Holy man and holy priest,
This love of life makes me weak at my knees,
And when we get there make your play,
‘Cos soon I feel you’re gonna carry us away.
In a promised lie you made us believe.
For many men there is so much grief,
And my mind is proud, but it aches with rage,
And if I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die.
—The Kinks, “Strangers”
Of the British in Arabia, T.E. Lawrence saw two types: “Class one; subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner… In such a frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed.”
“Class two,” he continues, “the John Bull of the books, became more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that , on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddled self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits.”
I hover in Lawrence’s first category — as much as I can without a shared language — but even Lawrence, under that bloom of the desert, must digress to reminisce over England’s dreary skies; and there is something about Oregon which experience abroad brings into focus. It was developed so late in the history of American and human migration, by hands experienced in the craft of civilization or at least with a Midwestern model, and linked to a greater nation, so that it has cities without the need for a fully supportive agriculture. You can drive an hour from the center of Portland and find yourself not in farms but rainforest. It’s special: not better, just different: and because I was born there Oregon’s peculiarities will always be, in my mind, Home.
I had finished reading Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and his depiction of the Bedouin, who consider it effeminate to carry food on journeys of only 100 miles, and who ride for days with maybe a few hours of rest under their cloaks in a sandy hole, made me feel like a wimp for my presumptuous daily requirement of a shower and a bed. This in mind, I took a bus east to Prilep in mountainous Pelagonia to seek something more ascetic.
An Irishman told me about the little Macedonian town and the Monastery of Treskavec in the hills above, where, if you are willing to hike up to it, you can stay for free. Before leaving, not wanting to carry food, I gorged myself cheaply at a Macedonian restaurant, where random pointing yielded a Scopsco beer, a salad of tomatoes and cucumber, and a Macedonian pljeskavica, which is a large hamburger patty with cheese melted in the center, served with chili-paprika powder and a spicy chili-pepper fried in oil.
A taxi took me through the Roma gypsy slums until the paved road bled into dirt, and halfway to Dabnica I set off into the eastern foothills of Mount Zlato on foot. I toiled up an old pathway — here ruggedly paved with stones from the hill, here a sand track, and here just parallel ruts running and intersecting, as if the trail were losing a war of attrition with erosion — into the scrubby highland, and sometimes lost myself in the big clusters of smoothed stones that emerged from the hill like barnacles, or when the trail crossed an expanse of unbroken rock. The track became more verdant near the crest, thick with bushes and pines around the sparse springs, eternal in that land of seasons: cold winters, melting springs, dry summers, and humid autumns.
At the top, along the mountain’s long, hogbacked spine, which twisted south toward Prilep, were three high pillars of corrugated rock painted sea-green with moss, and wedged between two of these, the monastery. The trail passes around one pillar, called the Lion’s Head for its animalian face and regal mane of stone, where at a crossroads is a post with signs for the capitals of the world (10,500 kilometers to Los Angeles, 2000 to London, where I started my journey, and 9500 to Tokyo, where I intend to finish), and then winds up past a walled vegetable garden to the front door.
The monastery’s six wings are shaped like a G, with the domed roofs of the chapel encircled within: an old building with colorful frescoes but no lights, yet exploring the darkened corners with a candle makes them more mystical and alien. Once the priest was sermonizing from his high pulpit when a Turkish assassin tried to shoot him. The rifle missed, despite the close range, and crippled a wooden pigeon carved on the front of the pulpit, which still bears one wing. The rifle barrel hangs over the pulpit, and the body of the infidel Turk, turned to stone, can be seen under an eve in the inner wall of the narthex. The monks of Treskavec suffered further attacks, and found themselves massacred when they would not grant entrance to the Christian wife of a Turkish Bey. Repopulated after the liberation, but burned in 1990, there is now only one monk to tend the remote site — but I’ll get to that.
Travelers enter the monastery from the west side through a door in a tower that divides two two-storied wings. The outer wall is stone, and sheer on the eastern facade where it drops into a crevice; the inside white plaster and darkly-stained wood. On the southern side the building opens and leaves only a stone fence shrouded in grape vines. Because the wings are dissimilar in height and unevenly placed on the hillside, stairs connect the wide wooden balconies to one another. Doorways lead to kitchens and Spartan rooms, with metal beds piled with blankets on the dusty wood floors and pictures of Christ and the Saints on the wall. Each room has a wood-burning stove, and the chimneys turret the red-tiled roof.
