Stanislav Senkin - The Perfect Monastery. Athos stories

The collection “Repentance of Agasfer” continues the cycle of Athonite stories by the young writer Stanislav Senkin. His first book, “Stolen Relics,” went through several reprints in a short period of time. Stanislav Senkin was born in 1975. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University and worked in his specialty. Traveled widely in Russia and other Orthodox countries. He lived on Holy Mount Athos for three years. In his stories, the author, without avoiding modern artistic techniques, tells about the life of a unique “ monastic republic" Filled with humor, love and subtle knowledge of the life of the Holy Mountain residents, the new collection of stories will be of interest to both the churchgoer reader and the neophyte just beginning to take an interest in Orthodoxy.

A series:Athos stories

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by liters company.

Golden cross

The patronal feast of the Russian Panteleimon Monastery was always joyful, as befits a good holiday. This time too, fun seemed to be in the air, mingling with the smell of incense and the ringing of censers. A lot of people came - it was overwhelming: Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks - everyone came to honor the memory of the holy great martyr and healer Panteleimon. And, although the ascetic Svyatogorsk elders do not approve of frequent walking on the thrones, not without reason believing that they weaken the ascetics, but occasionally visiting panigirs is considered a matter of honor and love on Athos.

Frequent “walkers”, those who appeared on Agripnia for the sake of entertainment or gluttony, already recognized each other and shyly hid their faces, feeling guilty for their idleness.

Some people loved panigirs for the delicious food, others for the opportunity to participate in a magnificent Athos service, or to sing Byzantine hymns, a lot and from the heart. Some, especially the Keliot hermits, wanted to communicate on spiritual topics or just gossip, while others wanted to pray and honor the memory of this or that saint, ask him for help in temptations or money to repair a cell.

Now a special part of the service was ending - kathisma: reading the psalter. Although in Greek "kathisma" means "to sit", the Greeks, bowing to authority Holy Scripture, stood at the kathismas. The Russian monks sat there, believing that this was how it was supposed to be. On the canon it’s the opposite: the Greeks sat down, and the Russians rose from their seats. Such small differences caused some suspicious monks to doubt the Orthodoxy of colleagues of other nationalities.

The kathismas were already ending and the psaltos were getting ready to sing sedalny (everyone stood up here - both Greeks and Russians), soon the polyeleos, one of the most solemn places of Agrypnia, would begin. The sexton lit candles on the choir and used a long pole to swing it. These gilded chandeliers, swinging from side to side during the polyeleos, serve as a wonderful symbol of the joy of the heavenly bodies: the sun, stars and moon.

The monks sang the polyeleos into two choirs:

- Praise the name of the Lord, praise the Lord, servants! Hallelujah! Those standing in the temple of the Lord, hallelujah!

The honorary guests of the monastery this year were the old abbot of Xenophon and four bishops from Russia. One of them, Archbishop Misail, brought a gift to the monastery - a large altar cross made of pure gold.

This was not a simple gift - the cross symbolized the recognition by the Patriarch and the Holy Synod of the works of the Athonite abbot and showed how much attention the Russian Orthodox Church pays to the reviving Russian Athonite monasticism. The Council of Elders decided to move the cross to the monastery sacristy after the celebration subsided.

The archbishop handed over the cross two days ago in Panteleimon Cathedral. That day, before the presentation, he gave a speech in which he admitted to the brothers and fathers of the monastery that, while still studying at the seminary, he wanted to become a novice under Father Jerome, the abbot of the monastery, and dreamed of going to the Holy Mountain. But the Lord judged differently, and to him, the current Archbishop Misail, Mother Church entrusted the helm of a large diocese. Father Jerome kissed the cross with emotion and, mincing like an old man, took it to the altar.

On the holiday, not only distinguished guests came to the monastery - all Russian orphans could visit the monastery today, without fear of being sent back to the orphan “Shatalova Hermitage”. They were settled, although not without delay, in the huge building of the monastery archondarium, where, while waiting for Little Vespers, they discussed the latest Svyatogorsk news.

The Russians on Mount Athos behaved differently from, for example, the Romanians. If the latter stuck to each other and helped the only begotten in every possible way, the Russians, on the contrary, “divided” the Svyatogorsk territory, like predators. And, although they were also friends with each other, their friendship was of some kind of competitive nature. The Greeks joked about this, saying that Russians are like lions - lazy, proud and busy only with fighting for territory.

Among the Russians who arrived at the monastery was a professional thief.

“This establishment is somewhat like a prison,” he thought, looking around the monastery. - True, they are sitting here voluntarily...

A thief named Alexey arrived at the Holy Mountain as a pilgrim before dark. The tip that a golden cross weighing more than two kilograms was being brought to the monastery from Russia was given to him by two Pontic brothers, with whom he had common business in Thessaloniki. One of them promised to help sell the golden cross for a small percentage.

Alexei stood in one of the front stasidias, carefully and carefully examining the temple premises. Everything went exactly as the Pontian described - he once had the opportunity to attend a similar service. After the vigil, which he estimates will end in ten hours, everyone will go to rest before the liturgy for three to four hours. After the vigil, Alexei will hide behind the banners. If they find him, he can always pretend to be a dozing pilgrim - it’s no wonder he won’t fall asleep in ten hours. But if it remains undetected, then sneaking into the altar and stealing the cross will be a piece of cake.

The most difficult thing will be to get out of the temple unnoticed; to do this you need to mix with the crowd before they discover that you are missing. If this succeeds, and Alexey believed in his luck, all that remains is to climb over the wall behind the fraternal building, and that’s all - look for the wind in the field! The Pontian described in detail to Alexey how to get away from the Holy Mountain, bypassing the ferry, on which a police check would be inevitable. This path passed through the vineyards to the road leading to Ierisso. Well, his Pontian accomplice will already be waiting for him there.

Having looked around and drawn up a plan of action, Alexey, in order to pass the time, began to stealthily look at the crowd that filled the temple to capacity.

The faces were mostly joyful, only the Greeks frowned with displeasure while listening to Russian singing. They especially did not like the first tenors - the Greeks believed that they had “female” voices, and some even grumbled and mimicked Russian singers.

Alexey liked our choral singing more than Greek. While listening, he recalled how, even before his first conviction, he would come to church from time to time, light candles and listen to the choir. These memories, although they brought Alexei into a state of tenderness, did not diminish his determination to steal the cross.

Towards the end of the polyeleos, Alexey moved to the outermost stasidia of the right choir. The vigil was already ending, and the monks, going out into the middle of the temple, began to sing some hymns. Alexey yawned and, feeling for a set of master keys in his pocket, hid in the very corner.

Finally, the vigil ended, the monks, guests and pilgrims began to leave the temple, and pretty soon only the thief and the sexton remained in the building, whose duties included extinguishing the lamps. He did this with a special fan, since it is impossible to blow out candles and lamps - this is considered irreverent, and some lamps hung very high. When the sexton finished with the front part of the temple, Alexey tiptoed to the large bishop's stasidia and hid behind it. The two small wooden griffins guarding the stasidia at its foot seemed to glance angrily at the thief.

Having finished, the sexton, a heavyset red-haired deacon, leisurely left, closing the large temple door behind him. Alexey waited a little more, carefully looked out from behind his hiding place and, having looked around carefully, went to the northern altar door.

Taking a set of master keys from his pocket, Alexey felt the well-known pleasant excitement that always accompanied his illegal acts, and bent down to the keyhole to determine exactly what master keys were needed...

Suddenly there was a quiet tinkling sound somewhere near him. Alexei quickly straightened up and, looking back, saw a monk standing at the southern door, looking at Alexei in fear. In his hand he held a ring with many keys strung on it.

The monk was the first to speak.

- Hey! What are you doing here?! The service is long over! – he hesitantly but rudely called out to Alexei.

- I’m a pilgrim, so I fell asleep during the service... And you... are probably a sexton?

- I’m a sexton...

“Father sexton, then open the door for me, please, so I can go and rest before the liturgy.”

The monk scratched the back of his head and looked around somehow strangely.

Alexey, squinting, watched him - he was clearly nervous.

“Well, stop fooling around,” Alexey approached the stranger. “I know what the local sexton looks like, but you don’t look very much like him—where’s the red beard?” glasses? – He looked at his drooping interlocutor, grinning.

He continued to remain silent.

“I think you and I came here for the same purpose.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” the stranger finally responded, nervously pinching his beard and looking away.

“You know,” Alexey continued, “I need a cross, and, as I understand it, you need it too?”

The monk sighed heavily.

- May the Lord forgive me.

They were silent.

- Great! – Alexey continued, grinning. - Well, what are we going to do? Shall we cut it in half?

- Of course not! – A reverent fear appeared in the monk’s eyes. - This is blasphemy. Come on, let's cast lots: whoever wins takes the cross, whoever loses takes the rest. Well, whatever he can carry. This is also a considerable loot.

Alexey thought about it.

- Fine. Let's draw lots. Just tell me, I’m not a believer, and for me stealing this cross is a piece of cake. I'm not afraid of any capital punishment for sacrilege, and the only thing that scares me is the police on my tail. Well, it seems that you are not as far from the faith as I am, but your desire to steal this cross, it seems to me, is no less than mine.

The thief in the cassock sighed heavily.

“I don’t know if I need to talk about all this, but since this is the case... in general, in a nutshell, I didn’t make a monk.” I worked hard on myself, prayed all night long, and in the end I realized that it didn’t mean anything... Only the one to whom you obey wins, wins by getting another slave. But the novice himself does not gain anything spiritual in return. They don’t take me to a Russian monastery anymore, much less to a Greek one. Once they hired me as a worker at a Romanian monastery, but the monastery boss took a dislike to me and began to pester me so much that I ran away from there two days later. But I tried to do as he said, but he still kicked me like a mangy dog. And now, I’ve been wandering around the mountain for two years now... I don’t even have the money to return to my homeland and I think I’m starting to believe that I really am... a mangy dog. In short, sacrilege is now... not a problem for me.

The unfortunate monk completely drooped, which did not really fit with his last words.

Alexey nodded.

– I will summarize, with your permission. Having figured out the system, you wanted to receive compensation for your suffering... Right? – And, without waiting for an answer, he continued. – So, here is a one euro coin. Europe will fall out - yours took it, Alexander the Great will fall out - my cross. Well, how?

The monk sighed heavily again and tugged at his unkempt beard.

“I would, of course, prefer to write two notes and put them behind the icon, but time is running out.” Let's just go into the altar first, see what kind of cross it is, maybe it's even gilded, and then we'll cast lots. Fine?

Alexey grinned.

-What is that in your hand?

The monk held up a bunch of keys.

– I stole it from the monastery workshop, I thought I would be able to find the key.

– A professional, you can see it right away! Let me do it better.

The monk lowered his hand, loudly clanking a pile of different-sized keys, and an offended expression appeared on his face.

Alexey wiped his hands with a handkerchief, put on latex gloves, selected two small master keys from his bunch, and a few moments later the northern doors were open. The attackers, after standing on the threshold for a while, one after another entered the holy of holies of the Panteleimon Temple. Alexey grinned when he saw how the thief in a cassock made several bows in front of the throne, but refrained from making a sarcastic joke about this. They removed the cover from the throne and began to closely examine the skillfully cast cross.

As far as Alexey could judge, it was indeed made of pure gold.

The thief in a cassock asked reverently:

- Well, professional, shall we take it? And when we leave the temple, we’ll cast lots to see who God will give to own this cross.

“Listen,” Alexey answered contemptuously, “at least don’t drag God into this.” In some matters, and in such matters, it seems that God is not at all in charge. I knew one of these in the zone. He also said: God, God. And you…

Alexey didn’t finish. The small door leading to the altar directly from the sexton suddenly opened, and Abbot Jerome entered the Holy of Holies.

The attackers froze, holding the cross in outstretched hands, as if greeting the Father Superior with a blessing gesture. Jerome stopped dead in his tracks, but did not lose his composure. Approaching the thieves, frozen in surprise, he kissed the cross and, freeing it from the hands of the unsuccessful thieves, placed it back on the throne. Having covered it, he finally addressed them as if nothing had happened:

- My prayer books! What are you doing here?

- Us? “Alexey was the first to recover from his fright. - We're stealing the golden cross.

The abbot, squinting, looked at the professional thief, raised up forefinger and spoke edifyingly:

- That’s it, a monastery cross, and I can’t give it to you! Don't you understand what you've encroached on? This is a shrine! The cross, you see, they want to steal! If you do something like that again, I will forbid you to go to the monastery, understand?

