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into the narthex, or antechamber, to look at the rest of the frescoes. The painting of the katholikon, or nave, was completed in 1548 and those of the narthex in 1566, by a certain Frankos Katellanos and by Father George, his monkish brother. It is strange how little, to an inexpert eye like mine, the Byzantine formula changes. Except for the Cretan renaissance, the same plastic technique prevailed, on general lines, for well over a thousand years, and a stranger would attribute these paintings to a far earlier date. Like the Orthodox religion today, Eastern iconography remained, until very late indeed, spiritually a part of the Byzantine Empire. Long, indeed, after Byzantium had ceased to exist as anything more than a sacred vision in the minds of the Greeks.
    The pillars were again painted with saints’ figures. Many of them were ascetics of the desert. The torsos of SS Agapios and Daniel the Stylites projected from boxes built on Corinthian capitals, and the beard of a naked hermit aproned in pale green leaves fell below his knees in a swaying white stalactite like melted sealing wax. The nakedness of the more fortunate Makarios, identically bearded, was covered with thick smooth hair growing all over him in a suit of silver fox. Only his hands and feet emerged and his knees, which had worn holes in the thick pelt by constant kneeling. The walls were devoted to wild scenes of martyrdom—inverted crucifixions, flayings, impalements, draggings by wild horses, tearings apart by bent saplings,brandings, mutilations and, above all, beheadings. Phalanxes of splendidly clad figures knelt or lay prostrate with blood gushing from their headless trunks while their heads, still haloed, rolled away over the sad plain.
    There was something immensely pleasing about the chapel of the Three Hierarchs hard by. Basilican in shape, with a low wooden roof divided up in a Mexican-looking pattern of black and white chevrons and faded orange, it was paved with mellow brick-coloured slabs. Led by the triumvirate of Doctors—SS John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen and Basil of Caesarea—the holy company trooped round the walls with the only Koutzovlach saint bringing up the rear—Nicolas of Metsovo, who was burnt at the stake by the Turks in the market place of Trikkala. In the death-bed scene of St. Ephraim of Syria, the saint lay swathed in a grey shroud on a wicker-work bier, and a fellow-ascetic lowered his bearded face for a valedictory kiss while another embraced his swaddled feet. An affluence of crutched elders streamed from the neighbouring hermitages, some carried on each others’ backs and some in primitive sedan chairs. Next door, an army of virgins and matrons and censer-swinging sages encompassed the death-bed of St. John the Divine. The Evangelist, tonsured in the manner of the Western Church, reclined in a pink and gold palace on a catafalque draped with green and mauve set about with tall gold candle-sticks. The faded colours of all these frescoes, the primitive technique, the arbitrary perspective and the literal punctilio of the detail, give them, although they were painted as late as 1637, an infinite charm. The insane mountains of the Meteora themselves must have been the inspiration for the background to the life of Christ that surrounded the upper walls—those narrow pinnacles of stepped and toppling table-mountains, shooting, in the Betrayal, right across the sky from either side, and almost forming a bridge. Most memorable of all was the oblong cartouche containing the Last Supper. On benches ofgold and polygonal stools Our Lord and the twelve apostles were seated in a ring, with an embroidered communal napkin across their knees. There is a faint glimmer of the Renaissance in the architecture of the background and in the yellow and black striped awning draped from gable to gable. A great round table is tilted out of perspective to display its burden of slender candlesticks, goblets of wine, cruets,