From I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen by Leon Surmelian. Trebizond before 1915.
Toward the end of the interminable mass the singing ceased suddenly. Everybody stood still. Men who had been prostrating themselves, touching the floor with their foreheads, rose to their feet and did not move. We twelve boys representing the twelve disciples of Christ went up the stairs of the sanctuary in single file and took off our shoes and socks in a side chamber. A large basin of water was placed on the platform of the altar. A large basin of water was placed on the platform of the altar. I peeped out from behind the curtain to see my mother, grandmothers, aunts, an other female relatives who had come to see the prelate wash my feet. I was nervous, palpitating, but immensely proud. Not only could you hear a pin drop, so profound was the silence, but to use the Armenian idiom, there was no place to drop a needle, so large was the crowd. The cathedral was jammed full with a congregation eager to witness the most dramatic ceremony of the church. I saw a sea of faces.
The prelate, who was a towering bishop, took off his crown and chasuble, and rolling up his sleeves knelt humbly by the basin. I went to sit on the stool before him and held my foot over the basin. He dipped a rag in the water and murmuring a prayer, squeezed it on my foot, after which he put consecrated ointment on my toes. I didn’t know what to do next.
“Kiss and go,” he whispered.
I raised my foot as high as I could go and stretching my neck as far down as it woud go, tried to kiss the holy ointmnet he had put on my toes, but I could not reach it with my lips.
A multitudinous murmur swept through the cathedral, which grew louder and louder and became peals of laughter. I was very good at gymnastics, but one had to be an acrobat to do what the bishop asked. The more I struggled with my foot the louder became the mortifying laughter. The thought that I should be the cause of this appalling and sacrilegious uproar in the house of God was so crushing that I wished I could fly away and disappear forever. I knew they were laughing at me, but didn’t know why. In the delirium of my confusion and despair, the cathedral was rising in vast billows of blazing lights and faces, faces, faces dissolving into space. Angel wheeled over this terrific and catastrophic tumult and an angry God watched me from his throne with his busy white brows drawn together. The bishop assumed the proportions of a gigantic phantom, became an oppressing shadow before me, above me, and all around me.
I finally gave up my acrobatics and looked helplessly at his wrathful face.
“Kiss the cross, the CROSS!” I heard him saying.
So it was the cross I had to kiss, and not my foot! It lay on the stool at my side with a large, silver-mounted Bible, a heavy jeweled episcopal cross. I fell on it with my devout lips and hobbled away in a hurry, to find the other choir boys rolling behind the altar and gasping for breath as they held their sides…