The accomplices were silent. Waving his hand in their direction, Father Jerome walked over to the refrigerator standing in the corner and looked into it.

- Why did I come? – sounded dully from the depths of the refrigerator. “I wanted to check if the prosphora was there.” Sometimes this happens - he forgets the prosphora and doesn’t bring it.

The abbot closed the door, turned around and, seeing the thieves who had not moved, hurried them on.

- That's it, servants of God, let's get out of here, you won't have time to rest before the liturgy. And after the meal you will come to my cell. I'll talk to you there. Come on, come on, quickly. – The abbot began to push them towards the exit. - I have to serve tomorrow.

The abbot closed the door to the altar from the outside and led the thieves through the small porta, since the larger one was closed.

- Rest, we'll talk tomorrow.

The thieves, who began to come to their senses from amazement, went to the archondarik. On the way, Alexey asked his accomplice:

- Listen, won’t the abbot pawn us to the police?

- Should not. I think that all this happened to us not without the will of God. Do you think this makes sense?

Alexey didn’t answer...

...They were late for the liturgy, but they had time for a hearty meal, where they tasted good monastery wine and simply, but surprisingly tasty, cooked fish and octopus.

After eating, they began to wait for the abbot to be free. We had to wait a long time: first, the abbot and his brothers accepted congratulations from the bishops and guests, then there was a religious procession, during which the thief in a cassock was given obedience to carry a banner with the image of Jesus Christ.

Finally, the attackers managed to approach the abbot. He looked at them not very friendly, which, in general, was quite understandable, given yesterday's incident. The abbot waved his hand menacingly and invited them to follow him. Rising to the second floor of the fraternal building, they entered the cell of Father Jerome. He took a large old notebook from his desk and, putting on glasses with thick lenses, began leafing through it.

- Here! – he pointed his finger at his notes. – Read here.

The novice took the notebook and read aloud:

– Which saints should we pray to to get rid of the sin of theft? Venerable Moses Murin and Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker.

– Remember or write it down? – The abbot looked at Alexei and took the pen. – I’ll write it down, after all.

Having received the abbot's blessing and holding pieces of paper with the names of saints in their hands, discouraged Alexey and his accomplice went on the ferry and talked until they reached Ouranoupolis.

- You know, a strange man this abbot,” Alexey said thoughtfully, continuing the conversation.

– Yes... I thought about him in different ways, but now I am more and more convinced that he is a saint. After all, holiness is not at all what people expect. How do you think?

– I don’t know, I’m generally far from all this.

The ferry, meanwhile, arrived at Ouranoupoli, and the passengers spilled onto land. The monk pointed to a tower standing near the sea.

– The Turks hanged monks here who did not want to convert to Islam. Let's go, let's go?

The newly made friends headed towards the tower, but, not reaching their goal a few meters, Alexey suddenly stopped.

- Look!

Next to them on the sea side, sandwiched by stones, lay several banknotes. Alexey picked them up:

- Oh, brother, there are three hundred euros! How come they weren’t washed away by the sea!

The failed thieves stood silently for a minute.

“What do I think, brother,” Alexey patted the novice on the shoulder. – This money still won’t be enough for me to have a good vacation, as I planned, but you... buy yourself a ticket to Russia and come back.

He became serious.

- You know, I think this is cowardice. So what if they drive me all over the mountain? Didn’t Christ call me to endure hardships for the sake of love for Him? I’ll probably stay on Mount Athos for some more time. As the Scripture says, “he who endures to the end will be saved.” So, I will endure it until the Greeks deport me.

– Well, then we’ll divide it in half or cast lots: Europe took yours, Alexander the Great took my money.

The novice looked at Alexei conspiratorially.

– I have another idea.

- Spit it out...

...Three weeks later, the abbot of the St. Panteleimon Monastery received a parcel without a return address. It contained a cupronickel silver altar cross. The elder, accompanied by the sexton, reached the altar and placed the gift on the throne. The abbot ordered the red-bearded deacon to take the former cross to the sacristy, where the nearly stolen, sparkling gold cross was now kept...

This anonymous gift was many times more significant for the elder than the gift from Archbishop Misail. He said that two more restless souls found faith, which is real gold for the soul.

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The given introductory fragment of the book Repentance Agasfer. Athos stories (S. L. Senkin, 2008) provided by our book partner -

In his book “Athos Tales,” the famous sectologist and Church historian A.L. Dworkin appears to the reader from an unexpected side. A collection of short stories-memoirs, incidents from life, parables, one way or another connected with Athos and with the people the author met there - that’s what this book is. The light, relaxed tone of the oral history does not in the least interfere with the conversation about the most important things for a Christian - about prayer, humility, asceticism; ultimately - about the thirst for God and the desire to find and maintain communication with Him... At the same time, the reader has something to smile at - the precise and gentle humor of the book makes the text lively and very relatable.

RUSSIAN MONASTERY

The Panteleimon Monastery was then, during my first visit to Athos (summer 1981), in terrible desolation. Like an abandoned, devastated city. At the beginning of the century, about three thousand monks lived there. But after the revolution there were almost no replenishments, except perhaps from among the emigrants. True, in the early seventies, a small group of monks from Soviet Union, and shortly before my first arrival, the second group arrived there. They did not want to let them out of the USSR, because the monks who settled on Mount Athos received Greek citizenship, and this actually meant emigration. On the other hand, the Greek authorities were very suspicious of immigrants from the Soviet Union. As a result, only about twenty monks lived in the huge monastery at that time, half of whom were very old. Therefore, it was impossible to maintain order throughout the vast territory, in all buildings. Several huge buildings stood burnt out after terrible fires and looked out at the world through blackened empty window openings.
The few guests of the monastery were accommodated in a hotel, which was then in terrible condition - like a New York slum. Now renovated, it shines with tiles and whitewash and is filled to the brim with pilgrims. The hotel building is located outside the monastery. But since I was, firstly, Russian, and secondly, a student at the Theological Academy, I was allowed into the monastery itself, and I lived in the monastic cell.

The premises, it seemed to me, were too much even for three thousand people, building, building, building... And how many guest rooms and apartments there were for the most honorable pilgrims! You could wander the corridors endlessly: go, for example, into the living room where generals were received, into the special grand-ducal apartments, the bishop's reception room... Nothing has changed since then: the same portraits hung on the walls, the same papers lay spread out on the table; you could just take it out, leaf through it, look at some records, touch things that had remained untouched since then... In the monastery library, I could leaf through handwritten books of the 10th and 11th centuries, written on parchment, with illustrations - then, what is kept in museums under bulletproof glass. I had the opportunity to read the manuscript of the memoirs of the future Archbishop of Brussels Vasily (Krivoshein), who in the period between the two wars was a resident of the monastery and served as a librarian. I read these notebooks, covered in the clear and clear handwriting of an outstanding theologian of our time and future bishop, for a day or a day and a half, and it was impossible to tear myself away. Of course, now this work has already been published, and everyone can find and read it. But this was the first - the most direct, from recent memory, edition of the book - the manuscript of an Athonite monk.

ATHONS PURITY

In general, Athos is an amazing place. Partly because when you imagine a community where there is not a single woman, where there are only men, the image that emerges is, say, a bachelor’s apartment: with burnt scrambled eggs in a frying pan, scattered clothes, where everything is upside down and cobwebs in the corners. But on Athos it’s completely different. This is ideal order, ideal cleanliness. This is some kind of special, amazing, cordial attitude towards each other. Of course, like all places on our sin-stricken land, Athos is far from ideal. But, in my opinion, this is a place where everything is somehow closer to ideal. The feeling of the prayerfulness of this soil does not leave you for a minute - whether you are standing in a Byzantine temple that has not changed at all since the time of construction, whether you are climbing into the mountains past a hermit’s dwelling, or whether you are sitting in the library of a ten-century-old monastery...

BYZANTINE TIME...

The whole inner life of Athos is a completely special life, essentially the same as in Byzantine times - without electricity, without cars... This was the case back in the 80s, now, unfortunately, a lot has changed...

Counting time is also Byzantine. Midnight is sunset, and all other time is counted from sunset. And every month the clocks fail, because every month the sunsets in different time. At the same time, the time differs in different monasteries, because some are located closer to the sea, others are high in the mountains. In general, time on Athos seems to be motionless.

RUSSIA'S CONTRIBUTION

It's amazing how much Russian was invested in Athos. In any, even the “most Greek” monastery, you always find something from Russian culture: are there gifts royal family(not necessarily the last, maybe earlier generations), Russian dishes, samovars, something else... The connection with Russia is constantly felt. Or suddenly you find out that the monastery was on fire and was rebuilt with money raised in Russia.

FLOWER IN A GLASS

The feeling of this specialness of the place also comes from the fact that each person tries to fulfill the desire of the other, before this desire is expressed out loud. In response, you also try to guess the other person’s desire and fulfill it ahead of schedule. And such service to one’s neighbor brings amazing, special joy. I remember one episode. We arrived on Athos together with my friend, Orthodox American Jeffrey MacDonald (this was my second trip, in the summer of 1982).
We spent one night in the Pantokrator monastery. We sat on the balcony until late - that is, until it got completely dark - talking with the resident of the monastery - a Greek monk. Then we went to our cells, and when we were already going to bed, there was suddenly a knock on the door. We open it - it turns out that it is the same monk who spoke to us. He brought us a glass of water, and in the glass there was a huge, still closed flower bud. He said: “You put it on the window. In the morning, when it dawns, it will open, and the first thing you will see when you return to your cell after the liturgy is an open flower.” With that the monk left.
It was so amazing, so different from the outside world... On Athos, it was completely natural that a person simply wanted to please guests with the beauty of a flower.

MARINES

Here, the rules of worship of medieval Byzantine Christianity have been preserved almost unchanged. Temples are lit only by candles and lamps. A significant part of the service takes place almost in complete darkness- Let's say, monks read the Six Psalms only from memory. Many other parts of the service are also recited by heart. Midnight Office and Matins begin in the dark, since night is the time when the monks are awake. The world is sleeping, the forces of darkness dominate in the darkness, and the monks, the warriors of Christ, go out into battle, protecting and guarding us all.

One American professor of anthropology made a very interesting comparison, especially for an unjustly famous person, drawing a parallel between the monasticism he knew and the army units. “If the French Benedictines can be compared to the infantry, and the Italian Franciscans, undisciplined and reckless, to the Air Force, then the Athonite monks are the marines, with their strict discipline and the most difficult tests in preparation. But this elite, always in in the best possible shape The fighters are not afraid of any enemy!"

DAY Routine... AND NIGHT

In different monasteries, the morning service begins differently, according to our time - from half past two to half past three, and continues, accordingly, until half past six - half past eight in the morning, when the liturgy ends. In Greek monasteries, each monk usually receives communion three times a week, so there are many communicants at each liturgy. After the service, if it is not a fast day, the monks disperse to perform their obediences and gather for breakfast around noon. Then usually a day's rest: as in many hot countries, sleep on Mount Athos is divided in half - a little at night, a little in the hottest time of the day. After this, obedience again, closer to sunset - vespers, for about an hour, then dinner. If it is a fast day, then this is the first and last meal. If it’s not a fast day, then usually for dinner they often eat the same thing they ate for breakfast, only it’s cold. After dinner - Compline. When it gets dark, the gates are closed, and then each monk calculates his own time - after all, there is also an individual evening cell rule. And even if the service begins at half past two in the morning, the monks wake up no less than an hour before to perform their cell duties. morning prayer.
On holidays they serve an all-night vigil, in the literal sense of the word - it lasts all night. The longest service I have ever attended lasted about sixteen hours: Great Vespers began at approximately eight in the evening, and the liturgy ended around noon. But that was the patronal holiday of the monastery. A typical all-night vigil lasts seven to eight hours.
I heard many times on Mount Athos that such an intense prayer life does not go “with impunity” - if a person spends all his time in church, if he prays all the time, opens his thoughts every day, if he, even without being good, always strives to be so, he can't help but begin to change for the better...

TASTE OF BREAD WITH QUINCE

Food on Mount Athos is very simple, lean. The monks themselves eat very little; on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays they have only one meal a day, but for guests they arrange an additional one - after the morning service. For breakfast, herbal tea, bread, and jam are usually served. Bread made from wholemeal flour is baked once a week or every ten days and eaten until it runs out, and only after that a new one is baked. Therefore, Athonite bread is usually stale. But one day I came to the morning meal, where there was freshly baked bread, still hot. In addition to bread, tea and quince jam were served. As usual, I spread jam on the bread, took a bite and was completely frozen by the sensation of the amazing intensity of the taste - it was so unexpected, even though it was the simplest things.

