The sun was setting to the west as I stood upon a vantage point known to the Byzantine residents of Constantinople as Hagios Demetrios. It was early spring, and the air was cool as I looked across the Golden Horn towards the Sea of Marmara. I was in Istanbul at the start of a quest. Over the course of it, I was to begin to understand what St Francis of Assisi had meant when he said: “What we are looking for is what is looking.”
Externally, and chronologically, my intention was to travel to Moscow. Internally, I was on a quest for knowledge. A quest for Truth. As part of this quest, I had decided that my journey from Constantinople, the New Rome, as Istanbul was known until 1453, to Moscow, known to many eastern Orthodox Christians as the Third Rome, should include time on Mount Athos, spiritual powerhouse of the Byzantine Empire, and the place from which monks had travelled to help lay the foundations of Kievan, and later Muscovite, Russia.
