reverend community, who were assembled
round the capstan. This is by far the largest of the convents in this
region; it is also in better order than the others, and is inhabited by
a greater number of caloyers; I omitted to count their number, but there
may have been about twenty: the monastery is, however, calculated to
contain three times that number. The buildings both in their nature and
arrangement are very similar to those of St. Barlaam, excepting that
they are somewhat more extensive, and that there is a faint attempt at
cultivating a garden which surrounded three sides of the monastery. Like
all the other monasteries, it has no parapet wall.

The church had a large open porch before it, where some of the caloyers
sat and talked in the evening; it was painted in fresco of bright
colours, with most edifying representations of the tortures and
martyrdoms of little ugly saints, very hairy and very holy, and so like
the old caloyers themselves, who were discoursing before them, that they
might have been taken for their portraits. These Greek monks have a
singular love for the devil, and for everything horrible and hideous. I
never saw a picture of a well-looking Greek saint anywhere, and yet the
earlier Greek artists in their conceptions of the personages of Holy
Writ sometimes approached the sublime; and in the miniatures of some of
the manuscripts written previous to the twelfth century, which I
collected in the Levant, there are figures of surpassing dignity and
solemnity: yet in Byzantine and Egyptian art that purity and angelic
expression so much to be admired in the works of Beato Angelico,
Giovanni Bellini, and other early Italian masters, are not to be found.
The more exalted and refined feeling which prompted the execution of
those sublime works seems never to have existed in the Greek church,
which goes on century after century, even up to the present time, using
the same conventional and stiff forms, so that to the unpractised eye
there would be considerable difficulty in discovering the difference
between a Greek picture of a saint of the ninth century from one of the
nineteenth. The agoumenos, a young active man with a good deal of
intelligence in his countenance, sent word that the hour of supper was
at hand, previously, however, to which I went through the process of
washing my hands in, or rather over a Turkish basin with a perforated
cover and a little vase in the middle for the piece of fresh-smelli