Of Orphans, Pilgrims, and Princes

In 2020, I had arrived in London in late January, my first stop as I embarked on my
“ year of living curiously”, with travels planned through South-East Asia. Then the first covid cases started showing up and my intuition told me to stay put. Six months later, I had to leave the UK so as not to overstay my “visa”. It was a 7-hour flight back to the US, and my home there had been emptied and packed into boxes; not to mention the disaster that was unfolding as a demagogue frothed at the mouth with lies while the country was ravaged by the pandemic. The EU had just banned U.S. travelers and so I looked to the handful of nearby countries I could go to. Morocco was too hot and the covid rates in Egypt were alarming. I settled on Turkey. It was scary to get on a flight, but I had no choice. In Istanbul, I was immediately soothed by the ancient city with centuries of history carved out along the banks of the sparkling Bosporus. The city was bereft of tourists, save for Covid refugees who could not get back home. The breezes that blew in from the sea murmured my name, and I found myself on a ferry to spend a few weeks on the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara. Here is an account I wrote then, of one of those August afternoons on the islands.

Eventually, the houses of Buyukada Island gave way to groves of pine, gnarly and crooked, that laid more claim to the land than the houses heaped on their slopes with their terraces jutting towards the sea; houses that finally gave way to nature because the view could no longer be justified by the steepness of the climb.

And this is how I found myself in a pine grove, where the trees strained and bent on their sojourn to the sky thirsty for water though the sea surrounded them. Were they like us, they would have complained as to their fate, but luckily their sentience was concerned simply with living and growing, and the stories they had to tell could be traced in the abrupt angles of their dark trunks or their dead limbs that hung down to stroke an ochre carpet of fallen needles.

This austerity was far removed from the pampered gardens lower down the hill where the streets were lined with oleander and where massive stems of glowing pink Bougainvillea, shot out like fireworks from behind high walls. Not to be outdone, trumpet vines cascaded over those same walls tooting their bright orange blooms. In contrast to this spectacle of fiery colors, the pale and delicate violet-blue of the cape leadwort beguiled the eye from the shade with its promise of coolness.

Here, there was none of that. There was the burned chocolate of the trunks, the uniformity of pine green, and underneath the grey-green and sienna scrub, the offerings of a dry earth. And so, taking in the fragrance of pine oil that rode on the summer breeze, I eventually reached the top of this hill, arriving at the hulking remains of the Greek Orphanage, surrounded now by a fence and barbed wires and warnings of not to enter.

Reputed to be the largest wooden structure in Europe, it was now on the verge of collapse, its tiled roof dipping in spots, with gaping wounds where there were once windows. A placard spoke to its origins. Built in the late 1800s by the same company the owned the Orient Express, the Prinkipo Palace was to be the lavish final stop for the disembarking well-heeled passengers, here on the Princes Islands, only a boat ride away from Istanbul. For political and economic reasons, the Prinkipo never opened. At the turn of the 19th century, it was purchased and converted to a Greek orphanage by a wealthy Istanbulite.

Almost 600 orphans were accommodated here. As the long-simmering conflict between Turkey and Greece flared, the orphanage was confiscated in 1964, and the remaining boys and girls turned over to nearby monasteries. Apparently, the Greek Patriarchate regained the property in 2018 but after half a century of neglect, it remains a casualty of conflict, the same conflict that deprived the orphans of their world. Now it sits empty and mournful, the wind and weather slowly tearing away at its magnificence.

Once on the hilltop, I looked down tempted by the sandy cove and the azure blue water far below. But I refused to climb down so quickly from my hard-earned perch for I had one more destination in mind. Another 20 minutes’ walk took me to the convergence of several island roads, where I lunched at a restaurant, enjoying a mezze of beans laced with olive oil and grilled aubergine among other delights. I gazed out over the Sea of Marmara, upon other islets in the archipelago, towards the Istanbul suburbs in the distance.

