On our taking leave, he bestowed his benediction on us all, but not before he had made us partake of some excellent champagne, and I really quitted the palace with much greater respect for the Greek clergy than I had entertained before.
Among other estimable members of the priesthood may be mentioned the archimandrite of a very large monastery in the same province, to whom I frequently paid a visit. In this monastery Alexis, Peter the Great’s son, was confined for a considerable time. I saw the apartments that were appropriated to him: they had thickly-barred windows and strong doors, well suited to a prison; the furniture was in the same state as when he resided there, and consisted of a few tables and chairs clumsily made of deal, ornamented with green and red streaks on the unpainted wood. I could not help feeling compassion for the unfortunate prince, who, whatever his faults might have been, was certainly unnaturally treated and cruelly deceived by his father. I thought, as I stood in those small, close rooms, how many weary hours he must have passed, and how bitter must his reflections have been as, day after day, he gazed from those grated windows on the never-changing scene outside.
A description of this monastery will serve to give an idea of those buildings in general.
In form it was nearly square, and was surrounded by a high whitewashed wall deeply dovetailed, having at each corner a small circular tower with a pointed roof, furnished with numerous loopholes. A gallery ran along the whole length inside, from which, in the time of the Tartar wars, the men could shoot their arrows on the besiegers. The gateway was surmounted by portraits of the Virgin and Child and those of other saints, before which a lamp was always kept burning. On entering I found a well-kept grass-plot, on two sides of which were buildings three stories high, containing the cells of the monks, the superior’s apartments, and the domestic offices. The lower range was partly devoted to a kind of monastic prison, in which disobedient monks and those convicted of bigamy were confined; for, in Russia, the punishment for men guilty of that crime is imprisonment for life in some religious establishment: the female convicts are, of course, sent to the nunneries. At the time of my first visit there were _three_ criminals confined in the monastery: one for having had three wives; another who had killed a man in self-defence, and who, according to the law, was sent there for one year to atone by repentance and prayer for the blood he had shed. One of the monks informed me that the prisoner in question was quite a youth, being only nineteen; that he was crossing the river very late one night on a hired sledge, when, on arriving at a very solitary spot, the driver suddenly turned and attempted to strangle him. He found means to draw his sword, with which he gave a mortal wound to his assailant, who fell dead instantly. He remained for a few minutes horror-stricken at what he had done and uncertain as to the measures he ought to take. At last he lifted the lifeless body on the sledge, drove back to the town, and presented himself at the police-station. He was arrested, but, as there was every probability that he had committed the act in self-defence, his punishment was the being sent to the monastery. The third prisoner was a monk accused of great immorality, who was shortly to be exiled to Siberia, but, as the final decision of the superior courts had not arrived, he was detained here in the mean time.