Walking To Jerusalem

Fırst Steps in Turkey

We left Mount Athos on Friday 7th April and travelled by boat, bus and then train to the Greek border town of Alexandropolis, where we arrived late that evening. Next morning, after shopping for food supplies, we caught a bus for the Turkish border and were dropped off on the side of the main road by the Greek border post. We showed our passports to the man at the check point and, hoisting our rucksacks on, struck out purposefully along the road, taking up our Journey where James had left off a few months before. We'd only walked a hundred metres when a soldier shouted at us to stop from his guard booth: appartently, we weren't allowed to cross the bridge over the River Maritsa (which forms the border between Greece and Turkey) on foot. Slightly deflated at such an early setback, we each begged a from someone and were driven across the bridge in convoy and dropped on the Turkish side. After a visit to the passport office to get our visas, we set off walking once again, and this time left the border behind us.

Our priority, as it has been since, was to get off the busy main road which was pretty unpleasant to walk along, and find a route across country along smaller roads and tracks. We were able to turn off down a smaller tarmacked road to a town called Ipsala. We were leaving the far side past a garage when two men shouted out to us and walked over. They asked in Turkish and with a gesture that's becoming very familiar to us - palms upturned in a quizzical shrug - where we were going. "Istanbul," we replied, making the internationally understood wiggle-your-two-fingers-like-they're-little-legs walking sign. They were flabergasted and somewhat bemused at the notion and shook their heads, pointing back the way we had just come. We walked a little way back and got our 1:500,000 scale map and compasses out to confer. The map had very little detail on it so we got out a black and white sheet of larger 1:200,000 scale military map from the 1930s that James had photocopied at the Royal Geographical Society (the Turkish military keep all decent scale maps to themselves) and agreed we must be walking in the right direction and so, rather embarassingly, had to walk past the garage and our would-be helpers, following our own route against their advice. We've become incredibly used to doing this since because while the Turkish are incredibly eager to offer you their help and advice, particularly with respect to directions, the directions they give are almost never the ones we want. They refuse to entertain the notion that we might want to walk a different route from that which one would drive and so always want to send us in the direction of the nearest dual carrıageway. Now when we're asked where we're going, we only give the name of the next village we are headed for. We did just this when an expensive looking four wheel drive pulled up by us on our way out of Ipsala along a dirt track and the young man in the passenger seat asked us - in excellent English - where we were going. When we were headıng for next village of Terpucular he just said, "Why?" "We're walking to Jerusalem."

We carried on walking along the road which soon turned into a dirt track that brought us to Tercupular. As soon as we took off our rucksacks to take a rest, we were surrounded by a crowd of kids and old men from the village. A large, jovial man with the obligatory moustache took the lead, introducing himself as Mehmed and ushered us across the road into a tea house. In the dingy, smoke filled interior, most of the village's male inhabitants seemed to be.

Mehment couldn't speak English and we could only manage about 3 words of Turkish, so we communicated in sign language and single words, hastily looked looked up in our phrase book. Luckily, we had our maps to explain what we were doing, but we weren't really sure if he could actually read them. He announced it to the room, to a mixture of laughter and sounds of disbelief. When we took our leave after two cups of tea, Mehmet went to pay but the owner refused payment. As we walked out of the village, two young boys ran up behind us and handed us a chocolate bar each, then walked with us half-way to the next village. We left feeling uplifted by the kindness of our welcome, which is typical of the way we have been received in almost every village we've been through since. The Turkish seem to have a culture of hospitality that simply doesn't exist in the UK. Sometimes it is actually a bit of a pain - if we accept every invitation to tea, we're never going to get to Jerusalem!

The Thracian landscape is pleasant, but unspectacular. The rolling hills covered in wheat fields land, you could be in Kent or Surrey, except for the odd shepherd driving his flock along the road. Sadly, there are constant reminders along the way of the region's troubled history in the last century. We've passed through several villages with ruined churches and through deserted hamlets, left over from the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s.

