The Monk and the Sly Chickpea

THE MONK AND THE SLY CHICKPEA tells the story of a journey the author and photographer Thomas K. Shor took in 1981 as a young man to the Greek island of Corfu. His journey starts in an idyllic coastal village in a house surrounded by lush fruit and olive trees.

While many a young man's journey to Greece would feature a coastal village and even a strip of white beach, Thomas K. Shor's journey led him, with a certain inevitability, to the island's highest mountain, the wind-swept and craggy Mount Pantokrator, and to the ancient stone monastery that crowns its peak. It was there that he lived with the monastery's sole inhabitant of over forty years, the fiery-eyed Greek Orthodox monk Evthokimos Koskinas, a man of both the mountain and of God. From that stormy peak, often pounded by bolder-splitting lightning, sharing meals of chickpeas seasoned with the mountain's wild herbs drenched in olive oil, Shor comes to some startlingly profound insights for a young man of twenty-two.

THE MONK AND THE SLY CHICKPEA, which is revised and has a new Postscript describing the author's return to Corfu and his encounters with the monk after twenty years, was originally published as Part I of the book WINDBLOWN CLOUDS by Escape Media Publishers, USA, in 2003.