We are accustomed to simple things in our lives, we don’t notice them, we don’t feel their taste at all, we don’t feel the joy that they bring us - we always want something more complex, exquisitely refined, which quickly also becomes boring, and so on without end. But that breakfast, after several weeks of living on Mount Athos, seemed to rediscover the beauty of the simplest things, and I must say that I have never had a more delicious breakfast in my life.

CHUVASH PSALTIR

On Athos, I learned a lot about church life in Russia: living in exile, I, in fact, knew nothing at all about church life in the provinces, about the life of ordinary believers. I really remember a conversation with one young deacon. He was Chuvash. Everyone in their family was very faithful to Orthodoxy. He talked about how he and his mother and his other siblings went to church as a child. The nearest church was forty kilometers from their village. There were no buses, we walked. We left on Friday morning and reached the place by Saturday evening.
They walked through the snow, through bad weather, spent the night somewhere near the temple and the next morning went to the liturgy. This deacon also showed me handwritten books that his younger sister had prepared for him when she found out that he was leaving for Athos. There was a Service Book in Chuvash, copied by hand, the same handwritten Psalter, and something else... The girl wanted to rewrite the entire New Testament, but heard from someone that the New Testament in Chuvash had already been published by the Bible Society and it was easy get it abroad. Then it turned out that the Bible Society had not yet republished the Chuvash New Testament.
To be honest, over these general notebooks with oilcloth covers, over these incomprehensible words written in Cyrillic, I shed tears. This is a real feat of faith, which is rarely seen these days! The girl was sixteen years old. I imagined her - what she could do: go somewhere, somehow communicate with peers, run to discos, or sit long evenings, copying - so that her brother could read it on native language. Moreover, everything was rewritten with a ballpoint pen, in two colors - red and blue, in a very smooth, beautiful, although childish, handwriting. I remember from my childhood: you try to write something more beautiful. The first lines come out - a sight for sore eyes! And then the letters begin to turn out crooked and blots appear, and the lines begin to dance... But in these notebooks everything was wrong: the handwriting was beautiful and even from beginning to end, but there were no blots at all! The deacon said that after the revolution, nothing of Orthodox literature was published in Chuvash, so at home, if they served in their native language, they either used dilapidated pre-revolutionary books or copied them.

TESTER

Another monk told me about his friend, a deacon from Russia. He was a test pilot, checking the plane. The plane went into a tailspin and fell to the ground. The pilot was an unbeliever, never thought about God, and suddenly, flying in a corkscrew downward, he remembered how his grandmother talked about St. Nicholas. He managed to say to himself: “Saint Nicholas, help!” And suddenly the plane turned around near the ground, and it softly landed on its wheels. The pilot was in a state of shock. He was pulled out of the car, he could neither bend nor straighten up. A few days after he came to his senses, he said that he would serve God in the Church. Naturally, everyone tried to dissuade him; his wife refused to follow him. He resigned and became a monk.

IS IT EASY TO BE A MONK

One day - on my fourth trip to Athos - already from Russia, in 2001 - an acquaintance of mine, an entrepreneur, a fairly wealthy man, began asking a monk of a Greek monastery about his life. He kept wanting to know how difficult it was to be a monk. To this, the monk (a Frenchman who converted to Orthodoxy from a good old family) told him that being a monk is very simple; The hardest thing is to become a monk, to decide on it. Since he has been a monk, every day is a holiday for him: the entire burden of everyday worries has been removed from him, he can calmly reflect on his spiritual life, talk with God, pray to God. Life in the world is much harder: you need to think about your daily bread, you need to feed your family, and this is a constant distraction. He said that he admires the feat of those Christians who live in the world and respects them very much, because in this sense his life is incomparably easier.

DYING CONFESSION

I remember confession in the Grigoriou Monastery. Then (in 1981) Abbot Georgy, who is still alive today, told me one story. He happened to take a dying confession from a priest in a small town in Greece. The priest had two children with a very large age difference - the eldest son and a much younger daughter. The son went to Athens to study, and a tragedy happened to him - he died. The young man's body was found in a deserted place. All that was clear was that he had been beaten to death. Although the son was very religious and led a pious life, no cross was found on him. And this absence of the cross greatly tormented the soul of the unfortunate father. The killers were not found then, the crime remained unsolved.
Time passed, the priest's daughter grew up and she had a fiancé. The young man, older than her, went to their house and was well received. The priest, by then widowed, liked him. But somehow he did not dare to propose. After some time, when it was already obvious that they loved each other, the groom asked the priest for confession. He agreed, and the young man admitted that he fell in love with his daughter and their family, but must say that he is unworthy of them, because he is a murderer. At one time, quite a long time ago, he was in bad company, they went on a spree, and late at night they pestered some young man - and this was in Athens. He began to admonish them, appeal to their conscience, which made them even more embittered, they began to beat him and beat him to death. Then the groom, the youngest of that company, out of some kind of arrogance, tore off the golden cross from the young man, which he still carries with him. With these words, he showed the priest a cross, in which he recognized the missing baptismal cross of his son. At that moment, it seemed to the priest that the floor was disappearing from under his Feet, and he himself almost fell. He prayed for God to give him strength. And the young man continued: “You see, a person rejected by God like me cannot be the husband of your daughter. Forgive me.”
The priest replied: “How can I not accept you into my family if God Himself accepts your repentance?” They had a wedding, and all the photographs of the priest's son were put away under a plausible pretext, so that his daughter's husband would never guess that he was the murderer of his wife's brother. So no one found out this secret. The priest told this only to Father George in his dying confession.

FATHER MAXIM

In general, on Athos you can meet monks from all over the world, from the most different countries. To stay here, a monk just needs to come to one of the monasteries, and if he is accepted there, then that’s the end of the matter. There are no special requirements or conditions to be met. However, there are not so many people who want to stay on Mount Athos forever. The fact is that life here is quite hard, not everyone can stand it. This constant lack of sleep, malnutrition, long service... But in principle, it is very healthy image life, and most of the Athonite monks are in very good physical shape.
Once Jeffrey MacDonald and I decided to climb to the top of Mount Athos - 2033 meters above sea level, and the mountain starts right from the sea, so you need to climb every single one of these meters. We started climbing in the evening, so, having climbed about eight hundred meters, we began to look for accommodation for the night. They knocked on a lonely cell (a hut with a house church, where one or two monks usually live) and were greeted by a venerable old man with a thick white beard. The elder introduced himself as Archimandrite Maxim and was very happy to learn that I was from Russia. It turned out that once upon a time he had interned at the Moscow Theological Academy and still spoke Russian quite well.
Father Maxim has been asceticizing on Mount Athos for almost fifty years, and in recent years he has settled in this cell in search of solitude. He accepted us as family, at dinner he didn’t know what else to treat us with, opening one tin can after another from his very limited supplies. The next morning, after the liturgy, having provided us with bread and olives and showing us the way, he released us to the mountain. We went light, leaving all our things with him to pick them up on the way back. The climb was quite steep, but around every turn the views opened up to be breathtaking. We often stopped, took a breath, looked around, took photographs, read prayers and psalms. When the forest zone ended and the rock began to come out, we were dumbfounded - it was solid white marble! In the end, all the vegetation ended and we continued our ascent among the sparkling white marble. I had never seen anything like this - I suddenly found myself in some long-forgotten Russian folk tale of my childhood: “And beyond three seas, behind three forests stands, iris, a white marble mountain!”
At the top there is a tiny chapel dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Lord (an all-night vigil and liturgy are served there once a year - on this holiday), and just above it there is a large iron cross crowning the mountain. We sat on the rocks for a while, explored the surroundings, sang the troparion to the Transfiguration and slowly walked back. In total, the whole journey there and back to Father Maxim’s cell took us about six hours. “Where have you been for so long? I’ve already begun to worry about you,” the elder greeted us. “I hope nothing happened?” We assured him that everything was fine, we just went up and down. “Then you probably read the all-night vigil there at the top,” suggested Father Maxim, “otherwise where would you have been for so long? This journey takes me no more than two hours!”

GEORGIO

There were cases when people who had already decided to stay on Athos retreated back. Thus, one of my wonderful Roman acquaintances, one of the Russian emigrants, Orthodox Archimandrite Father Hermogenes, told me the story of his spiritual child - an Orthodox Italian baron and professor. This baron loved to travel to Athos and wanted to become an Athonite monk. But Father Hermogenes still did not bless him for this step. In the end, he packed up and left without the blessing of Father Hermogenes. He settled on Mount Athos in one of the monasteries, became a novice, lived like that for about a year, very zealously followed all the rules and obediences and rejoiced at this turn in his life. Then, a year later, the abbot told him: “Now, Giorgio, get ready, tomorrow evening you will be tonsured.” Giorgio did not sleep all night: he was thinking about his aunt in Rome, thinking about his estate in Calabria, about his mother, who is on this estate, about something else... In the morning, as soon as it was dawn, he packed his suitcase - and back to Rome .

"NAKED FATHERS"

But there are many exceptional ascetics on Athos. In many monasteries they will tell you about the “naked fathers”, living alone in caves on the inaccessible rocky southern end of the peninsula and for many years having no contact with people (except for the chosen brother who brings them Communion), so that even all their clothes have already been worn out. They will certainly talk about how some German tourists accidentally wandered into one of these caves and saw traces of meager housing there, but did not find the inhabitants. Then they, they say, told about this in the nearest monastery, undertook to demonstrate this cave, but could no longer find it...
At the top of Mount Athos, Jeffrey and I discovered something similar - not even a cave, but a gap between two blocks of marble. There was a straw bedding, and next to it stood an iron barrel with rusty water, in which a plastic bag with lettuce was floating. When we were descending, we met a resident of the top - a relatively young (black beard) monk in an old faded cassock. He went upstairs, carrying an earthenware jug with drinking water(closest to the top drinking water at the level of 1200 meters). We asked for his blessing, asked his name (it turned out to be the monk of Damascus) and offered us the remaining bread and olives, which, to our joy, he accepted. Here is such a fleeting Athonite meeting...

FOUR DAYS

When I went to Athos for the first time, I had no idea what I would see there. I thought about several monasteries that could be visited in a couple of days and left Athos at the very end of my first month-long journey through the holy places of Greece. I expected to stay there for four days. But, of course, everything turned out differently. Athos turned out to be a huge peninsula - about 80 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers wide. Moreover, these are distances in a straight line, and when you walk along mountain paths, they, naturally, almost double. There were almost no cars at that time, so the most that one could hope for was to guess and go part of the way on a boat that passed along the coast once a day. Athos shocked me. Naturally, I abandoned all my other plans and stayed there for ten days - as long as I could.

I calculated everything by the hour: in the morning I left by boat from Athos, then changed to a bus to Thessaloniki, from there I went to Athens by night bus, and the next morning I had a plane to New York. I arrived at the airport two hours before departure, that is, everything came together until the last moment.
I didn’t really want to leave, but there was nothing to do. I spent my last night in the Panteleimon Monastery. In the morning, before the boat arrived, I went to say goodbye to Father Sergius, with whom we had become very friendly. And then Father Sergius says: “Why are you leaving? Stay for four more days.” I replied that I would really like to stay, but I couldn’t because I had a plane ticket to New York the next day. Father Sergius repeats: “Listen to me, stay for four days.” I answered again that I couldn’t, although I didn’t want to leave at all, that the cats were scratching at my soul, that he was tearing my heart, but that if I missed my plane, then the cheapest ticket to America would be lost, and I would have to return nothing, but at this time the school year will begin and in general, Father Sergius, you don’t understand, here is Athos, here everything is different, but there is peace, there planes fly on schedule, they don’t wait for latecomers and don’t return tickets.. But Father Sergius, with strange insistence, repeated again and again about the four days for which I must stay. In the end, I couldn’t stand it: “Well, that’s it, Father Sergius, goodbye, here’s my boat, I’m off, I hope I’ll come back, and we’ll see you again,” and I left.

In Thessaloniki, I boarded a night bus and arrived at the Athens airport. All lathered up, belatedly, I rush to my plane, run up to the counter and see: there is a large announcement that a strike of air traffic controllers has begun, and all flights have been canceled for four days... There was no money or special permission to return to Athos. So for four days I sat in Athens - a dusty, stuffy, hot city - and thought about my sins.