After 4 nights sleeping in the tent and five days of strenuous excercise, we were both beginning to stink. Luckily at this point, we came across a reasonably sized stream on the outskirts of a village.Stripping off enthusiastically, we jumped in to wash. We narrowly avoided been caught vigorously scrubbing our naked nether regions by two old women wandering along with their herd of cows. Not that there would have been much to see - the water was freezing.

Reaching the town of Banarli, after several days living off bread and cheese, we decided to go for a proper lunch and installed ourselves in the local tea house, with its ubiquitous sawdust strewn floor, posters of agricultural machinery on the wall and the ever-present portrait of Kemal Ataturk, founder and hero of modern Turkey. We had cold coke and a delicious "Kofte" (minced lamb sausage / meatball) sandwich, so good that we had a second each. We chatted (after a fashion) with the owner, Ali, who introduced us to his young son, Ghengis Khan. The small, bespectacled and painfully shy, little boy didn't quite live up to his name. We bought supplies in Ali's shop and when we went to pay, he refused to charge us for our substantial lunch. We continue to be overwhelmed by the kindness and hospitality that we've been shown.

Reaching the town of Karacakilavuz after another tea-filled day, we were determined to escape without accepting any more cups, to put a little distance between us and the town before pitching our tent. We were just congratulating ourselves as we reached the very edge of town, having managed to successfully turn down two invitations, when a car pulled up opposite, two young guys got out and practically begged us to come and have a cup of tea with them. They had driven out specially to get us. Faced with such over-whelming force, it would have been churlish not to accept.

The Holy Mountain

It's now nearly three weeks since we set off, so we felt it really was about time we sent in an update. Admittedly, we've only actually been walking for 11 days, but there's no point over stretching yourself early on...

We began with what seems to be becoming an annual ritual - a traditional pilgrim blessing from Fr Michael O'Boy in Westminster Cathedral after 9 am mass on Sunday 2nd April. From there, we headed off to Gatwick (via Tom's girlfriend Kate's parents house, who gave us a last hearty feed to lay down reserves before we set off).

We had decided to start out with a few days of quiet reflection in preparation for the journey ahead - a chance to 'decompress', to get rid of all the niggling things in our heads like 'Did I leave the iron on?' and 'should I really have left that irritatingly smug out of office alert?' and to prepare mentally (and practically - looking at maps etc.) for the road ahead. Wıth that in mind, we headed off for three days of retreat at the Monastery of Vaitopedi on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain.

We took the boat from Ouranopolis down the Western side of the peninsular and walked in the bright spring sunshine over the ridge from Zographou monastery, admiring the hillsides covered in wild flowers - a chance to break ourselves in gently for the rigours ahead. We arrived hot, sweaty and slightly blistered in time for lunch. The monks do not eat meat during normal time and during the season of lent, they are not even allowed fish. We therefore arrived to an austere meal of raw onions, dried fruit and nuts and steaming bowls of thick vegetable broth wıth bits of pasta. Bar the raw onions, it was actually very tasty.

We were met afterwards by Matthew, an American monk and a friend of a friend who kindly arranged for us to visit the monastery and looked after us whilst we were there, filling us in on the history of the monastery, explaining the rituals, showing us the monastery's most holy relics and generally ensuring we were in the right place at the right time.

According to legend, the monastery was first founded in the age of Constantine the Great (mid-4th Century), shortly after the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, and re-founded by the Emperor Theodosius in the late fourth century. After being sacked by pirates, it was refounded in the 10th century by 3 brothers from Adrianople (shortly after St Athanasius had founded the monastery of the Great Lavra, the leading monastery on the mountain), and it is from this time that the earliest records of the monastery begin. Whilst many have thought that the foundation legends of the monastery were just that, recent excavations have apparently revealed a large basilica-like church dating from about the 4th century in the grounds of the monastery. Vaitopedi is the second most important monastery on the mountain after the Great Lavra and is the largest in terms of buildings and occupants (with over 100 monks, many of them young) - a really thriving community. Prince Charles is a regular visitor and we had him to thank for the ease with which we crossed the peninsular - he comes for two weeks every year to clear the paths with the Friends of Mount Athos. This popularity comes at a price, however, and the monastery has to turn away many applying to visit. The abbot has been forced to take drastic, but eminently sensible, measures such as banning photography, children and the wearing of sports wear within the monastery walls.

