The Three Monks and the Exile

The story, as the monastery has always told it, goes like this.

Three hermits — Niketas, John, and Joseph — were living in the hills of the interior of Chios, on the slopes of Mount Provateio. A light appeared to them among the trees, and following it they came to a myrtle bush, and hanging in the bush, unsupported, was an icon of the Virgin. They took it and built a small chapel to house it, and lived there.

At that time there was living in exile on Lesbos, a day's sail to the north, a Byzantine aristocrat named Constantine Monomachos. He had been on the wrong side of a palace reshuffle and had been sent away, as such men were, to wait somewhere unimportant until he was forgotten or recalled.

The three monks crossed the water to Lesbos and found him and told him that he would be emperor of the Romans. And they asked that when it happened, he should remember them, and build a church for the Virgin at the place where they had found her icon.

Constantine — the accounts all agree on this, and one can hardly blame him — did not believe them. But he said that if it came true, he would.

In 1042, Constantine Monomachos married the empress Zoe, and became Constantine IX, emperor of the Romans.

And he kept the promise. Whatever one makes of the prophecy, the sequel is documented: imperial funds, imperial craftsmen, imperial revenues, and a foundation charter of formidable generosity. The monastery of Nea Moni — simply "the New Monastery" — went up through the 1040s and 1050s, endowed with estates on Chios and elsewhere, with tax exemptions, and with the personal interest of the emperor and, the sources say, of the empress Zoe. And crucially, the workmen and the mosaicists were sent out from Constantinople. This was not to be a provincial church.

What they built is one of the three surviving masterpieces of middle Byzantine art in Greece, the others being Hosios Loukas in Boeotia and Daphni outside Athens; the three were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1990.

The architecture alone would justify the visit. Nea Moni's church is an island octagon, a type of which it is the finest example: the central square of the naos is converted, by a system of squinches and corner niches of considerable ingenuity, into an octagon which carries a broad dome directly, with no internal columns or piers at all. The result is a single unobstructed vertical volume — you walk in and the whole building goes up above you at once, an eight-sided drum of light standing on empty air. It is a difficult and expensive way to build, and its effect is entirely different from the compartmented, column-divided space of the standard cross-in-square church. It is a room designed to make a person look up.

The mosaics are why art historians come. Made in the 1040s and 1050s by metropolitan craftsmen, they are imperial-quality work: figures set against fields of gold, dark and austere and deeply serious, with elongated proportions, sharp linear drapery, and faces of a severity that the more graceful mosaics of Daphni entirely lack. Scholars have called the style monastic, and the word fits. What survives of the cycle includes the great scenes of Christ's life and passion — the Nativity, the Baptism, the Washing of the Feet, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Anastasis. The Crucifixion in particular, with its stripped-down composition and the terrible stillness of the mourners, is among the most affecting images produced anywhere in the Byzantine world.

A great deal has been lost. The dome mosaic — a Pantocrator, looking down the whole height of that unobstructed space — came down in the earthquake of 1881, along with the belfry, and was replaced by nineteenth-century painting; what stood there for eight hundred years is gone beyond recovery. The monastery was sacked and burned in 1822 and its monks killed. It has been repaired repeatedly, sometimes clumsily, and what survives has survived against considerable odds.

There is one more thing at Nea Moni, and it is not on the tourist itinerary in any comfortable sense. In a small chapel by the gate is an ossuary. It contains the bones of the people who were killed at the monastery in 1822 — refugees who had come up from the villages believing that a monastery would be respected. They are not arranged. They are heaped behind glass, and among them, unmistakably, are the skulls of children, and some of the skulls have holes in them. There is no explanatory panel and none is needed. It is a more effective account of what happened on this island in the spring of 1822 than any number of pages, including these.

Nea Moni was for centuries the greatest landowner on Chios and a political power in its own right, negotiating in turn with Byzantine emperors, Genoese governors, Ottoman sultans, and the Greek state. Its archive of imperial chrysobulls and later Ottoman firmans is among the best sources for medieval Chian landholding. Today a handful of nuns keep it.