THE MAIN THING ON EARTH

Perhaps, after my story, after other stories about Athos, it seems that this place is quite remote from real life. This is wrong. Athos life, in my opinion, is the most real life that exists. More likely, we all live some kind of semi-real life, in constant running, in constant employment, stress, attempts to satisfy needs, make plans, realize dreams that for some reason are not realized... They live on Athos, to put it modern language, a very “concrete” life. Very earthly, concrete, filled with life. And the Athonite monks are engaged in the most important thing on earth - prayer for everyone and for everyone. Who knows, if there had been no Athos and the Athos prayer, would our world still continue?..

TIME MACHINE

There is a tunnel in Jerusalem that has survived to this day from the time of the prophet Isaiah. The evidence of it is found in the twentieth chapter of the 2nd Book of Kings. During the siege of the city by the Assyrians, water flowed into Jerusalem through this tunnel. Own sources There was no water supply in the city, and King Hezekiah ordered in advance to cut a tunnel in the rock to provide the city with water during the siege. Now you can safely walk through this tunnel: water trickles only along the bottom, you take off your shoes, light a candle (or a flashlight) and paddle barefoot all the way from start to finish (about eight hundred meters in total) through the entire rock formation.
This tunnel has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Traces of the work of King Hezekiah's subjects are visible on the walls; you can understand how and with what they chopped - sometimes with a pickaxe, sometimes with a hoe. You can put your hand in these impact marks and feel a connection with the person who once left this dent, that is, a material connection with a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah. A kind of time machine...
...A strange and amazing feeling is the feeling of restored continuity of generations. Seeing, holding in your hands, examining things that were left in this place by someone, almost in prehistoric times. On Athos, I had the opportunity to feel what archaeologists may have felt in Pompeii: it is known that when the city was excavated, everything there was covered with volcanic dust and ash, and therefore was preserved in the same form as it was on the day of the disaster. This comparison comes to mind when I remember the Athos monastery of St. Panteleimon, where I seemed to find myself in the pre-revolutionary world. A world in which nothing changed, a world that was preserved in time. It was as if, with the help of a time machine, I managed to touch something that no longer remained anywhere in a single ensemble. Old portraits, old interiors, old books... Moreover, I even drank pre-revolutionary tea there. That is, tea that was brought to the monastery before the revolution. By my time, it was already running out and the monks used it quite rarely - they treated only special guests, the remnants of what seemed like an inexhaustible supply half a century ago. I carefully opened old packages of tea, sealed once and by someone, a long time ago... Packages that were purchased with donations from some pious people, whose names are forever hidden from me. And now it fell to me to open these packages, brew their tea, drink it and remember unknown benefactors... These people once donated to the monastery, helped with money, sent parcels... As a result, their sacrifice reached me at the end of the 20th century century.

ABOUT RABBIT, KITTENS AND A JUG OF MILK

What countries do people come there from? We can talk about the special attraction of Orthodoxy that many people of other religious traditions experience. And often this attraction “works” through Athos. I developed long-term relationships with some of the pilgrims I met on the Holy Mountain. I want to talk about one of these people now.

When Geoffrey MacDonald and I hitchhiked from London to Mount Athos, at the very last stage of our long journey, Thessaloniki - Ouranoupolis, we had to buy bus tickets and transfer to paid transport: otherwise we would have traveled the next few tens of kilometers along country roads for who knows how long.

On the bus we noticed a young Italian interrogating the driver about something, however, completely unsuccessfully, since both spoke only in their native languages. Since immediately after emigrating from Moscow, I spent four months in Italy waiting for an American visa and managed to pick up some Italian, and now, five years later, I still remembered something, I intervened and offered my translation services. This is how we met Marco, who has since become one of my closest friends (those are Athos gifts for life). He lives forty kilometers north of Milan in the town of Induna Olona, very close to the Swiss border.

Marco was a pious Roman Catholic who heard about Orthodoxy for the first time and decided to go to Athos - to its very core, to receive information, so to speak, first-hand. Jeffrey and I were the first Orthodox Christians he met. Since then his interest in Orthodox faith does not weaken, although he does not give up his positions without the most thorough research. I remember how, after one heated argument, Marco, marking a point on his palm, said: “Suppose we are here.” Then he designated another point: “And God is here.” Further, he drew a straight line between two points: “Orthodoxy leads us to God like this.” Then he drew a winding and long zigzag between these same points and, looking at me with hope, asked: “What do you think, do we, Catholics, have a chance to get to God in this way?” As in my conversation with the Danish teacher, I was touched by my friend's humility and faith.

Of course, it is reasonable to ask the question why he never became Orthodox? Here a very important problem of inculturation arises. For many, even those who theoretically agree with the correctness of Orthodoxy, it remains alien - Russian, Greek, Romanian faith. “Yes, these peoples are more “lucky”,” such people argue, “the fullness of the truth has been revealed to them. But we have our own path, following which our ancestors were saved.”

For them, accepting Orthodoxy is tantamount to betraying their own traditions, customs and rituals, absorbed with their mother’s milk. And what more people connected with his roots, the more difficult it is for him to take this step. This is easier for an American than for a European, and especially for a European like Marco: not just an Italian, but a resident of Lombardy, and not just Lombardy, but its northern, mountainous region, the entire thickness of countless generations associated with this land. Marco knows his ancestors many generations ago, and they were all zealous Roman Catholics, and even now his entire family and his entire circle of friends and communication are closely connected with the active church life there. All this burden, unfortunately, makes his adoption of Orthodoxy extremely problematic. But on the other hand, what is impossible for humans is possible for God, especially since Marco takes his Christian faith very seriously and in terms of purity of life, prayer and good deeds can serve as an example for many...

Having met Marco on the bus, we traveled together to Ouranoupolis, had dinner together at a roadside diner, spent the night on the beach together in our sleeping bags, and then boarded a boat early in the morning and headed to the Holy Mountain. When the four days he had received had expired, Marco, shocked by what he had seen, left for his homeland, inviting us to stay with him when, on the way back, we would pass through its region.

After spending a month on Mount Athos, we drove to Patras, where we visited my classmate at St. Vladimir’s Academy (he was Greek and spent the summer with his parents), from there we arrived by ferry in Brindisi and leisurely hitchhiked north - to Rome, Umbria, Tuscany , Emilia Romagna and finally to Lombardy, of which Milan is the capital. All this time I practiced my half-forgotten Italian and succeeded in some ways. In any case, ten days later, when we reached Milan, oral speech I already understood quite freely and chatted, albeit very illiterately, but fluently.

In Milan we bought phone tokens and started calling Marco. But here comes a hitch: elderly woman, who answered my call, clearly spoke Italian, but at the same time I could not understand anything!

After asking several times and becoming convinced that the idea was hopeless, I began to catch English-speaking passers-by. Having found the right person, I asked him to negotiate for me. It turned out that the calls were answered by Marco’s grandmother, a native pawnbroker who could only speak the local dialect, which was strikingly different from the standard language. Fortunately, my negotiator also happened to be from that region and understood the dialect. Everything was eventually resolved, a couple of hours later Marco arrived in Milan and took us to his home.

He lived with his parents in a spacious, although still unfinished, house on the northern outskirts of his town at the very foot of the Alps. His father, who had worked in a printing house for half his life, had just retired, and, having built his own house and started a subsistence economy, he enjoyed working on the land. The house had a large orchard, a vegetable garden, a poultry house and a rabbitry. Marco's mother served with great pleasure own products. Our own new friend He studied at the Faculty of Law at the University of Milan, and now, in the summer, he helped his parents with the housework. The family was friendly and very hospitable, they welcomed us like family. We stayed with Marco for three days, during which he drove us around the area every day, showing us local attractions and introducing us to his many friends. The Italians introduced me as Sasha - everyone really liked such an exotic Russian name for some reason with a feminine ending, and Geoffrey was referred to as Gofredo - the Italian equivalent of the name Gottfried, of which Geoffrey is a variant.

This is where it happened funny story which I want to tell. On a sunny morning, Jeffrey sat on the threshold of the house and stroked a fluffy white rabbit, comfortably located on his lap. This idyllic scene was noticed by Father Marco, who was passing by.

“Gofredo,” he turned to my friend, “I see you like rabbits?”
“Yes, I love you very much,” replied Jeffrey.
“Great,” summed up the old Italian, “tonight we’ll cook roast rabbit meat!...”

The next morning the scene unfolded much the same. Jeffrey sat on the threshold and played with a gray kitten, who loudly purred his song.
Father Marco, passing by on his business, cheerfully greeted him:
“Good morning, Gofredo! I see you love kittens?”
“No, I don’t like it at all!” – Geoffrey screamed in panic, pushing the kitten off his lap.
…

I want to finish this story by retelling the legend existing in Marco’s family about the miraculous help to his great-grandmother, which surprisingly echoes the previously told story about the Cretan Metropolitan Irenaeus.

This was in the second half of the 19th century. As a relatively young woman, left without a husband, Marco’s great-grandmother was extremely poor and reached such poverty that she no longer had anything to feed her five small children. Leaving them at home, the mother went to the neighboring village to try to get some food, although she knew that she had nothing to hope for there either. But returning home and looking into the eyes of hungry children was unbearable. In deep despondency, she was walking along a path in the middle of a field and suddenly the thought of suicide came to her. After her husband’s death, life became no longer pleasant for her, and she still couldn’t help her children. Tears flowed down the face of the unfortunate widow, her gaze became clouded, and she did not notice where a well-dressed gentleman appeared in the open field, walking towards her. In a village, everyone knows everyone, but this young man with a small beard was definitely a stranger.
But at the same time he spoke a version of the Lombard dialect, which only the inhabitants of those places knew. The stranger sympathetically asked why she was crying, and when the young peasant woman told him about her grief, he ordered her to return home to the children, assuring that help will come.

“And what you were thinking about now is a great sin,” he suddenly added, “do not allow these thoughts to enter your mind in the future! And never give up hope in God, whose name is Love.”

Struck by the insight of the unfamiliar young man, the widow turned around and ran home.
On the porch she saw a large jug of milk and several loaves of bread. That evening she was offered a lucrative job, and her affairs began to improve.
My friend’s great-grandmother believed until the end of her days that the Lord Himself appeared to her and passed on her faith to her children and grandchildren.

Based on materials from the publications "Orthodoxy and Peace", "Foma", "Russian Week"

The history of Athonite monasticism goes back more than one and a half thousand years. Ancient legends claim that the first monks came here in the 4th century, during the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. Today, monks of different nationalities live on Mount Athos, most of all, of course, Greeks.

For more than a thousand years, no woman has set foot on the land of Athos (according to the Athos charter, monks are not even allowed to keep female animals). The only Woman who stays here and is revered as the Abbess of Athos is the Mother of God. She holds spiritual power on the peninsula; many of Her icons are glorified here. Every monastery has icons Mother of God, about which amazing legends have been preserved.

Athos is called the source of Orthodox spirituality in the modern world. Here the ancient practice of heartfelt prayer and “smart doing”, known in the Orthodox East as silence, or hesychasm, was preserved.

Some say that life on Athos is prohibitively difficult, others say that it is easier than anywhere else... And they also say that it is there that the sky becomes closer.

Time Machine

This tunnel has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Traces of the work of King Hezekiah's subjects are visible on the walls; you can understand how and with what they chopped - sometimes with a pickaxe, sometimes with a hoe. You can put your hand in these impact marks and feel a connection with the person who once left this dent, that is, a material connection with a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah. A kind of time machine...

...A strange and amazing feeling is the feeling of restored continuity of generations. Seeing, holding in your hands, examining things that were left in this place by someone, almost in prehistoric times. On Athos, I had the opportunity to feel what archaeologists may have felt in Pompeii: it is known that when the city was excavated, everything there was covered with volcanic dust and ash, and therefore was preserved in the same form as it was on the day of the disaster. This comparison comes to mind when I remember the Athos monastery of St. Panteleimon, where I seemed to find myself in the pre-revolutionary world. A world in which nothing changed, a world that was preserved in time. It was as if, with the help of a time machine, I managed to touch something that no longer remained anywhere in a single ensemble. Old portraits, old interiors, old books...

Moreover, I even drank pre-revolutionary tea there. That is, tea that was brought to the monastery before the revolution. By my time, it was already running out and the monks used it quite rarely - they treated only special guests, with the remnants of what seemed like an inexhaustible supply just half a century ago. I carefully opened old packages of tea, sealed once and by someone, a long time ago... Packages that were purchased with donations from some pious people, whose names are forever hidden from me. And now it fell to me to open these packages, brew their tea, drink it and remember unknown benefactors... These people once donated to the monastery, helped with money, sent parcels... As a result, their sacrifice reached me at the end of the twentieth century.