The monastery has many important relics (amongst them a piece of the True Cross donated by the Serbian King killed at the battle of Kosovo and the mantle of the Virgin Mary) and icons which are objects of pilgrimage in their own right - much as similar objects in the Western Church would have been
in the Middle Ages. The difference being that in the Orthodox world, the monks and the laity still have a strong faith in the miraculous which in Northern Europe at least, with our worldliness, our cynicism and our belief in the ability of man to explain everything rationally, we appear to have lost. In the Orthodox world, the veil between God and Man seems somehow thinner and more porous. God makes himself felt more in people's lives. The relics and icons of Vaitopedi have been responsible for countless miracles in the past and one particular icon (a 17th Century depiction of the Virgin and Child) is still very much active today, credited with many cancer cures - including Russian children with Leukemia as a result of fall out from Chernobyl. Donations from those cured through hang in front of the icon in gratitude.

Our stay was not quite the restful retreat we had planned. Whilst we were there, the monastery celebrated its major feast day (the feast of the Annunciation, to which the church is dedicated), which involved us spending somewhere between 14 and 16 hours of our three day stay in the church. The celebrations culminated in a 15 hour vigil service beginning at 7pm on Thursday and finishing at midday on Friday.

The service was absolutely beautiful - we entered the church at dusk, to see the interior lit up with oil lamps- wıth a huge, brass chandelier spinning backward and forwards. The lamps revealed dimly the frescoes of saints painted on the walls of the church and picked out their golden halos - St George (spearing his dragon) and St Demetrius, the great military saints, assorted early church fathers and a beautiful mosaic of the Annunciation high on the Eastern wall of the church. The chanting began with two groups of cantors on opposite sides of the church huddled round their little pools of light to illuminate their music. A deacon walked between the two groups, passing the tune from side to side - a constant low, bagpipe like drone at the bottom and arpeggios of "kyrie eleisons" running up and down the scale over the top. The chanting continued, a very Eastern sounding lament, almost like the call of a muezzin, whilst the officiating monks went round the church blessing the church and congregation with incense and the presiding bishop sat enthroned imperiously over all.

We'd like to say that we lasted the distance, but after pretty much standing for the first four hours, we had to admit defeat and headed to bed. Even with the support of a monk's stall which Tom managed to bag at one stage, we couldn't keep up with the monks. The misericords are really cleverly designed - the occupant can half-sit whilst appearing to be standing, with additional support provided by some well positioned arm rests, allowing the monk to support himself as if on crutches.

Although we left early, we were up at 6 am to witness the culmination of the service. First, the monastery's fountain was blessed and the oldest and most precious icon, a beautiful Madonna and child thought to date from well before the 10th century, was paraded around the monastery. Each of the important buildings (laundry, bakery, guest rooms etc.) was blessed with incense and Holy Water from the fountain as the icon passed by. The whole ritual can have changed little in centuries. Finally, we returned to the church for the last 2 hours of liturgy, then decamped en-masse into the trapeza (dining room) for the feast. The previous day we had been able to have octopus, which is apparently excluded from the Lenten fast as it has no blood, but now as it was a feast day the Lenten rules were put aside and we had a delicious fish dish, retsina and a gooey, sticky honey and nut confection covered in chocolate for pudding. Perhaps saving this for the hot, stuffy bus journey back to Thessaloniki was not the best idea - sticky honey, nut and chocolate mess is difficult to clean.

We came away from the Holy Mountain perhaps not as rested as we would have liked to have been, but with a deep respect for the holiness and dedication of the orthodox monks who give their lives to God and certainly better prepared for the road ahead.