At night, a cooling breeze began to stir the plane trees and cypress of the valley, lifting the day’s heat from the courtyard’s stone and filling the monastery with the scent of jasmine hanging from the walls. I entered the Katholikon as the first soft chants broke the stillness of the evening, and stood in the shadows of the esonarthex to watch the midnight liturgy unfold. And “unfolding” is the only way to describe the experience, for as the liturgy progressed everything seemed to be in motion. The candles flickered in their candelabra and cast moving shadows from the chandelier, which was kept in constant, oscillating sway by one of the nuns. And as the voices of the nuns rose and fell, prompting and responding to the priest’s deep drone, they seemed to match the pendulous swing of the censer, which filled the church with thin smoke and the smell of incense. Dressed in black robes which blended with the church’s very shadow, the nuns were never still themselves: genuflecting and moving in circular patterns around the altar, they lit candles and extinguished them, kissed the gleaming gold of the icons and gracefully retreated again. The impression was of timelessness, of recurring motion and repeated sound that created a strange sense of stillness and silence: the stillness and silence of a reflection, perhaps, or an echo.
At night, a cooling breeze began to stir the plane trees and cypress of the valley, lifting the day’s heat from the courtyard’s stone and filling the monastery with the scent of jasmine hanging from the walls. I entered the Katholikon as the first soft chants broke the stillness of the evening, and stood in the shadows of the esonarthex to watch the midnight liturgy unfold. And “unfolding” is the only way to describe the experience, for as the liturgy progressed everything seemed to be in motion. The candles flickered in their candelabra and cast moving shadows from the chandelier, which was kept in constant, oscillating sway by one of the nuns. And as the voices of the nuns rose and fell, prompting and responding to the priest’s deep drone, they seemed to match the pendulous swing of the censer, which filled the church with thin smoke and the smell of incense. Dressed in black robes which blended with the church’s very shadow, the nuns were never still themselves: genuflecting and moving in circular patterns around the altar, they lit candles and extinguished them, kissed the gleaming gold of the icons and gracefully retreated again. The impression was of timelessness, of recurring motion and repeated sound that created a strange sense of stillness and silence: the stillness and silence of a reflection, perhaps, or an echo.