Russian Monastery

The Panteleimon Monastery was then, during my first visit to Athos (summer 1981), in terrible desolation. Like an abandoned, devastated city. At the beginning of the century, about three thousand monks lived there. But after the revolution there were almost no replenishments, except perhaps from among the emigrants. True, in the early seventies, a small group of monks from the Soviet Union was sent to Mount Athos for the first time, and shortly before my first visit, a second group arrived there. They did not want to let them out of the USSR, because the monks who settled on Mount Athos received Greek citizenship, and this actually meant emigration. On the other hand, the Greek authorities were very suspicious of immigrants from the Soviet Union. As a result, only about twenty monks lived in the huge monastery at that time, half of whom were very old. Therefore, it was impossible to maintain order throughout the vast territory, in all buildings. Several huge buildings stood burnt out after terrible fires and looked out at the world through blackened empty window openings.

The few guests of the monastery were accommodated in a hotel, which was then in terrible condition - like a New York slum. Now renovated, it shines with tiles and whitewash and is filled to the brim with pilgrims. The hotel building is located outside the monastery. But since I was, firstly, Russian, and secondly, a student at the Theological Academy, I was allowed into the monastery itself, and I lived in the monastic cell.

The premises, it seemed to me, were too much even for three thousand people, building, building, building... And how many guest rooms and apartments there were for the most honorable pilgrims! You could wander the corridors endlessly: go, for example, into the living room where generals were received, into the special grand-ducal apartments, the bishop's reception room... Nothing has changed since then: the same portraits hung on the walls, the same papers lay spread out on the table; I could just take it out, leaf through, look at some records, touch things that had remained untouched since then... In the monastery library I could leaf through handwritten books of the 10th and 11th centuries, written on parchment, with illustrations - what was stored in museums under bulletproof glass. I had a chance to read the manuscript of the memoirs of the future Archbishop of Brussels Vasily (Krivoshein), who in the period between the two wars was a resident of the monastery and served as a librarian. I read these notebooks, covered in the clear and clear handwriting of an outstanding theologian of our time and future bishop, for a day or a day and a half, and it was impossible to tear myself away. Of course, now this work has already been published, and everyone can find and read it. But this was the first - the most direct, from recent memory, edition of the book - the manuscript of an Athonite monk.

Athos purity

In general, Athos is an amazing place. Partly because when you imagine a community where there is not a single woman, where there are only men, the image that emerges is, say, a bachelor’s apartment: with burnt scrambled eggs in a frying pan, scattered clothes, where everything is upside down and cobwebs in the corners. But on Athos it’s completely different. This is perfect order, perfect cleanliness. This is some kind of special, amazing, cordial attitude towards each other. Of course, like all places on our sin-stricken land, Athos is far from ideal. But, in my opinion, this is a place where everything is somehow closer to ideal. The feeling of the prayerfulness of this soil does not leave you for a minute - whether you are standing in a Byzantine temple that has not changed at all since the time of construction, whether you are climbing into the mountains past a hermit’s dwelling, or whether you are sitting in the library of a ten-century-old monastery...

Byzantine time

The whole internal life of Athos is a completely special life, essentially the same as in Byzantine times - without electricity, without cars... This was the case back in the 80s, now, unfortunately, a lot has changed...

Timing is also Byzantine. Midnight is sunset, and all other time is counted from sunset. And every month the clock fails because every month the sunsets are at different times. At the same time, the time differs in different monasteries, because some are located closer to the sea, others are high in the mountains. In general, time on Athos seems to be motionless.

Russia's contribution

It's amazing how much Russian was invested in Athos. In any, even the “most Greek” monastery, you always find something from Russian culture: gifts from the royal family (not necessarily the last, perhaps from earlier generations), Russian dishes, samovars, something else... Connection with Russia is constantly felt. Or suddenly you find out that the monastery was on fire and was rebuilt with money raised in Russia.

Flower in a glass

We spent one night in the Pantokrator monastery. We sat on the balcony until late - that is, until it got completely dark - talking with the resident of the monastery - a Greek monk. Then we went to our cells, and when we were already going to bed, there was suddenly a knock on the door. We open it - it turns out that he is the same monk who spoke to us. He brought us a glass of water, and in the glass there was a huge, still closed flower bud. He said: “You put it on the window. In the morning, when it dawns, it will open, and the first thing you will see when you return to your cell after the liturgy is an open flower.” With that the monk left.

It was so amazing, so different from the outside world... On Athos, it was completely natural that a person simply wanted to please guests with the beauty of a flower.

Marines

Here, the rules of worship of medieval Byzantine Christianity have been preserved almost unchanged. Temples are lit only by candles and lamps. A significant part of the service takes place in almost complete darkness - for example, the monks read the Six Psalms only from memory. Many other parts of the service are also recited by heart. Midnight Office and Matins begin in the dark, since night is the time when monks are awake. The world is sleeping, the forces of darkness dominate in the darkness, and the monks, the warriors of Christ, go out into battle, protecting and protecting us all.

One American professor of anthropology made a very interesting comparison, especially for a non-Orthodox person, drawing a parallel between the monasticism he knew and the army units. “If the French Benedictines can be compared to the infantry, and the Italian Franciscans, undisciplined and reckless, to the Air Force, then the Athonite monks are the marines, with their strict discipline and the most difficult tests during training. But these elite fighters, always in the best shape, are not afraid of any enemy!”

Daily routine... and night

In different monasteries, the morning service begins differently, in our time - from half past two to half past four, and continues, accordingly, until half past six - half past eight in the morning, when the liturgy ends. In Greek monasteries, each monk usually receives communion three times a week, so there are many communicants at each liturgy. After the service, if it is not a fast day, the monks disperse to perform their obediences and gather for breakfast around noon. Then usually a day's rest: as in many hot countries, sleep on Mount Athos is divided in half - a little at night, a little in the hottest time of the day. After this, obedience again, closer to sunset - vespers, for about an hour, then dinner. If it is a fast day, then this is the first and last meal. If it’s not a fast day, then usually for dinner they often eat the same thing they ate for breakfast, only it’s cold. After dinner - Compline. When it gets dark, the gates close, and then each monk calculates his own time - after all, there is also an individual evening cell rule. And even if the service begins at half past two in the morning, the monks wake up no less than an hour before to perform their cell morning prayer.

On holidays they serve an all-night vigil, in the literal sense of the word - it lasts all night. The longest service I have ever attended lasted about sixteen hours: Great Vespers began at approximately eight in the evening, and the liturgy ended around noon. But that was the patronal holiday of the monastery. A typical all-night vigil lasts seven to eight hours.

I heard many times on Mount Athos that such an intense prayer life does not go “with impunity” - if a person spends all his time in church, if he prays all the time, opens his thoughts every day, if he, even without being good, always strives to be so, he can't help but begin to change for the better...

The taste of bread with Quince

Food on Mount Athos is very simple, lean. The monks themselves eat very little; on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays there is only one meal a day, but for guests they arrange an additional one - after the morning service. For breakfast, herbal tea, bread, and jam are usually served. Bread made from wholemeal flour is baked once a week or every ten days and eaten until it runs out, and only after that a new one is baked. Therefore, Athonite bread is usually stale. But one day I came to the morning meal, where there was freshly baked bread, still hot. In addition to bread, tea and quince jam were served. As usual, I spread jam on the bread, took a bite and was completely frozen by the sensation of the amazing intensity of the taste - it was so unexpected, even though it was the simplest things.

Chuvash Psalter

To be honest, over these general notebooks with oilcloth covers, over these incomprehensible words written in Cyrillic, I shed tears. This is a real feat of faith, which is rarely seen these days! The girl was sixteen years old. I imagined her - what she could do: go somewhere, somehow communicate with peers, run to discos, or sit for long evenings, copying - so that her brother could read in his native language. Moreover, everything was rewritten with a ballpoint pen, in two colors - red and blue, in a very smooth, beautiful, although childish, handwriting. I remember from my childhood: you try to write something more beautiful. The first lines come out - a sight for sore eyes! And then the letters begin to turn out crooked and blots appear, and the lines begin to dance... But in these notebooks everything was wrong: the handwriting was beautiful and even from beginning to end, but there were no blots at all! The deacon said that after the revolution, nothing of Orthodox literature was published in Chuvash, so at home, if they served in their native language, they either used dilapidated pre-revolutionary books or copied them.

Tester

Is it easy to be a Monk?

One day - on my fourth trip to Athos - already from Russia, in 2001 - an acquaintance of mine, an entrepreneur, a fairly wealthy man, began asking a monk of a Greek monastery about his life. He kept wanting to know how difficult it was to be a monk. To this, the monk (a Frenchman who converted to Orthodoxy from a good old family) told him that being a monk is very simple; The hardest thing is to become a monk, to decide on it. Since he has been a monk, every day is a holiday for him: the entire burden of everyday worries has been removed from him, he can calmly reflect on his spiritual life, talk with God, and pray to God. Life in the world is much harder: you need to think about your daily bread, you need to feed your family, and this is a constant distraction. He said that he admires the feat of those Christians who live in the world and respects them very much, because in this sense his life is incomparably easier.

Dying Confession

...I remember confession in the Grigoriou Monastery. Then (in 1981) Abbot Georgy, who is still alive today, told me one story. He happened to take a dying confession from a priest in a small town in Greece. The priest had two children with a very large age difference - the eldest son and a much younger daughter. The son went to Athens to study, and a tragedy happened to him - he died. The young man's body was found in a deserted place. All that was clear was that he had been beaten to death. Although the son was very religious and led a pious life, no cross was found on him. And this absence of the cross greatly tormented the soul of the unfortunate father. The killers were not found then, the crime remained unsolved.

Time passed, the priest's daughter grew up and she had a fiancé. The young man, older than her, went to their house and was well received. The priest, by then widowed, liked him. But somehow he did not dare to propose. After some time, when it was already obvious that they loved each other, the groom asked the priest for confession. He agreed, and the young man admitted that he fell in love with his daughter and their family, but must say that he is unworthy of them, because he is a murderer. At one time, quite a long time ago, he was in bad company, they went on a spree, and late at night they pestered some young man - and this was in Athens. He began to admonish them, appeal to their conscience, which made them even more embittered, they began to beat him and beat him to death. Then the groom, the youngest of that company, out of some kind of arrogance, tore off the golden cross from the young man, which he still carries with him. With these words, he showed the priest a cross, in which he recognized the missing baptismal cross of his son. At that moment, it seemed to the priest that the floor was disappearing from under his feet, and he himself almost fell. He prayed for God to give him strength. And the young man continued: “You see, a person rejected by God like me cannot be the husband of your daughter. Excuse me".

The priest replied: “How can I not accept you into my family if God Himself accepts your repentance?” They had a wedding, and all the photographs of the priest's son were put away under a plausible pretext, so that his daughter's husband would never guess that he was the murderer of his wife's brother. So no one found out this secret. The priest told this only to Father George in his dying confession.

Father Maxim

In general, on Mount Athos you can meet monks from all over the world, from various countries. To stay here, a monk just needs to come to one of the monasteries, and if he is accepted there, then that’s the end of the matter. There are no special requirements or conditions to be met. However, there are not so many people who want to stay on Mount Athos forever. The fact is that life here is quite hard, not everyone can stand it. This is a constant lack of sleep, malnutrition, long services... But in principle, this is a very healthy lifestyle, and most of the Athonite monks are in very good physical shape.

Once Jeffrey MacDonald and I decided to climb to the top of Mount Athos - 2033 meters above sea level, and the mountain starts right from the sea, so you need to climb every single one of these meters. We started climbing in the evening, so, having climbed about eight hundred meters, we began to look for accommodation for the night. They knocked on a lonely cell (a hut with a house church, where one or two monks usually live) and were greeted by a venerable old man with a thick white beard. The elder introduced himself as Archimandrite Maxim and was very happy to learn that I was from Russia. It turned out that once upon a time he had interned at the Moscow Theological Academy and still spoke Russian quite well.

Father Maxim has been asceticizing on Mount Athos for almost fifty years, and in recent years he has settled in this cell in search of solitude. He accepted us as family, at dinner he didn’t know what else to treat us with, opening one tin can after another from his very limited supplies. The next morning, after the liturgy, having provided us with bread and olives and showing us the way, he released us to the mountain. We went light, leaving all our things with him to pick them up on the way back. The climb was quite steep, but around every turn the views opened up to be breathtaking. We often stopped, took a breath, looked around, took photographs, read prayers and psalms. When the forest zone ended and the rock began to come out, we were dumbfounded - it was solid white marble! In the end, all the vegetation ended and we continued our ascent among the white marble sparkling on the breaks. I had never seen anything like this - I suddenly found myself in some long-forgotten Russian folk tale of my childhood: “And beyond three seas, behind three forests stands, iris, a white marble mountain!”

