The Monastery of the Annunciation

When I was around ten or eleven years old, my mother took me to a convent in Patmos, Greece to see my great aunt before she died. My great aunt was a nun, and also an artist and a teacher. She was my father’s aunt, my grandmother’s sister. My grandmother married young. She had my father young, which was common for women in Greece at that time, and stayed home to take care of him until he eventually met and married my mother, and they moved away to the United States. My great aunt never married, likely because she decided to become a nun, although I sometimes wonder if she decided to become a nun only after she failed to find someone to marry.

For twenty years or so, when my great aunt was young enough to want to live near family, she lived in Rhodes, the island in Greece where my father was raised. There, she was my father’s elementary school teacher. She was strict, my father says, especially with me because I was her nephew. She made me stand in the corner with my back against the wall, then told me to hold out my bare wrists so she could smack them hard with a wooden meter stick. And if my handwriting was ever messy, she made me write my name neatly two hundred times on a sheet of white paper. My great aunt was also a painter. When my parents got married, she gifted them several paintings, two of which they hung on the walls of their apartment in Rhodes. They hung one in the living room above the sofa, a landscape painting of green and brown hillsides, cypress trees in the foreground and small people in the background, pushing wheelbarrows and sitting outside small houses. They hung the other in their bedroom, a painting of a red and pink flower blossoming, its stamen standing erect through its open petals, everything covered in bits of sticky, orange pollen. 

When my parents left Greece and moved to the United States, they hung one of my great aunt’s paintings in my childhood bedroom in Connecticut. It was a painting of a wooden cross against a deep-red background, a bundle of white lilies at the bottom. The cross was made of two cylindrical wooden sticks, smooth and hollow, no nails or ropes holding them together. Each stick looked so untouched that they appeared to have been overlaid of their own free will, the shorter stick floating up to meet the longer one. I did not ask for the painting to be hung in my bedroom. I was too young to have an opinion about art, or really about anything, and when I grew old enough that it became embarrassing to have a painting of a cross in my bedroom, it felt like a sin to ask them to take it down. 

My great aunt moved out of Rhodes and into the convent in Patmos after my father finished high school and started college. Patmos is another island in Greece, much smaller than Rhodes and about five hours northwest of it by ferry. It is thought that, in a cave in Patmos, St. John the Theologian received a vision of the end of the world and wrote the Book of Revelation. My great aunt lived ten minutes from St. John’s cave, in the Monastery of the Annunciation. The monastery was set on a hill, on which there was a church, small chapels, and various gardens with purple flowers growing on vines. The sick nuns were kept at the top of the hill. I do not remember much of our walk up, aside from a little shop somewhere along the way where the nuns sold bracelets, embroidered tablecloths, and jars of honey. My mother bought me a black bracelet called a komboskini. It was made of black wool, which the nuns knitted into knots, each knot tied so tight it resembled a bead. With every knot they tied, the nuns said a prayer, and once there were enough knots to fit around a wrist, they knitted a black cross to close the loop. I wear the bracelet even now, over ten years after my mother bought it for me, because it is charming in how unassuming it is and because it feels like a sin to take it off. 

At the top of the hill was a small, white building with a flat roof. On either side, the hill spilled into views of Patmos. The ocean lay on one side, a tumble of green and brown hillsides on the other. Down the hill on the ocean’s side was a chapel, the brown cross on its roof pressed against the ocean’s blue backdrop. The ocean was wide, so wide that it looked empty, interrupted only far in the distance by a hazy outline of the nearest island. On the other side of the hill were rows of olive trees and brown streaks of winding dirt road. Plots of land were drawn out in perfect rectangles, within which rows of trees were arranged in straight lines, like the whole thing was a drawing from a geometry book. The white building stood so carefully balanced at the top of the hill, as if just one push might nudge it off the edge such that it would fly down the hill, crashing into a billion pieces at the bottom. 

Inside the building was a single room with a bed in its center, where my great aunt lay. On the far side of the room, across from the door, there was a counter of things one might find in a hospital—blood pressure cuffs, cotton swabs, towels, sheets, needles in a box. The room was white and sterile, sunlight pouring in through the windows, hitting the sheets that coated her body. The white floor tiles blended into the walls and then into the ceiling, the bed in the center just a white mattress atop an elevated metal frame with wheels at the bottom. My aunt looked sick, like any woman lying in such a white room would, a mix of a mummy and a dying angel. I had drawn a picture for her because my mother told me she might like one. It was a crayon drawing of three girls on a stretch of jagged grass. The grass was neon green and spiky like a crown; the girls’ skin was beige and they wore pink T-shirts. She looked so sick that I was afraid to give it to her. My mother, who was not afraid, held my great aunt’s hand.

Eventually, with my mother’s asking, I gave my great aunt the crayon drawing. I do not remember her reaction, likely because I was still afraid to stand close to her and because she was too sick to react much. She died less than a year after we visited her. I did not attend her funeral, nor did I ever hear my parents speaking about it or about where she was buried. I imagine she died alone in the white room, with the ocean swaying and the hillsides tumbling on either side of it. All the sunlight must have been streaming in through her window, frosting her dead body in a clean glow before sending her straight up to God. I imagine the nuns eventually found her and organized her funeral in the church in the monastery. They were her family, the way a man becomes a woman’s new family after they marry. Except nuns become family out of their love for God, not really for each other. 

My parents do not speak much about my great aunt or about the monastery, other than to tell stories from when my father was a child and my great aunt was his teacher. Her painting of the wooden cross still hangs in my childhood bedroom in Connecticut, although I have since moved out. Sometimes my mother says I have her fingers, long and thin, the middle joint bending at an awkward angle. Fingers like twigs, my mother says with a tone that suggests it is a good thing. My father agrees, nodding but saying nothing, as if my great aunt was some famous stranger who happened to have fingers that looked like mine. 

Rafaela Kottou is an emerging writer based in New York City. She is a recent graduate of Yale University, where she studied English and biology. She writes essays and creative nonfiction, loves to read, and enjoys gardening and a good cappuccino. 

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