Fortified, I continued to the next higher hilltop. The sun had now vaulted higher in the sky offering barely a fringe of shade beneath the trees the lined the steep cobbled path. I plunged into the pine trees looking for shade only to find myself entangled in threads strung up the slope through the bushes. Strange, I thought.

I then noticed what looked like litter caught in the bushes. Closer inspection revealed the signs of pilgrims. All manner of items, pieces of cloth or tissue, candy wrapper, plastic bags, even discarded face-masks were all tied and knotted to the branches of shrubs.

The steep cobbled trail was none other, as I discovered later than the “walk of torment” that pilgrims undertook barefoot and silently to the Agia Yorgi, or St George Church and Monastery twice a year. As they climbed, they would unravel a spool of unbroken thread all the way to the top so their prayers would be answered.

I remembered a favorite poem by William Stafford:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I reached the top of the hill, sweating, and waited to catch my breath before I made my way in. I wrapped my cotton picnic cloth around my waist like a sarong to cover my bare legs in keeping with the sign on the door requesting modesty. The cool interior was lit by bejeweled fairytale chandeliers. Symbols and images, in a complex metaphysical tapestry, glimmered and glowed evocatively as they had for centuries past. Stars were painted across parts of the vaulted rich blue ceiling. Stained glass let in golden green and yellow hues, and even a hint of ruby from a small round window high above. Silvery icons beckoned in the dimly lit chamber. There were images of St George slaying dragons everywhere. Visitors, of all faith, knelt in submission before them, in the hope of being healed.

It is said that the Church stands on the site of an ancient monastery. The Princes Islands were in fact known as the islands of the monks in Byzantine times, as so many monasteries had been established there. The islands earned their name for the various Byzantine princes, princesses, and other royalty who had fallen out of favour and were exiled there.

In 1884, Gustave Schlumberger in Les Iles de Princes wrote: “Few places…have witnessed the groans of more princes and princesses hurled from their imperial Palace to the depths of a cell in some imperial monastery.”

Whether exiled royalty was once housed in the ruins around St George, I don’t know, but a single priest remained to preserve this remaining distant outpost of his faith, and manage the flow of pilgrims and tourists that stream into the inner chamber. He was tall, broad-chested, and imposing with a small ponytail tucked into his collar.

I ask him how long he had been there.

“That’s a strange first question to ask,” he replied. (I wondered what people usually asked him.)

Still, he answered, “twenty-three years.”

Reflecting on his lonely sojourn high on this hilltop a long way from his homeland in northern Greece , as he had told me, I queried further: “what does time mean to you?”

“Preparation” he answered, without hesitating.

“For the afterlife…the next life?”

He nodded, seeming not to agree exactly with my wording.

I asked, “can you experience that in this life?”

“You can get a taste of it.”

Leaving the candle glow, I returned to the bright outer world. I looked towards the lower hilltop and was startled at the sight of the Greek Orphanage. It was almost unrecognizable from this perspective. Dark shadows had fallen immediately below its tiled roofs, and it looked like some ancient, even alien structure.

I thought of the orphans who must have gazed through its windows across the sea wondering through what cruel hand of fate they had lost their parents, and what was to become of them.

I, too, looked out over the water as that is where the eye is naturally drawn.

I now saw what the orphans must have seen.

I saw what the priest must see every day, striding his long balcony behind the monastery, fingering the knotted string of his komboskini — the sea of Marmara spreading luxuriantly, impenetrably, shimmering crepe silk masking the distant shore to take on the mantle of a vast ocean. It was a deception I was willing to allow for the conjured sense of vastness and infinity, ocean and sky woven into a single celestial garment.

I wondered what dragons that a priest in preparation for the hereafter for the past twenty-three years has left to slay. I know I still have mine.

I wondered what lives the orphaned children went on to lead, and what they remembered, or had buried, of their days on the island.

I wondered what happens if you let go of the thread.