At the top there is a tiny chapel dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Lord (an all-night vigil and liturgy are served there once a year on this holiday), and just above it there is a large iron cross crowning the mountain. We sat on the rocks for a while, explored the surroundings, sang the troparion to the Transfiguration and slowly walked back. In total, the whole journey there and back – to Father Maxim’s cell – took us about six hours. “Where have you been for so long? “I have already begun to worry about you,” the elder greeted us. “I hope nothing happened?” We assured him that everything was fine, we just went up and down. “Then you probably read the all-night vigil there at the top,” suggested Father Maxim, “otherwise where would you have been for so long? This journey takes me no more than two hours!”

Giorgio

There were cases when people who had already decided to stay on Athos retreated back. Thus, one of my wonderful Roman acquaintances, one of the Russian emigrants, Orthodox Archimandrite Father Hermogenes, told me the story of his spiritual child - an Orthodox Italian baron and professor. This baron loved to travel to Athos and wanted to become an Athonite monk. But Father Hermogenes still did not bless him for this step. In the end, he packed up and left without the blessing of Father Hermogenes. He settled on Mount Athos in one of the monasteries, became a novice, lived like that for about a year, very zealously followed all the rules and obediences and rejoiced at this turn in his life. Then a year later the abbot told him: “Now, Giorgio, get ready, tomorrow evening you will be tonsured.” Giorgio did not sleep all night: he thought about his aunt in Rome, thought about his estate in Calabria, about his mother, who is on this estate, about something else... In the morning, as soon as it was dawn, he packed his suitcase - and back to Rome.

"Naked Fathers"

But there are many exceptional ascetics on Athos. In many monasteries they will tell you about the “naked fathers”, living solitarily in caves on the inaccessible rocky southern end of the peninsula and for many years having no contact with people (except for the chosen brother who brings them Communion), so that even all their clothes have already been worn out. They will certainly talk about how some German tourists accidentally wandered into one of these caves and saw traces of meager housing there, but did not find the inhabitants. Then they, they say, told about this in the nearest monastery, undertook to demonstrate this cave, but could no longer find it...

At the top of Mount Athos, Jeffrey and I discovered something similar - not even a cave, but a gap between two blocks of marble. There was a straw bedding, and next to it stood an iron barrel with rusty water, in which a plastic bag with lettuce was floating. When we were descending, we met a resident of the top - a relatively young (black beard) monk in an old faded cassock. He climbed up carrying a clay jug with drinking water (the closest drinking water to the top is at 1200 meters). We asked for his blessing, asked his name (it turned out to be the monk of Damascus) and offered us the remaining bread and olives, which, to our joy, he accepted. Here is such a fleeting Athonite meeting...

Four days

…When I went to Athos for the first time, I had no idea what I would see there. I thought about several monasteries that could be visited in a couple of days and left Athos at the very end of my first month-long journey through the holy places of Greece. I expected to stay there for four days. But, of course, everything turned out differently. Athos turned out to be a huge peninsula - about 80 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers wide. Moreover, these are distances in a straight line, and when you walk along mountain paths, they, naturally, almost double. There were almost no cars at that time, so the most that one could hope for was to be smart and drive part of the way on a boat that passed along the coast once a day. Athos shocked me. Naturally, I abandoned all my other plans and stayed there for ten days - as long as I could.

I didn’t really want to leave, but there was nothing to do. I spent my last night in the Panteleimon Monastery. In the morning, before the boat arrived, I went to say goodbye to Father Sergius, with whom we had become very friendly. And then Father Sergius says: “Why are you leaving? Stay another four days.” I replied that I would really like to stay, but I couldn’t because I had a plane ticket to New York the next day. Father Sergius repeats: “Listen to me, stay for four days.” I answered again that I couldn’t, although I didn’t want to leave at all, that the cats were scratching at my soul, that he was tearing my heart, but that if I missed my plane, then the ticket - the cheapest ticket to America - would be lost, and I would have to return I will have nothing, and at this time the school year will begin and in general, Father Sergius, you don’t understand, here is Athos, here everything is different, but there is peace, there planes fly on schedule, they don’t wait for latecomers and don’t return tickets... But Father Sergius, with strange insistence, repeated again and again about the four days for which I must stay. In the end, I couldn’t stand it: “Well, that’s it, Father Sergius, goodbye, here’s my boat, I’m off, I hope I’ll come back, and we’ll see you again,” and I left.

The main thing on Earth

Perhaps, after my story, after other stories about Athos, it seems that this place is quite remote from real life. This is wrong. Athos life, in my opinion, is the most real life that exists. More likely, we all live some kind of semi-real life, in constant running, in constant employment, stress, attempts to satisfy needs, make plans, realize dreams that for some reason are not realized... On Athos they live, in modern terms, very “ concrete” life. Very earthly, concrete, filled with life. And the Athonite monks are engaged in the most important thing on earth - prayer for everyone and for everyone. Who knows, if there had been no Athos and the Athos prayer, would our world still continue?..

From the addition to “Tales of Athos”

Novice Afanasy

When I came to Athos for the third time, I spent almost the entire month in the Stavronikita monastery, which I knew from previous visits through its resident, the Swiss monk Father V. The abbot of the monastery, Father Vasily, was also familiar to me, and I knew that I could to confess to him, since he spoke French and even a little Russian. I also knew almost all the small brethren (Stavronikita is a small monastery for about twenty people), who treated me very kindly. But this time I found a new face in the monastery. The novice Athanasius, an Australian Greek, arrived at the Holy Mountain a few months before me. He was about twenty-five years old, and he had just begun to grow a beard - it was still very short.

We were brought together by age (I was only a couple of years older) and English, which he spoke better than his parents’ Greek. We talked a lot about spiritual life, and several times we went on long walks in the surrounding hills. I remember he showed me the second (besides the usual - waist) version of the small bow accepted in the monastery: you bow to the ground, but the initial position of the body is kneeling.

17 years later, in 2001, I again arrived on Athos. Of course, I wanted to see my old friend and find out what happened to him. However, when my companion, the Moscow businessman Sergei, and I reached Stavronikita, it turned out that no one remembers Athanasius there: many years ago, the abbot with a group of monks moved to the Iversky Monastery - to restore the communal rules there after almost two centuries of special residence, and almost half of the brethren in Stavronikita has changed. We were not able to stay overnight: the small monastery was full. I had to go to Iviron.

We got there quite quickly, but even here we were met with misfortune: the monk-gatekeeper very kindly and affably informed us that the monastery was undergoing renovations, the number of beds in the archondarik had been reduced, and we could not stay.
The sun was rapidly setting, and something had to be decided quickly. I tried to find Athanasius - what if he was in the group of monks who came here with the abbot and could provide us with protection? But in response to my timid question, the gatekeeper said that they did not have a monk with that name.

We went out onto the road in front of the monastery gates, sat down on the logs lying there and thought. We won't have time to get anywhere. You could try to call a “monastic taxi” and get to Panteleimon. Seryozha started calling from his mobile phone, but there was no connection. The situation was beginning to become unpleasant, when suddenly an elderly Greek man came out of the gate and asked what we were doing here.

After listening to our sad story, he told us not to fool around and waste time with the gate monk, whose obedience consisted of reducing the flow of pilgrims, but to go straight to the archondarik, where it would be much easier to arrange an overnight stay. We perceived our well-wisher as an angel sent in response to our prayers and again entered the gates of the monastery.

The archondarite turned out to be a middle-aged monk, with noticeable gray hair in his long black beard. He spoke English well, but he still had a slight Greek accent. Having offered us traditional coffee, water, rakia and Turkish delight, standing right there on the table in a huge bowl, he listened to our intercessor and agreed to accept us for the night. Without showing much enthusiasm, the monk began to write our names in the thick book of life.

And then I asked him if he had met the Australian novice Afanasy.

How did you know him? - the monk suddenly asked, peering intently at me.

I explained.

“Exactly, now I remember you,” said my interlocutor. - Don’t you recognize me? I am that same Afanasy. Only now my name is Hieromonk Paisiy. Welcome to our monastery!

Burn

In one of the previous stories, I wrote about the “naked fathers” - the strictest ascetics who live in inaccessible caves and gorges at the southern tip of the Athos peninsula and have no contact with the world, except for the chosen brothers who deliver Communion to them. Their clothes are worn out, and they are saved in their original form, like the first people in paradise.

Once I was walking along the shore with an Austrian pilgrim and enthusiastically told him about these amazing ascetics, it is almost impossible to see them and become familiar with their holiness, except perhaps by the special grace of God. Suddenly he interrupted me with an exclamation:

So here they are - naked fathers!

And he pointed towards the sea, in the waters of which several respectable bearded pilgrims were splashing.

Indeed, although some pilgrims or even “free” (that is, not attached to any of the monasteries) monks allow themselves to plunge into the gentle Aegean Sea, swimming on Athos is prohibited. This is not what people come here for.

But sometimes, especially on a hot summer day, the sea just beckons. I did not escape this temptation either. One day, on a very hot day, walking with Jeffrey past a secluded deserted beach, I could not resist and told him that while no one was looking, I was going to swim here. My friend, although he was sweating no less than me, showed greater discipline and said that he would not get into the water, but would wait for me on the shore.

I can’t say that my conscience was silent, but I reassured it with the fact that others can do it. So we saw “naked fathers”. But no one will see me here! And I won’t be a temptation to anyone.

I quickly undressed and rushed into the cool, inviting sea. But I didn’t manage to swim even a few meters when a terrible pain pierced my right arm. It felt as if she had been hit with all her might with a stick. The arm was paralyzed and it hung helplessly. Fortunately, land was very close. With difficulty, in a semi-fainting state, I rowed back to the shore and, staggering, climbed out of the water. Throughout inside A huge red spot, similar to a burn, swelled up from the armpit and almost to the elbow. What it was, I still don’t know. Most likely, some kind of huge jellyfish, which came from nowhere and disappeared somewhere. It’s also strange that I didn’t notice her at all: after all, I always swim with with open eyes. But I remembered my unlucky swim for a long time.

My hand took ten days to heal. At first it hurt, then itched until the skin completely peeled off. I don’t know whether this is symbolic or not, and what this symbol could mean, but the burn, having formed, took the form of the number “9” (or “6”, if you raise your hand up).

“I chose Christ”

Some time after the publication of “Athos Tales,” one of our parishioners, originally from Chuvashia, approached me.

“They asked me to tell you,” he said, “that Father Sergius died a few days ago.”

What kind of father is Sergius? - I didn’t understand.

Father Sergius Svyatogorets. You wrote about him in your book. In stories about three days and about a priceless gift!

This is how I learned about the further fate of my oldest Athonite acquaintance. It turned out that he returned to Russia in 1984 - shortly after our brief meeting during my third visit to Mount Athos. He lived for some time in his native Pskov-Pechersky Monastery, in the same cave cell where in the 19th century. Hieroschemamonk Lazar the recluse, now canonized, lived.

In 1985, Father Sergius was assigned to Chuvashia, where he served for 5 years in the village of Mishukovo, and then for another 17 years in the city of Shumerlya, where he built a temple in the name of St. Seraphim of Sarov. He is buried near this temple.

Father Sergius did not abandon his heartfelt pastoral care for everyone: both distant and close. People came to him not only from Chuvashia, but also from neighboring regions. And for everyone he found a kind word and the right advice. No one left him unconsoled. Eyewitnesses say that not only people, but even animals were drawn to him. Cats and dogs ran after the priest in a flock. He lived in a small house at the temple, in the garden, where in winter and summer people flocked a large number of birds. Their sweet-voiced singing is remembered by all visitors to Father Sergius.

One of the parishioners brought my book from Moscow and asked the priest if he remembered me. He replied that he remembered and smiled. However, then he was already preparing to meet Christ.

This is what his spiritual son writes about the last days of the Athonite monk:

“From the age of seventy, Father Sergius was in retirement. He lived according to the Athos routine. He didn’t sleep at night, his light was on until the morning. He himself said: “I go to Mount Athos every night and serve the liturgy there every night. Even when I sleep, I see Athos. After all, what a person cleaves to in life, he strives for in his dreams.” He used to go to rest and say: “Well, I went to Jerusalem...”.

