Codex Metamorphosis 573

 In July 2008 a ‘miracle’ happened: I was almost through with proofing my book on the Scholia in Apocalypsin, which Adolf Harnack falsely ascribed to Origen a century ago. My two-year struggle to be granted access to the Codex including the sole manuscript of the Scholia had been unsuccessful. Suddenly though a sequence of events brought it about that the door of the Great Meteoron monastery opened to me and I found myself studying the Codex and its palaeographical texts.

Codex 573 of the Great Meteoron (the Metamorphosis Convent) is 9th-century manuscript and of its almost three hundred pages only the last ninety ones were related to my topic. At the end of day of study through a magnifying lens and keeping endless notes, I came to examining the book as an elegant piece of an ancient epoch, when I noticed its header: “The book of monk Cassian the Roman”. One of the dear authors (allegedly, ‘the only Latin one’) included in the Philocalia was once again in front of me. But who was he really?

The rock complex of Meteora in Thessaly, with impressive monasteries ‘in the air’, perched on the summits and in the caves of the gigantic rocks, is regarded by some as a second Athos. This is a token of Byzantine monasticism, which inspires pilgrims to scale the heights in order to visit the monastic settlements at the Meteora. Their origin was the Scete of Doupiani, in the early fourteenth century. Yet the real story began in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the Athonite monk and hesychast Athanasius settled on the Broad Rock (Platys Lithos) and founded there what was to become soon the Monastery of Metamorphosis, the Great Meteoron, which currently preserves Codex 573. Other monasteries came into existence later. Codex 573 of the Metamorphosis cloister (the Megalon Meteoron), the text of which occupied me for a long time, is only a small token of the predicament of the Greek nation during many centuries and the subsequent fate of old treasures of all kinds, lying both in the open and hidden all over the country.