Monastery of Pantokrator
Mount Athos, Northern Greece
Present day
Elli was booked onto the next flight to Thessaloniki en route to Ouranoupolis and Mount Athos (the Holy Mountain) and the Monastery of Pantokrator.
When she arrived in Thessaloniki, she was swiftly whisked through customs, and a car waiting outside picked her up for the two-hour drive to Ouranoupolis, the last frontier, the last town before the semi-autonomous community of the Mount Athos and its twenty monasteries.
From there, a boat took her around the Athos Peninsula, to its North-Eastern coast and the Monastery of Pantokrator. At the quay, she was met by a monk who led her to the igoumenos or abbot, an old friend. She was of course under disguise, as according to a peculiar and ancient rule of the one-thousand-year-old monastic community there, no woman was ever allowed to step even a toe on the Holy Mountain.
Once inside the abbot’s private rooms, she removed the hood of her cloak. The abbot had been expecting her and he greeted her warmly and, unusually for the monastic community, embraced her and kissed her on both cheeks.
The abbot had not always been a monk. He lived a normal life before devoting his life to God. He came from Cyprus. He was the son of a business associate of Elli’s father. He and Elli were the same age and grew up together in the streets of Limassol. They had remained good friends and loyal to each other ever since and looked to stay lifelong friends, till death do them part. The abbot was intrigued when she sent word requesting a permit to be issued, because she needed to speak to him urgently.
‘Ellitsa mou, my Ellitsa, kalos ilthes agapi mou, welcome my love.’
Ellitsa, the diminutive word for Elli, was a way of showing endearment and familiarity.
‘Now, tell me, to what do we owe this honour?’
‘I need to speak with Aggelos.’
‘Well, you are in luck. As it happens Aggelos is in the library right now. He very often sleeps there with his cherished manuscripts for company. He says they make him feel safe and warm and that he can watch over them like a proud father. Though I think it’s the lack of proper ventilation in there that keeps the place warm and that he craves. Come with me.’
He led her to the library where Aggelos was waiting for them.
‘My dear Elli. Twice you honour us with your presence in such a short time. We are surely blessed. Spyros, why have you been hiding her? I heard she arrived here some time ago.’
Spyros smiled and looked at Elli who wasted no time.
‘Aggelos, what do you know about that child that was kidnapped from the Palace of Vlachernae on 4 ^th May 1453?’
‘My dear Elli, after you left last time I decided to put some order in the shelf where the Book of the Pallanians, that you took with you when you left, was located. I also wanted to check whether there was anything there that was relevant and significant. Until you came here a month ago, that shelf had probably not been touched for years, so I had no idea what I would find there.
‘Well, I did find something interesting. It is a pergamene that was archived near the Book of the Pallanians. It is a letter from Michael and Mark Symitzis to Eleni Symitzis, their mother and your ancestor. You know their story. Mark, undercover as Suleyman, with a group of Ottoman riders was on a reconnaissance mission and Michael was doing the same with a group of members of the Order of Vlachaerne. What it says in the letter is that, on 4 ^th May 1453, the two brothers met by accident in the Forest of Valens outside Constantinople.
‘Yes, that was the same day as the disappearance of the child. After Michael and Mark had gone their own ways, Mark heard a child’s cry coming from somewhere nearby. He went to investigate and found a child. There was nothing with the child to indicate where it had come from, any clue as to his identity. To protect the child it was decided not to take it to Constantinople, but to a safe place, as far away from the hot spots of battle as possible.
‘Mark took the child to Crete, to the village of Ayia Galini in Southern Crete where it was brought up by a good Greek family. Amidst the uncertainty and confusion of the siege of Constantinople, Mark never got the chance to contact his mother or brother to let them know. Unfortunately, on his way back to Constantinople, Mark was, apparently, ambushed and killed by bandits and never got to tell them about his find and the last chance was lost.
‘How this letter, which he must have written before he died, survived and ended here, I don’t know, assuming, by the way, that it is genuine, which by the look of it, it must be. I did a bit more digging and came up with various documents indicating that some of my predecessors at the monastery had been following the boy’s progress. But the trail unfortunately went cold somewhere in the 1890s.’
‘Aggelos, does the letter give us the name of that family that took the boy under their wing?’
‘It’s Palantis. I don’t know whether it still exists. It could be that it changed due to marriage, if there were no male descendants, or there may be no descendants left at all.’
‘I’ll try and find out. I’ll put my people onto it. I know the right person to carry out that kind of research.’
Later, Elli called Giorgos and explained what she wanted and suggested the computer hacker that James Calvell used recently to find out the identity of the donor of the icons to the Metropolitan. Giorgos said that he’d call James to arrange it.