Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 9

Tomasito photo, 2009

Nine

“Good Priest", the Greek biker, means it.

When I get back to Thessaloniki, I telephone the biker with the help of a friendly English-speaking gas station attendant who writes out directions for me so I can find his apartment.

I finally locate the apartment, on the sixth floor of one of the hundreds of apartment block buildings crowding the seacoast. My new friend is delighted that I have come and invites me to stay with him until I get my visa—and he says he has friends in the Holy Mountain office, who will help me get the document as soon as possible.

I can sleep on the couch in the living room of his small one-bedroom apartment and he will accept no payment from me—he says he will gain spiritual merit from helping a pilgrim!

His name is Kalogiros, which he says means “good priest”.

Kalogiros is a young man that I would describe as “typically Greek”. He is fairly short and stocky and wears longish black hair, a thick black beard and a mustache. He is muscular with thick workingman’s fingers so I suspect he is a mechanic or construction worker but he turns out to be a certified repairman of expensive foreign cameras—which work he does at home on his small kitchen table.

He plies his trade for several hours every day and while he works we talk. This may seem strange because the only Greek I know is the five words of the Jesus prayer and he speaks very little English, but the simple fact is that we seem to understand each other quite well anyway.

Besides, he has such an unusual way of working that it is really edifying to watch.

First he takes the malfunctioning camera completely apart, scattering tiny bits and screws all over the small table with what seems to be total abandon. As he destroys the camera he will suddenly say: “There is the problem!” but will continue taking the apparatus apart until it is just a heap of pieces.

Then he immediately begins to re-assemble the camera, picking up the tiny screws and joining together the bits of metal and plastic with his thick, sausage-like fingers—until it is perfectly whole and fixed. And perhaps most odd of all, though he has documents pinned to his wall which prove that he is a certified technician, authorized by their factories to repair even the most expensive Haselblad cameras from Germany or Nikons from Japan, he says he never has been trained for this work at all—just always knows instinctively exactly what must be done.

Camera shops all over Thessaloniki bring their broken fine cameras to him to fix and he says that he always has more work than he wants.

After I get to know him better and we have spent several afternoons “talking” in our peculiar way, he demonstrates for me something else he says he has learned to do—and something he said I should never try since acquiring the skill and knowledge had almost cost him his life.

He took two strands of bare copper wire—one in each hand— and stuck them into the open holes of an electric wall socket—taking what should have been a serious or fatal shock in stride—not even blinking or pausing in his conversation. He said that he had learned, through meditation and other occult techniques, to offer no resistance to the flowing electric current, but to allow it to pass freely through his body.

He said that this was the true meaning of the biblical injunction to “resist not evil”.

“If you resist the current (or the evil), you’ll get fried. You have to just let it flow through you without any resistance.”

He explained this to me in Greek and I understood.

While he was elaborating on this dangerous practice, Kalogiros suggested that I read a book called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” when I could locate a copy in English. (A few years later, I found a copy of this opaque book, but never understood enough of it to try this experiment.)

Kalogiros accompanies me to the visa office of the Holy Mountain government when I apply and makes sure that they know I am especially interested in the painting of icons since I am an artist.

He tells me that if you are a foreigner interested in some particular aspect of Greek culture , history or art, there is a better chance of being granted a visa than if you merely want to satisfy touristic curiosity. I am indeed very interested in the icons produced on Holy Mountain–their meaning, use and manufacture.

Tomasito, 2009


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