by the snowball-throwing monks. He had seen a photo of the event. Of course I was immediately interested in the poem and I told him about our experiences in the winter of 2015. Very much to his surprise as well. We decided to exchange information. Richard sent the photo that inspired him. We checked the picture. It was taken by Herman Voogd, during the snowball fight in Gregoriou. The photo was not used in our initial weblog post on this subject, but on a later one (post 1720). So it was distributed in the digital world and Richard picked it up. A number of sites had used the photo, so we found out. Richard remembered another trigger for his poem: “I stayed at Grigoriou Monastery for four nights in September 2022 with the Friends of Mount Athos. In the evenings we spent time with Father Damianos, a bookbinder, who is an English monk who has lived there for about 30 years. One evening I asked him how he found winter on Athos and, specifically, if there were snowball fights and snowmen. He said there were – it was the young monks who did it”.
Anyway. It is more than just a unexpected chain of events. How the snowball fight inspired us for a web log post, how that post found its way through the digital world, how it was picked up by an Englishman who was inspired to write a poem about the event. And how all of that came together by a change meeting on the ferry to Dafni.
With the author’s permission, we are pleased to publish his:
Winter on Athos
As Winter opens wide her arms
To embrace and hold the Holy Mountain,
Blizzarding snow impedes and slows
The ascent of the Jesus Prayer to Heaven.
The fall is deep. Walls built to keep
Pirates out, now gird and insulate
Against the plunder of pitiless cold
That threatens to snatch the frail and old.
A hungry wolf comes warily down
And pads the path to a hermit’s cell.
At night, the shrieks of jackals slice
The muffled banks of steep ravines.
Down one of which Leigh Fermor fell,
Not twenty yet. He spoke with Death
But a guardian angel lifted him out
And delivered him to a roaring hearth.
Above the pantile roofs, there rose,
In winters past, high wisps of smoke,
Gentle grey against the white,
From fires where fingers splayed for heat.
Young tonsured monks and novices,
When a depth has settled, are kids again –
Someone starts a snow-ball fight
And the black robes are soon white-splattered.
What they need is a snowman friend:
One grabs a shovel, another a carrot
And a Jack-the-lad dares to hang
A monk’s black veil from the frozen crown.
But they don’t have the Abbot’s Blessing.
This spells trouble. He has seen their games;
And decided to turn an indulgent eye,
Sure that God will be smiling too.
Richard Devereux
(Richard send us an explanation of Leigh Fermor: “The reference in the poem to ‘Leigh Fermor’ is to Patrick Leigh Fermor, a great English travel writer. He walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1935. He spent his 20th birthday there. He had a fall in snowy conditions and almost died. This is told in his book ‘The Broken Road’. In 1944, in the Second World War, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a British officer and, with the help of resistance fighters, the antartes, kidnapped a German General, Heinrich Kriepe, and smuggled him over the mountains and by boat from the south coast to Egypt.”)
Bas Kamps