Victoria CLARK
( n. 1961 )

Just before the year 1000 a young Viking named Thorvald the Far-farer turned his back on the pagan gods of his fathers to preach the Christian gospel. But his Icealndic countrymen mocked him as a homosexual, stoned him and finally outlawed him. Abandoning his homeland, Thorvald embarked on an epic journey to the golden heart of all medieval maps - Jerusalem.

A thousand years later, in the year 2000, Victoria Clark embarked on the same journey to discover to what extent the dramatic changes and conflicts sweeping western Europe a thousand years ago still resonate today. The Far-Farers is both the story of this 21st century journey and a history of extraordinary 11th century western Christendom.

In this remarkable book she gathers a group of influential 11th century characters. Viking Thorvald, emperors of East and West, Christendom, abbots, saints, princesses, a robber Norman and Crusaders are personally or professionally connected one to another in a historical chain extending down the century and all the way from Iceland to the Holy Land.

Western Europe was struggling to unite in the 11th century, expanding rapidly and changing utterly. Warfare, peacekeeping, multinational monasticism, institutional power struggles, mass pilgrim travel, and rising religious fundamentlaism, were a few of its salient characteristics. In short, it was a world more like our own than we might imagine.

The 21st century people she encounters as she travels through Iceland, central and western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East cast fresh light on both worlds. A Swedish violinist she meets on a Turkish train reclaims the religion of his pagan Viking ancestors. In the ancient capital of Poland, a young Catholic priest scorns the idea of Europe uniting in the name of human rights instead of Christ. A Greek Jewess in Thessaloniki makes her peace with a thousand years of her people's persecution. At the Crusader stronghold of Krac-les-Chevaliers a Syrian playboy highlights the deep and widening gulf between the West and Islam.

A richly evocative and beautifully written work, The Far-Farers is neither conventional history nor travel, but a powerful and authoritative demonstration of our enduring connection with the distant past.

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Preface

Religion in the West was long ago privatized under the dual pressures of Protestantism and the Enlightenment. The separation of Church and State, achieved with much violence and hatred, has long been viewed as a necessary step in the forward march of human progress.
But the West is now embarking on its third millennium in a state of shock at discovering that for a very large part of the world religion remains a factor shaping the cultures and fates of nations, that there is no agreement that Church and State must be separated. Instead, there is much dismay, in the West as well as elsewhere, at where secularism has led us. After decades of favouring economic explanations above all others, Western historians, journalists and teachers are now having to accord religion the crucial attention it clearly demands.
I started writing this book about western Europe a thousand years ago in the hope and belief that if we in the West could recall a time in our own history when religion informed every corner of life we might be better positioned to understand the outlook of much of the rest of the world. The more closely I researched the eleventh century the clearer it seemed to me that Western Christendom underwent crucial changes during that hundred years. It might be argued that the ten hundreds laid the essential groundwork for the rest of the second millennium with its eventual removal of religion from its central place.
I discovered that the century had begun promisingly. A German emperor and a pope were peacefully co-operating in the task of building a federal Europe, united in the name of Christ. Halfway through the century the Roman Church launched a fundamentalist reform programme, designed to extend and expand the papal control over all Western Christendom, rulers as well as ruled. To achieve this ambitious end the Roman popes needed armies, and they got them. By the end of the century Pope Urban II was despatching the soldiery of Western Christendom to the East, to recapture the holy places from the Infidel. The Crusader states, first western colonies, were created. Growing intolerance of Eastern Byzantine Christianity, intense anti-Semitism, the growth of secularism in the West in reaction to the power of the Church, and the demonizing of Islam were all side effects of this ultimately doomed fundamentalist project.
The fallout from each of these phenomena is still with us today.

In the remote monasteries of Greece, Kosovo, Siberia and Cyrpus, a Christian monk of the Eastern Orthodox rite grows his beard and dons the black 'angelic habit'. Leaving the world behind him, he devotes himself to the pursuit of an ascetic ideal as ancient and mysterious as any candlelit Orthodox church. But if the ideal is sublime, the practice can be perturbing.

Victoria Clark paints a starting portrait of Eastern Orthodoxy in Europe by uncovering deep traces of the past in the turmoil of the region's present. A 1054 schism between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople created Europe's oldest and most durable fault line, represented today by the Catholic/Protestant West and the Orthodox East.

Originally a Byzantine culture, Orthodoxy has survived centuries of Ottoman Moslem rule and, more recently, decades of Communism. Now, the religion, the mindset and the world view arre reviving in the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War, with the churchmen, who have always been the guardians of the tradition, taking the lead.

In casual but unconsciously revealing encounters with monks, nuns, priests, bishops and archbishops, in monasteries ancient and modern from Kosovo, to Siberia to Cyprus, Victoria Clark measures the depth and width of the tragically growing gulf between the twin Christian civilisations of Europe. A Bosnian Serb bishop's enthusiasm for 'ethnic cleansing', Romania's current boom in monastery building, Greece's neo-Byzantine climate, Russian anti-Semitism and the power of the Greek Cypriot Church are all manifestations of a civilisation scarred by centuries-old, unforgotten traumas.

Demonstrating a rare sympathy and understanding of the region, Victoria Clark's perspective is fresh and her message sobering: the dangerously underrated significance of the 1054 scar through the heart of Europe is deep enough to ruin hopes for a peacefully united future.

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Foreword

For my at best sketchy treatment of Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and Moldova in this survey of Eastern Orthodox Europe I offer profuse apologies, and plead lack of space.
My presentation of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the northern Greek province of Macedonia in a single chapter makes useful historical rather than contemporary sense. It should not be interpreted as an argument in favour of revising national frontiers.