And during the day he received everyone who needed his help. He had to confess to thousands of people...

Two weeks before his death, when asked who to vote for in the upcoming elections, he thoughtfully said: “And I have already chosen Christ,” and smiled mysteriously.”

Schema-Archimandrite Sergius (Markelov) died quietly on November 17, 2007, a month short of his seventy-nineth anniversary.

It is a great pity that I did not have the opportunity to meet Father Sergius in his homeland during his lifetime. I learned too late that we lived just a few hours away from each other. But still he managed to hear about me, remember me and, I hope, pray for me. Eternal memory to him!

“Virgin Mother of God, rejoice, I am going to You on Athos, on Your Holy Mountain,” my tongue said by itself. I felt happy. It turns out that I greet the Mother of God with the words of Archangel Gabriel, and She seems to rejoice for me that I new year holidays I will spend it on Athos - in Her garden, with pious people of the angelic order.

And what? That's right. The Mother of God is a warm Intercessor before Christ our God for us sinners. You only need to pray to Her, especially if you yourself feel like you’re in over your head...

I'm walking through Domodedovo airport to board the plane. My mood couldn’t be better: especially joyful, since the January holidays are ahead, which I plan to spend on Holy Mount Athos.

Here I am going through passport control. The attentive gaze of the border guard. Passport, visa. Everything is fine. I'm moving on. I approach the fence, where a pretty girl in a uniform frock coat with shiny buttons is standing at her post. She strictly:

- Do you have any currency?

I answer:

– There is cash, euros, within normal limits.

– If you don’t know exact number, then take out all the currency, we will recalculate it now. How many rubles? Don't you know for sure either? And get the rubles. Let's count them too.

I'm trying to joke:

- Young woman! Why such strictness? We lost the Cold War. Who needs rubles abroad now?

- That's how it's supposed to be.

We counted both euros and rubles. It turned out that I had five times less cash than could be taken out without a declaration.

“Okay,” the girl in the frock coat continued, “put your backpack on the conveyor belt, now we’ll check with an X-ray to see if you have any prohibited items.”

For some time the girl carefully examined the contents of my backpack on the computer.

– What do you have here – weapons, explosives?

- No, what are you talking about! This is a camera, a movie camera and three battery-powered hand-held flashlights.

– Take them out, show them. Did you know that batteries are prohibited from being carried on aircraft?

- I know. But these batteries are in sealed products, so they are not in danger of leaking from changes in pressure or temperature.

- OK. What do you have? Books? Take it out and show it, now we’ll figure out what kind of books these are and why you’re taking them out. Oh, it's yours modern books? Where are the documents for exporting books? Where are at least the checks or receipts? How's that? So you are also the author of these books? Oh, and your photo is on the cover. Okay, you can put everything back in your backpack.

I gathered my things and zipped up the tight and uncomfortable zippers of my new backpack:

- Girl, tell me, what have I done wrong in your eyes? Why did you start examining me? What didn't you like? Maybe my beard?

- No, it's not the beard. You're just too narcissistic. You need to be taught a lesson. (And this is what a girl who looks younger than my daughter tells me!)

- Yes, that's right. I have such a sin as narcissism. Sorry. I repent. But how could you identify this sin in me without an x-ray?

– We are specially taught this.

– Does your teaching come from above or from below?

– What kind of dirty hints?

– I wanted to ask: is your teaching from God or from the evil one?

- This is not relevant.

- What does it mean?

- Nothing applies.

That's where we parted ways.

Pantocrator

I quickly went through the customs of Holy Mount Athos in the port of Ierisso and on the small passenger ship “Panagia” I went to the monastery of Pantokrator (Pantocrator). There were few pilgrims on board. The sea was breathing evenly. The morning sun was just gaining strength. A light summer breeze was blowing. Lepota! From the upper deck it was pleasant to watch the rocky Athos shores floating past us, the blue sky, which was covered with white crosses from flying planes.

But finally they announced a stop near the Pantokrator monastery. A gangway was installed at the bow of our boat for pilgrims to descend to the holy land of Athos. I remembered something forgotten movie, or something heard or read about how a person flies to the Promised Land, descends from the plane, kneels down and kisses this land. I was the only passenger who disembarked on the Pantocrator, so the ship was not completely moored, that is, it did not even touch the quay wall. But relying on my dexterity and agility of my legs, the captain only slowed down and then immediately put the car in reverse. This was enough for me to jump off the ramp. However, the boat moved a little on the wave, I swayed and almost fell over. And at that moment I also felt the desire to kneel down and bow, and maybe even kiss the stone of the quay rock - I missed Athos so much. But he was embarrassed by the sailors and pilgrims who remained on the Panagia. Suddenly they will think that some demoniac has come to Athos to confuse the monastics.

He threw his backpack on his shoulders and went to the monastery standing on a high stone cliff along a clearly visible path among the rocks.

The Pantocrator was undergoing a major renovation - builders were rushing back and forth through the open monastery gates. The archondarik was also not ready, and we, the few pilgrims who came to the monastery before me, were asked to wait in the living room by a pleasant-looking young monk. He offered us coffee, cold water and Turkish delight, thickly sprinkled with powdered sugar. For me, as the only Russian, he prepared tea from mountain herbs, in which the flavor of sage predominated.

When all the pilgrims had calmed down and sat down on the benches, eating the food, the monk himself stepped aside and began good deed- He began to finish whittling the boat with a knife made of thick tree bark. Well, this is God’s work: the church of Christ is the ship of salvation.

In the monastery shop I bought pious souvenirs: crosses, icons, finely crafted small, pocket-sized, incense chests. There was a large selection of wooden staves - all with a rope loop, so as not to lose somewhere in the abyss in the mountains, and some were decorated with carvings, all with sharp metal tips. The price is inexpensive for such beauty - only 10 euros.

The monk at the desk watched me carefully, and when I began to pay, he spoke, answering me in good Russian. He said that he really wanted to visit the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Moscow. I asked how he knew Russian so well. Monk Nikitos replied that he learned Russian with the blessing of his father abbot from books, since in Lately a lot of pilgrims come to Pantokrator from Russia.

After wandering around, I found a gazebo from where I could admire marine species and the Stavronikita monastery is clearly visible, which stands on a cape protruding into the sea.

Very close to us you can see the huge buildings of the Ilinsky monastery. The wooded hills of Mount Athos are pleasing to the eye. This gazebo is a great place. One problem: it turns out that it is intended for smokers, and Greek smokers are avid smokers. As one of them told me in this very gazebo, the Greeks are simply world champions in smoking, along with the Cubans. And the palm, that is, the amount of tobacco smoked per capita, goes one year to the Greeks, and the next year to the Cubans. And so they compete for many years. To avoid suffocation from the smoky stench, you have to step aside. When the gazebo is empty, I return.

The fresh wind from the sea blows around me with such caress, such bliss! The hot sun heated the stone roof of the gazebo. Fast swallows trim their wings at eye level. Lepota! Enjoying the peace, the sound of the wind and waves below, I became sleepy and stretched out to my full height on a bench, putting my backpack under my head. I thought that this is probably how the righteous amuse themselves in paradise... Then I seemed to doze off. I don’t understand whether it’s a dream or reality - I feel everything, understand everything, but my eyes are closed. I pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

Three days later, I understood everything about the width of a swallow’s wings when I was visiting the Kostamonit monastery. The swallows made nests in the inner galleries of the monastery, and in order to feed the chicks, they, like hummingbirds, hovered in one place, fluttering their wings. If swallows are given wide wings, their chicks will die of hunger.

I fell in love with this little gazebo and often went there without any apparent business, in the secret hope of hearing that voice again. I sit and watch: won’t someone who has a mysterious voice and supernatural powers reveal something else to me? Or: won’t I be able to learn something significant and useful for the soul?

And I found out. I see a nun standing on a flat rock by the sea below and taking something out or stuffing it into his bag. It’s clear: he pulled off something that wasn’t lying well and is hiding it, some kind of rag.

I remembered the parable about the three monks. They stood in their cells and prayed. And everyone saw a brother who, in the approaching twilight, jumped over the monastery fence and disappeared. The first monk thought: “Yeah, it’s clear... The brother ran off to commit fornication.” The second monk thought: “Brother is planning a daring thing. He will rob travelers in the night." And the third monk thought: “Brother, under the cover of darkness, ran to do deeds of mercy - he would plow someone’s garden or haul firewood from the forest or something else that people needed.”

A young monk stands behind a rock, and it seems to him that no one can see him. And from above I see that he looked around and suddenly knelt on this rag. I started to pray.

It seemed to me that the monks and the monastery had enough prayer. And here the man himself, of his own free will, and even standing on a stone, prays on his knees! For me it was great pleasure and the joy is to watch him invisibly. Then I see: my prayer book jumped up and went to the water. I think what's the matter. It was the carefree voices of approaching people that scared him away. I saw some pilgrims coming out to the site of the monk’s prayerful deeds, looking like young, colorfully dressed slobs. The monk came closer to the water and pretended that he just went for a walk, fresh air breathe.

The pilgrims shouted and made noise, walked back and forth, threw pebbles into the sea - whoever was further - and left. The monk again hid behind the rock, knelt down and continued his prayer.

I left the gazebo and came back. And he kept praying and praying. After dinner, sitting down at the gate of the monastery, I saw him again. He walked steadily up the hill, like a soldier after a hard battle; he had a jacket in his hands, on which he stood with his knees. When I caught up with me, I realized that such a jacket did not soften standing on a stone much.

And looking into the bright face of the monk himself, I thought that through the prayers of such ascetics, the Lord could postpone the end of the world in order to give us sinners the opportunity to repent, leave behind sin and begin to live a pure life.

Hilandar

After the Greek monasteries, you can especially feel the ascetic, military spirit of the Serbian monastery of Hilandar. Here you remember the words of St. Nicholas of Serbia: “It seems to many that if they were in another place, they would be better. This is self-deception and recognition of one’s spiritual defeat. Imagine if a bad warrior made excuses - at this point I will be defeated; give me another - and I will be brave. A true warrior is always courageous - whether he wins or dies.”

I had a chance to visit this monastery before the fire in 2006, after which the monastery has not recovered to this day. And then we, three pilgrims, were placed in a barracks outside the monastery wall. It was a real barracks for about 60 bunks. True, there was a modern toilet and shower with hot water inside.

I liked everything about the Serbs: and the service, which is conducted in a manner understandable to the Russian ear Church Slavonic language, and a hearty meal with red wine, and the general spirit of the monastery - so stern and courageous. Although the Serbian monks are all joyful and friendly.

I also liked the Serbian pilgrims themselves: everything seemed to be a good choice, tall - from 180 centimeters - tall, athletic build, you can feel the bearing and military hardening in the people. Many have battle marks and scars on their faces. I regretted that I had not prepared properly for communion. I wanted to stand in line with the Serbs at the Cup in order to become involved in their military spirit.

I remembered how on the same November days, only in 1941, our Russian military columns left from the parade on Red Square in Moscow straight to the front lines to fight the Nazis. And now I sensed in the Serbian people the same decisive readiness to engage in battle with their enemies. In addition to the spirits of evil in heaven, we Slavs have someone to fight against together.

In the monastery shop, I asked the majestic looking old monk for the blessing of the monastery - a grapevine and several dried grapes. The monk asked the names: “Who are you taking it to?” - to write them down in a thick notebook, two fists thick.

It is world-famous that the Hilandar blessing helps infertile couples conceive children. I said a woman's name, and then a man's name. The monk corrected me: “Say the man’s name first. From Adam’s wife Eve went to eat.” I simply said that Adam did not need to give birth, Eve gave birth. The monk didn’t answer, chewed his lips and gestured with his hands, saying, maybe you’re right, but we have this order and for your sake I won’t break it. I felt ashamed that I began to argue with the magnificent elder, because in the monastery it’s like: for everything there are only two words: “Forgive, bless.”

Other pilgrims and I bought the famous Hilandar wine from a shop to bolster our strength and treat our brothers. There were no snacks, so I asked the monks where we could get some simple food. One of the monks perked up, ran and brought an open pack of biscuits - here you go. He refused the money. He said that we are brothers. His words made my eyes tingle and my chest, somewhere in the middle, warmed - except for the Serbs, no one loves us Russians so sincerely.

The night lamp was burning in the barracks. You can't read, but in the twilight everything is visible. I see a very young man approaching the door. He began to cross himself and bow with bows from the waist. Finally, having prayed and crossed himself to his fill, the ascetic of piety, with a sweeping meter-long cross, marks the doorway in front of him and, pushing the door hard with his hand, decisively leaves the barracks, leaving the door wide open behind him.

