the hilltop monastery

On an island I met a very old man who as a boy knew Trotsky. Trotsky would fish for a specific red-skinned type in the sea near his house. He didn't speak to the boy. Once Trotsky pulled a gun on the boy's doctor as the doctor had reached into his pocket for a notebook. The doctor told the boy about it and the boy was terrified. At eighty something he still was. He was now one of the last Christians and Greeks left on the island. He had once lived in its historic monastery.

In Istanbul later I saw the room in the Church of Divine Wisdom (a cathedral/mosque that remains a wonder of the world. It was inspired originally by an Emperor's vision). Here one day a handful of smelly, sweaty old bishops from all over the tiny known planet decided that the church must have only one line on divinity and a murderous institution to enforce it which was placed squarely between God and Us. It was the beginning of everything going bad for creative activity. The assholes. To decide that there under the icons and angels!

The twenty foot gold and blue and still very intensely feathered angels in the dome had resisted the conversion of the church into a mosque. They
still floated high above the rising non-representative and coded Islamic tilework. Islam had never reached to the dome, the dome that was originally built to hold divine wisdom and placed to catch sea breezes in a city of spirit and riots over images.

Back to Trotsky. You read it all here first. It is nowhere else. Not on the web. Don't tell anyone else either or I will know.

The island on which he was exiled and on which he wrote The History of the Russian Revolution, My Life and others and where he organized the spiderweb of the Fourth International is covered with Cypress trees and wild olives. The ancient monastery on the high hill dominates it. Travel on the island is still by horse and buggy. It is now a place for romance and picnics by Turkish youth. It seems to them a place away from the increasingly stricter mosques and the political turmoil of Istanbul.

Trotsky's house was on the beach shore facing the sea and also Europe. It was behind the hill that blocked the view to Asia. During his stay assassins and lunatics arrived by boat regularly and some worked in his secretariat. The house was firebombed mysteriously. Was it by someone he knew?

The island was traditionally a place of exile for misbehaving empresses, mad mothers of the heirs to the sultanate, megalomaniac generals and for others. Trotsky stayed for years, trying constantly to get away. He wrote to everyone.

But not just that. The monastery on the hilltop was in fact one of the first asylums for the wealthy and possessed. They were chained to the floor in front of the crucifix to remain until they said they believed and were cured or they died. Here God would speak to them. The treatment was provided to all of Byzantine and later to the top people in the Ottoman Sultanate for 1500 years (yes to Muslims). The chains on the floor are still regarded as holy relics and are the object of pilgrimages by members of ancient families with hidden histories including from the British aristocracy.

You may know about Trotsky's daughter. She joined him there on his island in the fury and paranoias of his exile. She languished in the heat and gaslight isolation of the place. She became terrified at his predictions about the rise of fascism and of soviet bonapartism. He was toxically messianic to all around him and gathering disciples. He challenged everything, thought of every expedient.

She felt she was going insane. Her father was cold and disdainful. She was bored and frustrated. The kingdom they had was gone.

She was losing faith. The island doctor wasn't to be trusted for the treatment of her shaking and weeping nervousness. Trotsky hadn't time as he obsessively tried to reverse history, to sort friend from foe staring at his patch of trees and bit of sea on the Marmara.

Did he send her up to the monastery?
He could see it every day from his window.
He had to get back to work. She screamed in the sunshine.

In any event she left the island later. In Germany she gassed herself on the eve of Hitler's ascension to power. The friends of Trotsky say it was for political reasons.

I recommend a visit.

It is a lovely place, magical. The horses freed in the evening from their buggies frolic unrestrained in the trees.