I was extremely frightened as we stood there, for I thought it possible that a number of people, packed together and constantly stirring in their discomfort and all holding lighted tapers, might set themselves on fire. But I forgot my alarm, because I was standing opposite a peasant woman sitting on a window ledge who was the very essence of Macedonia, who was exactly what I had come back to see. She was the age that all Macedonian women seem to become as soon as they cease to be girls: a weather-beaten fifty. There was a dark cloth about her hair and shoulders, and in its folds, and in her noble bones and pain-grooved flesh, she was like many Byzantine Madonnas to be seen in frescoes and mosaics. In her rough hand she mothered her taper, looking down on its flame as if it were a young living thing; and on the sleeve of her russet sheepskin jacket there showed an embroidery of stylized red and black trees which derived recognizably from a pattern designed for elegant Persian women two thousand years before. There was the miracle of Macedonia, made visible before our eyes.
This woman had suffered more than most other human beings, she and her forebears. A competent observer of this countryside has said that every single person born in it before the Great War (and quite a number who were born after it) has faced the prospect of violent death at least once in his or her life. She had been born during the calamitous end of Turkish maladministration, with its cycles of insurrection and massacre, and its social chaos. If her own village had not been murdered, she had certainly heard of many that had, and had never had any guarantee that hers would not some day share the same fate. Then, in her maturity, had come the Balkan wars and the Great War, with a cholera and typhus epidemic in between. Later had come I.M.R.O.; and there was always extreme poverty. She had had far less of anything, of personal possessions, of security, of care in childbirth, than any Western woman can imagine. But she had two possessions which any Western woman might envy. She had strength, the terrible stony strength of Macedonia; she was begotten and born of stocks who could mock all bullets save those which went through the heart, who could outlive the winters when they were driven into the mountains, who could survive malaria and plague, who could reach old age on a diet of bread and paprika. And cupped in her destitution as in the hollow of a boulder there are the last drops of the Byzantine tradition.
With our minds we all know what Byzantium was. We are aware that the Eastern continuance of the Roman Empire was a supremely beautiful civilization. It was imperfect because it was almost totally ignorant of economics, and the people were distraught with hungry discontents which they could not name. We know that by the Golden Horn the waning empire developed a court ceremonial, which the earlier emperors had borrowed from Asia, until it made all those who watched it wise about the symbols of spiritual things that can be expressed by sight and sound. The Church itself learned from its partner the State, and raised the Mass to a supreme masterpiece of communal art; and the people, saturated with ritual impressions of the idea of God and of the Emperor, who was by theory the Viceroy of God, produced an art that is unique in its nobility, that in its architecture and painting and mosaics and metal-work and textiles found a calligraphy for the expression of man’s graver experiences which makes all other arts seem a little naive or gross. We know that these achievements were not technical tricks but were signs of a real spiritual process, for the Byzantines were able to live in dignity and decency for four centuries in the knowledge that they were doomed, that one day they would be destroyed root and branch by the merciless Turks. They were not merely stoical in that shadow; they continued to live in the fullness of life, to create, even, in the very last phase of their doom, to the point of pushing out the shoots of a new school of painting.
All this we know with our minds, and with our minds only. But this woman knew it with all her being, because she knew nothing else. It was the medium in which she existed. Turkish misrule had deprived her of all benefit from Western culture; all she had had to feed on was the sweetness spilled from the overturned cup of Constantinople. Therefore she was Byzantine in all her ways, and in her substance. When she took up her needle it instinctively pricked the linen in Byzantine designs, and she had the Byzantine idea that one must decorate, always decorate, richly decorate. As she sat there she was stiff, it might almost be said carpeted, in the work of her own hands. The stiffness was not an accidental effect of her materials, it was a symbol of her beliefs about society. She believed that people who are to be respected practise a more stately bearing than those who are of no account; her own back was straight, she did not smile too easily. Therefore she found nothing tedious in the ritual of her Church. She could have sat for long hours as she was then, nursing her taper in quiet contentment, watching grave and slow-moving priests evoke the idea of magnificence, and induce the mood of adoration which is due to the supremely magnificent. She was not gaping at a peepshow, she was not merely passing the time. She was possessed by the same passion that had often astounded the relief workers who came here at the beginning of the century to fight the famine that always followed the suppression of the Christian revolts. Again and again, in villages which had fallen under Turkish disfavour and were therefore subject without cease to murder and arson and pillage, they urged inhabitants to emigrate to Serbia and Bulgaria; and the peasants always answered that that might be the wisest course, but that they could not desert their churches. This was not superstition. Before the altars, the offshoot of Byzantinism had passed the same test as its parent; it had prevented doom from becoming degradation. This woman’s face was unresentful, exalted, sensitive to her sorrows yet preoccupied by that which she perceived to be more important, magnificence and its adoration.
