“It is up here in the silence that you can feel God’s presence.”
the monk lives on a pillar. When he wants to step down out of the clouds, the 59-year-old scales a 131-foot ladder, which takes him about 20 minutes.
After living on pillar for 20 years, climbs have slowed, but having worked as a crane operator in a past life, he’s never feared heights.
Photographer Amos heard about while working in the country of Georgia, and when he first arrived and asked to go up, he was told no. Only priests and some of the troubled young men learning from and living in a monastery underneath the pillar were allowed to go up.
stayed with the men at the base for four days before he was told he could ascend the pillar. He participated in prayers seven hours a day, including four-hour night prayers from 2 a.m. to sunrise. When he was finally going up to home, rain clouds rolled in and the sun was setting. The iron ladder was “very dicey,” said.
“I put so much time into getting permission that I said it was too late to be scared,” he said.
While with at the top, said he was worried he would run out of light for the climb down and that it would start raining, but as he looked out at the clouds at eye level and the distance between he and the ground, he appreciated the quiet of the elevated home.
“You could feel one with the weather,” he said.
said he needs the silence of the top of the pillar.
“It is up here in the silence that you can feel God’s presence,” he told in Russian.
, or pillar saints, began after the elder in Syria first moved atop a pillar in 423 to cut himself off from worldly temptations. were most common in eastern Europe during the latter part of the fifth century, but the practice has since been abandoned.
pillar had sat idly since the 15th century when the Islamic Ottomans invaded Georgia. No one had even been to the top for centuries until an climbed it and found the remains of a chapel and the skeleton of a in 1944.
told he “drank, sold drugs, everything” as a young man. After serving time in prison, he decided he needed a change.
“I used to drink with friends in the hills around here and look up at this place, where the land met the sky,” told . “We knew the monks had lived up there before, and I had great respect for them.”