“I’m off to battle,” I thought respectfully. The chilly November air began to fill the barracks with dampness. I lay there until my nose froze. Then, balancing between my laziness, which forced me to wrap myself in a blanket but not get up, and the cold that penetrated my very bones, I began to rise from the bunk to go close the door that was wide open by the giant of spirit.

“Yes,” I thought, “this is a real warrior of Christ. Prayer book. But he doesn’t have love in himself. After all, there is no greater love than the one who lays down his life for his friends. And here is such a small thing - you don’t need to lay down your soul: close the door behind you, think about your Orthodox brothers. It’s not the month of May.”

I didn’t condemn him, I just thought that love and care for one’s neighbor comes to a person with age and experience. Or, as a gift from God, it is given to a person from birth.

Then I remembered my young years and my excesses, and I felt funny at the smallness of the young man of prayer. He got up and closed the door.

Top of Athos. Temple of Transfiguration

There are such Jews that you wouldn’t even think about them: a simple Ryazan face with hemp, blond hair, blue eyes. Then after a year, or even two, it turns out that his mother is Jewish, and his father is Jewish.

But our Oleg is not like that, you can’t confuse him with anyone - his Jewish features are so bright that they are noticeable even in the dark. Boris, our companion, seemed to be annoyed by this.

From the Church of the Most Holy Theotokos (Panagia), through the initially shallow snow, we set off to the top of Mount Athos in the following order: Oleg was in front, I was behind him, Boris was behind me, and Hieromonk M was bringing up the rear.

The sun went below the horizon, the moon appeared in the sky. It got colder, the snow began to creak underfoot, and frost was felt. We lost our way from a barely noticeable path and took, as it seemed to us, the shortest route. At first it was easy to walk through the snow, the climb up the mountain was not particularly steep, you could climb it using only a strong staff. I tried to pray the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.” Gradually the slope of the mountain increased, and in order to climb up, I had to drop the staff and help myself with both hands.

Fatigue set in. It became difficult to pray the full Jesus Prayer - thoughts and words were confused in my head, and I began to pray briefly: “Lord, have mercy.”

It got dark. The frost kept coming. The depth of the snow cover increased and in some places reached the chest. The moon shone brightly, like a street lamp. The rocks and cliffs on our way cast a thick shadow, and we tried, where possible, to go around it in order to crawl up the light areas of the mountain.

Completely exhausted, dumbfounded, I continued to move higher and higher. I don’t know how I got to the top, I don’t remember. I only remember that I prayerfully repeated only one word: “Lord, Lord, Lord...” Apparently, the Lord pulled me up the mountain.

In some kind of oblivion, I see in the moonlight the top of Mount Athos with an Orthodox cross, I see the Church of the Transfiguration, looking like a shed of stones. Have they really arrived?

- Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee...

Temple of Transfiguration. Top of Athos

I open the door and see that Oleg has lit the candles. I see icons on the walls, a small altar with the Royal Doors. My strength is leaving me. I fall, hit the back of my head on the stone floor, and for a while my consciousness turns off.

I’m lying on my back, without taking off my backpack, and, like a cockchafer that the children turned upside down for fun, I’m trying to move my arms and legs to get up.

But how can you help Borya if there is nothing to help? No strength…

Oleg crosses himself and leaves the small church, going downstairs to save Boris. I rested a little, felt ashamed, took off my backpack and also went out.

I see that Oleg took Bori’s backpack on his back and is helping him climb to the top. Together with Oleg, with the help of the hieromonk, we somehow dragged the half-frozen, exhausted Boris into the Church of the Transfiguration, laid him on the floor, began to warm him up, and bring him to his senses. They rubbed the frozen parts of his body, boiled water and wine, gave him the warmth of Boris, wrapped him up and left him to rest until the morning.

At night I woke up feeling eyes on me. Borya looked at me firmly and said: “I will never call Olezhka a Jew again. He is a Russian Orthodox man. It’s just that his face is Jewish.”

– Why do we pray every day for the monks of the Holy Mountain of the Caracal Monastery?

- According to the promise.

I really liked how Boris tied his raincoat with special straps to the bottom of his backpack. I asked him to help me do the same. Boris was surprised: they say, why do you need this? – our two-week stay on Mount Athos is coming to an end, the day after tomorrow we must fly home. I replied that I wanted to free up space in my backpack. Boris asked why you need space in your backpack.

- Let it be, I don’t know yet.

Matins. Three o'clock in the morning. In the monastery church of Peter and Paul, built in the middle of the 16th century, it is very dark - the rare lamps provide almost no light. The monks move around the temple like shadows. There was a whisper in my ear:

– Do you speak Russian?

The service is over. The monks, and after them we, the pilgrims, moved to the refectory.

After the meal, a Greek monk comes up to us and, bowing slightly, hands me books - a five-volume set of the Philokalia. Speaks:

– Philocalia. As a gift from our monastery.

I opened one of the books and read on the first page: “The Philokalia in Russian translation, supplemented, volume one. Dependent on the Russian Panteleimon Monastery on Athos. St. Petersburg, printing house N. A. Lebedev, Nevsk. prosp., house No. 8. 1877.”

Published almost 130 years ago.

I was embarrassed, then I took out a bill and handed it to the monk - thank you. Eucharist. Take the money.

The monk shook his head. He said he didn't need money.

- What do you need?

– Pray for the brethren of our Karakalov Monastery.

– Me?.. I can’t.

- You can.

The space in the backpack, freed from the raincoat, ideally accommodated all five volumes of the Philokalia in the Russian translation of our Saint Theophan, the Recluse of Vyshensky.

Ice cream

– Do you know what I wanted most on Athos? Ice cream,” Boris said when, after a two-week pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, we got off the ferry “Agia Anna” in Ouranople.

“I don’t remember the last time I ate at home, and then at night I dreamed of gorging myself on this ice cream,” Boris continued. - Just some obsession: I wish I could get some ice cream from this!

- So what's the deal? – said Oleg. – Let’s go to the bus stop near the pier, there’s a shop there that’s open until late, and we’ll buy some.

The store was open, but the ice cream case was locked.

“It’s late,” the local Greek explained to us. – It’s November, it’s not the season, no one sells ice cream in the evening anymore.

Having slurped unsalted, we wandered back to the hotel.

“Yes, now I understand,” Boris said sadly. “This is the Mother of God explaining to me that I am not a spiritual person.” All people come to Athos for spiritual food, they are filled with the Holy Spirit here, but I, you see, had an urge to eat ice cream. I can’t think of anything else!..

We entered our cell. We ate what God had sent us and began to get ready for bed.

Suddenly there was a voice behind the door:

– Through the prayers of the saints, our fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!

“Amen, amen,” we answered.

A bearded young face looked into the door.

- Guys! This is the case here. Today we were preparing to meet our Lord with the host of the priesthood. Yes, they immediately, without stopping, sailed to Athos. There was food left, and most importantly, ten kilograms of ice cream. We can’t take it with us - it will melt and leak. Take it from us.

We sat as if struck by thunder.

Boris was the first to come to his senses...

Stanislav Senkin

Perfect Monastery

Athos stories

Appeal to readers

Friendly responses from readers and requests from friends prompted me to write another book of stories about Holy Mount Athos. The approval of my Svyatogorsk friends also meant a lot to me. I want to tell you, brothers and fathers, a special thank you and, of course, I ask for your holy prayers.

I think this is the last book in this series. Unfortunately, I will no longer be able to work on new Athonite stories without sinning with repetitions and similar plots. But I worked on this book for a long time and I hope that it will become a worthy continuation of the first collections.

I tried to use all the material I had. First of all, these are my own memories of the Holy Mountain, as well as the stories of the elders and Svyatogorsk legends.

Of course, these stories bear the stamp of my personal imperfection, and the reader will see the Holy Mountain through my eyes. Therefore, I apologize in advance if my stories cause confusion or bewilderment to anyone. I also want to remind you that this collection of stories, like the two previous ones, is not an ascetic guide, but a work of art.

Therefore, be lenient with me as an aspiring writer and do not judge harshly for some bold statements.

I thank the Lord for allowing me to complete this work, the Most Holy Mother of God for allowing me to live on the Holy Mountain, the Athonite elders for their wise instructions and, of course, the readers who favorably accepted my books.

I hope that what I have written will serve for the good and salvation of souls, both yours and mine.

Stanislav Senkin

Admonition of the old monk

The sun has almost set; its reddish glow set the branches of the cypress trees on fire, causing them to resemble Christmas trees. The monastery cities and islands of cell-houses of the country of Athos exuded everywhere an unearthly sweetness - a premonition of future bliss. Here even an atheist believed in God, although he tried to hide it. The Byzantine ringing of bells and the hum of cast-iron beats could already be heard: vespers began in monasteries and cells, the spiritual poetry of Byzantine hymn-makers filled the space of the churches.

But even Saint Athos has its own prose. Not all the temples of Athos were filled with prayer. Some, out of weakness, were too lazy to get up for prayer, preferring to read spiritual literature at night; someone was sick and needed God's help more than before...

When on this quiet evening the shabby red cat Murzik approached his saucer, in which milk had not appeared for a long time, he noticed that the saucer was also cracked. It did not crack because of time - it was death that passed by and touched the plate. The crack, like the web of an evil, black spider, ran inside the bowl, from which emanated a faint smell of sour milk, more like cheese.

Murzik purred pitifully and looked at the half-open prayer room, from where his breadwinner, an old, unkempt monk who usually wore a torn and dirty cassock, had not come out for a long time. Murzik was clean, he didn’t like the old man’s smell, but now more than anything else he would like to see the scraggly silver beard of the breadwinner and his wide, kind smile.

It wasn’t even a matter of food: Murzik had enough snakes, rats and frogs for food, and his thirst could be quenched from a spring that bubbled nearby. Nevertheless, the cat has not forgotten how to love milk. Besides, he so missed the old man’s stingy but sincere affection!

Ahh! Murzik almost forgot about the fish and cheese that he received on rare occasions. holidays. All this is now gone... And then, in addition, the saucer is cracked! Trouble has come to their cell!

The cat looked warily at the rickety door of the old man’s chambers, which had not been painted for a long time. He was strictly prohibited from entering there. Several times, for his curiosity, he received a secret hit on the back from the monk, and once he even received a painful blow to the face with a fly swatter.

The cat was understanding and stopped encroaching on the elder’s personal space.

But now the situation was not entirely ordinary: the old man had not left his chambers for several days. Something was wrong!

The breadwinner had stayed in his room for a long time before, but at the same time he showed at least some signs of life: he bowed, talked to someone, muttered something... True, after that he was silent for a long time, for a very long time, almost like now.

But not only from the lack of milk and the cracked saucer, the cat realized that something serious had happened to the old man. A subtle smell of danger and decay emanated from the old man’s cell.

This smell and the dead silence in the breadwinner’s chambers forced Murzik to disobey the elder and sneak into the forbidden room. He carefully grabbed the bottom of the slightly open door with his claws and pulled it sharply towards himself. It gave way, albeit with effort, but without squeaking, because the elder regularly lubricated the hinges with oil so that even the slightest noise would not distract him from prayer. The cat looked around carefully and warily.

The lamp had long since burned out; the copper censer was full of black, cold coals. The faces of the icons looked with love and sorrow at the old man, who lay motionless on his bed.

The cat had a good understanding of the signs of life and death and realized that his breadwinner was very bad. His chest heaved weakly, his breathing was intermittent. The old man’s hands lay on his chest, and judging by the way they trembled convulsively, he was tormented by some terrible visions. There was a heavy smell of a sick body in the room.

Death was still playing with him, just as he himself, Murzik, used to play with mice, crushing them, then releasing them, giving a ghostly hope for life.

Murzik understood the game of death well, but he did not want to give his breadwinner to it. He loved him in his own way, like a cat - for the cheese and milk, for the roof over his head, for that little bit of affection that the old man bestowed on him. The old man was not cruel. He never beat Murzik, and the fly swatter and slippers don’t count - it was a well-deserved punishment.

The cat gathered his strength and hissed to death, trying to scare her, to snatch the breadwinner from her hands, naively believing that he himself had some power over life and death. The efforts were in vain - death was not afraid of his hissing.

Suddenly the old man called plaintively: “Nikodim!” The cat did not understand what the breadwinner wanted, but since there were only three of them in the cell - the old man himself, the cat and death, Murzik thought that it was his name after all, and quickly jumped onto the breadwinner’s chest, in which his sick heart was barely beating.