Now the Metropolitan was at the door, a gorgeous figure, not only because his vestments were bright with gold thread, and his high mitre and pastoral staff and the cross on his breast glittered with jewels. There is inherent dignity in the lines of a costume that has incorporated the philosopher’s mantle of the ancients, the Roman consul’s scarf, and the tunic and gauntlets of the Byzantine Emperor. In a rich voice the Metropolitan announced that Christ had risen, and from the faces above the primrose flames came sharp cries of belief. Then he uttered a prayer or repeated a passage from the Gospels, I was not sure which, and went on to deliver an address which compared the resurrection of Christ and the liberation of Christian Macedonia from the Turks by Serbia twenty-five years before. It was, in fact, straight Yugoslavian propaganda, and most of it could have easily been delivered from a political platform.
It was only our modernity that was shocked. This was not an innovation, but a continuance of the ancient tradition of the Church. ‘As the body politic, like the human body, is composed of parts and members, so the most important and the most vital parts are the Emperor and the Patriarch,’ wrote a Byzantine theologian; ‘in the same way that the peace and happiness of the human being depends on the harmony of body and soul, so in the polity there must be perfect agreement between the Emperor and the priesthood.’ Since the Orthodox Church does not pretend to be anything but a religion, since it does not claim to be in possession of the final truth about philosophy and ethics and political science, this does not raise such difficulties as it would in the West. The Orthodox Church conceived, and still conceives, that its chief business is magic, the evocation by ritual of the spiritual experiences most necessary to man. It has also the duty of laying down a general pattern of moral behaviour. If the civil authority assists at the ritual and accepts this pattern it has a right to demand the support of the ecclesiastical authority, and the ecclesiastical authority has a right to give it, save when its own sphere is invaded. It will, in fact, support the civil authority politically if the civil authority does not meddle in theology. This is an attitude that is bound to be adopted by any state church, and that involves no difficulties in the case of a church which does not claim final wisdom on profane subjects as well as divine.
The Orthodox Church did not renounce that claim by choice. The renunciation was forced on it by the troubled character of Byzantine history. One can claim final wisdom on a subject to the degree that life as regards that subject is predictable. Now life in Europe has never been orderly for more than a few years at a time and in a limited area; but in the West it has been orderly enough, if only in the homogeneity of its disorder, to allow clever men to lay down principles that they could safely claim to be eternal, since they afforded useful bases for action and thought during some considerable period of time. In the East of Europe it has not been so. Continual and astonishing were its historical convulsions. The Byzantine Empire, which suffered invasion by blood-thirsty and pitiless fellow-Christians who had come to redeem the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem and stopped to taste the more immediately delectable pleasure of looting Constantinople, and which knew itself certain to be invaded by Asiatics as inaccessible to appeal as the personages in a nightmare, could not prophesy. Hence its genius turned away from speculative thought to art, and its Church preserved its dogma without developing it and concentrated its forces on the glory of the Mass, which gave a magic protection against evils that were unknown as well as those that were known. Thereby it brought on itself the criticisms that it was sterile and archaic in teaching and an arcanum of superstition; but it could not have served its people better in their special tribulation.
For these historical reasons nobody in the congregation was shocked because the Metropolitan’s sermon was a speech in support of the Government; and I am sure also, since the circumstances of Balkan life have forbidden any intertwining of religious and pacifist sentiment, that nobody was shocked because the Metropolitan had in his young days been a comitadji. The comitadji who waged guerrilla warfare against the Turks in Macedonia before the war covered a wide range of character. Some were highly disciplined, courageous, and ascetic men, often from good families in the freed Slav countries, who harried the Turkish troops, particularly those sent to punish Christian villages, and who held unofficial courts to correct the collapse of the legal system in the Turkish provinces. Others were fanatics who were happy in massacring the Turks but even happier when they were purging the movement of suspected traitors. Others were robust nationalists, to whom the proceedings seemed a natural way of spirited living. Others were blackguards who were in the business because they enjoyed murder and banditry. All intermediate shades of character were fully represented. This made it difficult for the Western student to form a clear opinion about Near Eastern politics; it also made it difficult, very difficult, for a Macedonian peasant who saw a band of armed men approaching his village.
The Metropolitan had, in point of fact, belonged to one of the most admirable among these bands; but if he had been careless about the choice of his companions it would not have troubled the peasant woman who was nursing her taper and gazing at him in thankfulness over its glow. He was a good magician. He knew how to wear the garments, how to speak the words, how to make the obeisances, that gave her the beautiful experience of loving a flawless being. He was a magician, and, what was a great marvel to her, he was not her enemy. For two centuries her people had been under the horrible necessity of seeking this magic, which was their sole consolation, from agents who, in the intervals of dispensing it to them, contrived their ruin and death. In the eighteenth century the Church fell into the power of the phanariots, the wealthy Greeks, who established themselves in Constantinople and worked hand in glove with the Turks; not least joyfully when their Moslem masters set them on the Slavs though they themselves retained their Christianity. They persuaded the Sultan to put the whole of the Balkan Church under the power of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, an institution which they kept in their pocket. They then turned the Church into an elaborate fiscal system for fleecing the Slavs, by exacting enormous fees for the performance of all religious functions, even stripping the peasants of their last farthing as a charge for saying prayers for the dead. They not only robbed their congregations of their material possessions, they strove to deprive them of their most treasured immaterial possession, their racial identity. There were always a number of Slavs so devout that they insisted upon becoming priests; if these were not prepared to forget that they were Serb or Bulgar, and play traitor to their own blood, they were enlisted as the servants of the Greek clergy, and if they displeased their masters they were beaten during divine service before silent congregations of their own people. There was also a ruthless campaign against the speaking of the Serbian and Bulgarian languages, and an attempt to enforce the use of Greek over the whole of Macedonia, instead of the small Southern district to which it had long been limited.
