The accompanying sketches will explain the forms of the patriarchal staff, the board, and the iron bar.
[Illustrations: [Greek: tokmak], a hammer, in Turkish.]
The latter are called in Romaic [Greek: sêmandros], a word derived from [Greek: sêmasoktoumai], to gather together.
According to Johannes Comnenus, who visited Mount Athos in 1701, and whose works are quoted in Montfaucon, 'Paleographia Græca,' page 452, St. Laura was founded by Nicephorus Phocas, and restored by Neagulus, Waywode of Bessarabia. The buildings consist of a thick and lofty wall of stone, which encompasses an irregular space of ground of between three and four acres in extent; there is only one entrance, a crooked passage defended by three separate iron doors; the front of the building on the side of the entrance extends about five hundred feet. There is no attempt at external architecture, but only this plain wall; the few windows which look out from it belong to rooms which are built of wood and project over the top of the wall, being supported upon strong beams like brackets. At the south-west corner of the building there is a large square tower, which formerly contained a printing-press: but this press was destroyed by the Turkish soldiers during the late Greek revolution; and at the same time they carried off certain old cannons, which stood upon the battlements, but which were more for show than use, for the monks had never once ventured to fire them off during the long period they had been there; and my question, as to when they were brought there originally, was answered by the universal and regular answer of the Levant, "[Greek: ti exebzo]--Qui sa?--who knows?" The interior of the monastery consists of several small courts and two large open spaces surrounded with buildings, which have open galleries of wood or stone before them, by means of which entrance is gained into the various apartments, which now afford lodging for one hundred and twenty monks, and there is room for many more. These two large courts are built without any regularity, but their architecture is exceedingly curious, and in its style closely resembles the buildings erected in Constantinople between the fifth and the twelfth century: a sort of Byzantine, of which St. Marc's in Venice is the finest specimen in Europe. It bears some affinity to the Lombardic or Romanesque, only it is more Oriental in its style; the chapel of the ancient palace of Palermo is more in the style of the buildings on Mount Athos than anything else in Christendom that I remember; but the ceilings of that chapel are regularly arabesque, whereas those on Mount Athos are flat with painted beams, like the Italian basilicas, excepting where they are arched or domed; and in those cases there is little or no mosaic, but only coarse paintings in fresco representing saints in the conventional Greek style of superlative ugliness.