Through small windows or lattices of glass, the inner wall faces the chapel in a courtyard of stone only drizzled with overgrowth, where there stands an oak, and under the oak a chained St. Bernard — defender of travelers — named Bruno, who defends the gate with a full third of Cerberus’ fury. A scratch on the neck renders the sentinel docile as a pup, but until then he barks savagely at all comers, including Father Sofrajni, the quirky proprietor and sole resident monk, in the beard and black robe of the order. He mildly asks no payment of his guests, who nonetheless feel obliged to leave donations in the chapel. The other lodgers were a motley crew of pilgrims, escape artists, and Dutch travelers. One was a Macedonian night club manager, bored with the daily similitude of drink, women, and planning events, who came to the monastery regularly, seeking mental clarity in its serene solitude. This time he sold his Honda, since the policia were after him.
In the archaic kitchen I met two Dutch families, traveling together, who did not so much invite me to eat with them as simply serve me food, with wine bought from the monastery. A French girl named Selene and her two Macedonian companions, Boris and Irana, got caught up in unflinching Hollander hospitality as well, and we scoured the dishes when through. It was dark after dinner, so I walked outside the monastery to look around. On the plain below glittered eddies and currents amid a sea of shadows; above, the white of the Milky Way. Something shone in the grass: bending close I saw a little crescent cocoon, lighted neon green at the tip like a Christmas tree light, and marked more in the lawn and under the rocks. It would have been silent if not for Dutch revelry, which persisted in spite of sobriety and parenthood, without losing any of its graces.
The next morning I went out to the Lion’s Head with Selene, Boris, Irana, and two urchins living in the monastery. Although one of them was in a cast to her elbow, we managed to climb up the south side of the Lion’s face to the rocky summit, not the highest point of Mount Zlato, but close. I saw Dabnica in a dale to the east; Krushevo in the crook of a ridge to the west, the highest town in the Balkans, where the locals threw rocks at the Turks after they ran out of bullets; and across the scoliotic spine of Zlato, six miles as the bird flies, the white and red expanse of Prilep. Looking north over the monastery I saw a red cross with letters underneath. Once the full slogan stated, “We are Tito’s, and Tito is ours,” but weather erased it down to the existential claim, “We are.” Climbing down the lion was more unsettling than climbing up.
We went into the chapel and looked over the cartoons. In the narthex were six brass stands, with one dish at the top and another half-way up filled with sand for candles. To pray for someone, you take a candle for each person — and many buy bundles — and deposit it lighted in the top tier if you pray for the living, or in the lower if you pray for the dead. An attendant comes around regularly to remove the low-burning prayers and put them in a bucket to be melted down in the candle factory that exists below each Orthodox chapel, made into new petitions, and recycled to the chapel for the next batch of pilgrims to burn. This makes the Orthodox candles either the holiest of wax or the filthiest of supplications, being marked and erased with as many names as a blackboard in a history classroom, so that even St. Peter might have trouble reading such transmissions.
At around 1, we started walking south along the ridge, a different and more consistent path than I had taken up. In some places we had to climb up or down steep rock faces by rope cables bolted to the stone, and at the end, after a steady descent, we marched back up some switchbacks to the Towers of Marko. According to the legend, the 14th century Serbian Prince Marko, who crossed lakes in a step, who wielded against the Turks a great Heraclean mace bigger than anything Braveheart could heft, who chose to die when guns were invented, that Prince Marko desired towers, and since all the men of Prilep were off fighting, he sent the women and children up the hill to haul stone until they perished of exhaustion. The walls and towers are still there, but bigger by far is a great fifty-foot metal cross that lights up at night.
On the way back to town, we passed another Macedonian monument: a twenty-foot rock which looks like an elephant from one side and a pterodactyl from the other. This is no small thing in Prilep. A construction crew busied about the final mortared shingles of a pathway around the rock, to a little circle of benched stones, taking care not to mess up the lights that illuminate the pachyderm at dusk. Beyond the town started, streets lined with racks of drying tobacco leaves to be sold to cigarette companies.
The 7:30 train to Skopje was another old workhorse with Hogwarts Express compartments and a restaurant car, which took almost three hours to travel the 120 kilometers as it stopped at every small town and in some random clearings. I wanted to take another train to Sofia, but unfortunately the track is incomplete, even after 20 years of mishandled construction. (The Balkans are like California in this respect and in others: elected celebrity leaders who seem an international punchline, anachronistic prejudice against and discrimination of minorities, IOU’s as state policy, asphalt cities that add 20 degrees to the temperature, and where is the Los Angeles to Las Vegas express? It’s taken as long to build as a railway in ex-Soviet countries). Anyway, I said goodbye to my friends at the station and went to get an overnight bus.
