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Updated: June 9, 2025
The diet is a fast one, just as the hard beds are penance beds, and no one can procure anything different at Novy Afon for any amount of money. Even in the hall reserved for dignitaries and officials the fare was the same as for us in the tiers état. The soup was of vegetables only, and much inferior to what the tramp makes for himself by the roadside.
I lay on a bank and gleaned sunshine. The morning came over the sea steadily, equably, like a good ship making for a sure harbour. Then, ten miles from Gudaout, on a mountain, I looked out from the ruins of the Tower of Iver, over a vast resplendent sea, and saw below me the monastery of Novy Afon and all its buildings, looking like children's toys.
"I have heard," said the old postman with the leather hat, "that the Devil had no hand in de work at all, but that it was built by a Mynach, or monk, on which account de river over which de bridge is built is called Afon y Mynach dat is de Monk's River." "Did you ever hear," said I, "of three creatures who lived a long time ago near the Devil's Bridge, called the Plant de Bat?"
Such monasteries as Novy Afon are true institutions of Christianity; they do more for the real welfare of a people than much else on which immense sums of money are spent. It is a matter of real charity and real hospitality both of hand and mind combined. The great monastery sits there among the hills like some immense mother for all the rude, rough-handed tribes that live about.
As the abbot Ieronym resumed his ordinary attire, and left the temple, the hundred or so peasant men and women pressed around him, and fervently kissed his little old fingers, white and delicate. I watched the old man give his hand to them I watched their eagerness. Religion was proved to be Love. What struck me particularly on entering Novy Afon was the new tone in the every day.
The "dover" in the town-name is probably the pre-Celtic root which meets the traveller when he arrives at Dover and greets him again in unsuspected places from the "dor" in Dorchester and the Falls of Lodore to the "der" in Derwent and smoky Darwen. All have the same meaning water; and "an," strangely enough, is a later and Celtic word for the same element, the equally ubiquitous "afon."
The Armenian went off ten miles to a celebrated cave and a point of view, "the swallows' nest"; he wished me to accompany him, but I had not come to Novy Afon to find points of view or the picturesque moreover he had come by steamboat and was fresh, I had come on foot five hundred miles and wanted a rest.
To the last-named category belongs Novy Afon. It is very likely that the immense wealth of the other monasteries may invite the hand of the spoiler. Even now the monks are notorious for drunkenness and corruptibility: the institutions are moribund, and there is no doubt that if revolution had overturned the Tsardom the rich monasteries like the Troitsky would have been sacked.
"Pont Bettws," he replied. "And what may be the name of the river?" said I. "Afon something," said he. And on my thanking him he went forward to the woman who was waiting for him by the bridge. "Is that man Welsh or English?" I heard her say when he had rejoined her. "I don't know," said the man "he was civil enough; why were you such a fool?"
Perhaps even Novy Afon and many another spiritual mother would have shared a common fate with their depraved sisters. That is as may be. The Revolution did not succeed and could not, because the common peasantry still prayed in the temples which the Revolutionaries would have destroyed.
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