But as the nineteenth century progressed the Ottoman Turks began to conceive a great fear of the Greeks, some of whom had already achieved independence in the kingdom of Greece; and the unrest of the Serbs and Bulgars grew with every decade. So the Sultan worked out a new application of the fiendish rule Divide et impera, and in 1870 he appointed a Bulgarian exarch to rule over the churches of Bulgaria and Macedonia. The term exarch shows the curious persistence of the Byzantine tradition in these parts. It was originally used by the Eastern emperors to denote a viceroy; the Exarch of Ravenna was the governor who represented their power in Italy. But it exemplifies the degradation which the Byzantine tradition had suffered in Turkish hands that it is hard to define the ecclesiastical office to which the name was given in modern times, and it seems indeed to have held a different meaning at different times. In this case it meant the patriarch of this province, appointed to fulfil a political mission but with uncertain guarantee of support against the opponents of his mission. The situation can be grasped if we imagine the British Government sending out an archbishop to Australia to carry on his ecclesiastical duties, and also to compel the Irish and the Scottish to lose their identities and become English patriots, while at the same time doing nothing to prevent the existing Scottish and Irish religions and political organizations from opposing him. The Sultan did not recall the Greek priests who were already in Macedonia, and they fought savagely to retain their power. As the Serbs naturally found Bulgar control of their Church no more admirable than Greek they too were up in arms. Thus, at the cost of all peace and gentleness in a community of over half a million people, the Ottoman Empire preserved itself from the risks arising out of a union between its Greek and Serb and Bulgar subjects.
This horrible confusion of religion and bloodshed persisted till the end of the Balkan wars. The woman sitting on the window ledge was certainly not too young to remember a certain Greek Archbishop of a Macedonian diocese to the south of Skoplje, whose hatred of the Slavs in his spiritual care was indeed spiritual, since it could hardly be satisfied by anything he could do to their bodies. Once he commissioned a band of assassins to murder a Bulgarian leader who was lying wounded in a hideaway. They were successful. As proof they cut off his head and took it back to the Archiepiscopal Palace, where the Archbishop received it and paid them well. It offered an unpleasing appearance, as a bullet had smashed the jaw. Nevertheless he had it photographed and hung an enlargement on the wall of the room where he received his flock, so that they might take a lesson. Many a woman, such as this one, sensitive and exalted, could never hear the proclamation that Christ had risen except from the lips of this atrocious enemy of her kind. The Archbishop was a man of extreme personal beauty and the graduate of a Western university. At the thought of this unpleasing incongruity, one of a million omens that the world is not simple, not consistent, and often not agreeable, my hand shook and my taper shivered.
The Metropolitan was still speaking, it was becoming enormously hot, and the heat was laden with the smell of honey, for it is ordained that all tapers used in churches must be made of beeswax. There came back to me the fear of fire which I had felt earlier in the service, and this was accompanied by a revulsion from the horror of history, and a dread that it might really be witless enough to repeat itself. Fire spreads, and the substances it inflames put up no defence, burn, and become ashes. Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow-creatures, and the species yields to its perverse appetite, allowing vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries, people to agonize and become extinct. The pleasantness of life which is so strong when it manifests itself that it is tempting to regard it as the characteristic and even determinant quality of the universe, is of no real avail. I could be burnt to death in this church, though the air smelt of honey. In moonlight, by fountains where roses grew and nightingales sang, all less tangible and superior beauty could be beaten down into earth, not to emerge itself again until freed by another Creation. I let myself feel these fears to their extreme, with a certain sense of luxury, for facing me was this Macedonian woman, who could, better than anybody else I had ever met, give me an assurance on these points. There was nothing over-positive in her statement. One can shout at the top of one’s voice the information that the 11.15 for Brighton leaves from platform 6, but subtler news has to be whispered, for the reason that to drag knowledge of reality over the threshold of consciousness is an exhausting task, whether it is performed by art or by experience. She made no spectacular declaration that man is to be saved; simply her attitude assumed that this Easter would end with no more fatality than any other Easter she had known, and her body, wasted yet proud in its coarse and magnificent clothes, proclaimed that death may last five hundred years yet not be death.