A Pilgrim’s Guide to Mount Athos Friends of Mount Athos 2020 1 FRIENDS OF MOUNT ATHOS ROYAL PATRON HRH The Prince of Wales PRESIDENT Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia PATRONS Mr Costa Carras The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Lord Chartres, DD, FSA Archbishop Elisey of The Hague and The Netherlands Professor René Gothóni Dr Vladeta Jankovic Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys, FAHA Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, KCVO, CMG The Revd Professor Andrew Louth, FBA, FSA Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen The Most Revd and Rt Hon Lord Williams of Oystermouth, PC, FBA EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Dr Dimitri Conomos The Revd Douglas Dales Mr Hugo Grimwood Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia Mr F. W. Peter Lea, FCA (Hon. Secretary) Dr Christopher Solomon Dr Graham Speake, FSA (Chairman) Mr Peter Stevenson (Hon. Treasurer) Mr Christopher Thomas MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY FOR THE AMERICAS Professor Robert W. Allison HONORARY MEMBER HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh © The Friends of Mount Athos 1995, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2009, 2017 6th edition © The Friends of Mount Athos 2020 The Executive Committee have done their best to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this guide. However they cannot be held responsible for any inconvenience sustained as a result of information or advice contained in it. For the latest information readers are invited to visit the society’s website at http://www.athosfriends.org 2 Introduction What is Mount Athos? In physical terms Mount Athos is a peninsula, 56 kilometres long and not more than 8 kilometres wide, jutting out into the Aegean from Halkidiki, the most easterly of its three splayed claws. Its northern border roughly follows the 100-metre contour across the isthmus. South of it the land rises steeply to wooded peaks of 500 and 600 metres. South of the claw's knuckle the woods give way to scrub and ultimately to bare rock as the contours rise, peaking finally at 2,033 metres before a sudden drop down to the sea. From the summit, snow-capped for much of the year, Robert Byron claimed he could see the plains of Troy; but even he admitted that the flat dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople ‘rose only in the mind’. For in spiritual terms Athos is not of this world at all: it is, at least for those who live there, a station in sacred space, a foretaste of paradise. Not for nothing is it known as the Holy Mountain. For more than a thousand years Athos has existed as the principal centre of monasticism for the Orthodox Church – or rather for all the Orthodox Churches. Ever since Byzantine times it has been a pan-Orthodox, supra-national centre. There were once monasteries for Albanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Italians, Moldavians, Russians, Serbs, and Wallachians as well as Greeks. Today there are still houses for Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, Russians, and Serbs. Furthermore Athos is unique for being a portion of contemporary continental Europe entirely devoted to the monastic life and to nothing else. Today the Mountain has a total population of some 2,200 monks, a figure that is at present more or less static. Most follow the cenobitic tradition which brings monks into communities for living, working, and worshipping together. Others follow the eremitical tradition and live as hermits, either in small groups or as solitaries. Between them they inhabit a variety of different establishments. First and foremost are the so-called ruling monasteries. Their number is fixed by charter at twenty (though there were once more); and they follow a rigid hierarchy of precedence, beginning with the oldest, the Great Lavra, Vatopedi, and Iviron, and ending with Konstamonitou. Each is a self-governing coenobium, owing allegiance to no ecclesiastical authority. Even the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch is restricted to matters of spirituality that affect the monks. Of the twenty, seventeen are Greek, one Serbian, one Russian, and one Bulgarian. Between them they rule the Mountain. In addition to the ruling monasteries there are many other smaller settlements, though each must function as a dependency of one of the principal houses. First in importance come the sketes. These tend to be smaller, poorer, and more ascetic than their parent house; but apart from being ruled by a prior rather than an abbot, their organization is very similar to that of the monasteries. Some, such as the Romanian skete of Prodromos and the Greek (formerly Russian) sketes of St Andrew and the Prophet Elijah, even look like monasteries, having a number of cells grouped around a courtyard with a church in the middle. But the majority are more loosely structured, being little more than a collection of cottages clustered round a central church. After the sketes come the kellia or cells. Looking very much like an isolated farmhouse, each kellion is completely independent of its neighbours and answers only to its parent monastery. It has its own chapel and usually houses three or four monks. 3 Then come the kalyves and kathismata which are like the kellia but smaller. Finally there are the hesychasteria, the true hermitages, simple huts or more often just caves in the cliff, to which monks resort in search of complete isolation and rigorous asceticism. Many of these cluster around the southern tip of the peninsula in what is called the desert of Athos. Here men spend their lives in prayer and are rarely seen. A little history Hermits are known to have lived on Mount Athos since the mid-ninth century but the first real monastery, still known as the Great Lavra or Megiste Lavra, was established in 963 by St Athanasios the Athonite. Founded with the support of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, it still holds first place in the hierarchy of the monasteries, and the Athonite millennium was duly celebrated there in 1963. Further monasteries soon followed, though not all of them survive today. Of the twenty that do, nine were founded in the tenth century, four more in the eleventh, one in the twelfth, one in the thirteenth, four in the fourteenth, and the last in the sixteenth. Athos was not the only holy mountain in the eastern Mediterranean but it was the only one to survive the Byzantine empire, and since then it has always been known as the Holy Mountain (Agion Oros in Greek). During the empire’s last centuries Athos suffered constant assaults by pirates, crusaders, adventurers, and Turks, all of them drawn by the monks’ fabled treasures. In self-defence the monasteries turned themselves into fortresses, which is why many of them still look more like castles or fortified towns. In order to keep going, they needed to attract wealthy and influential recruits, so many of them began to depart from the cenobitic system (by which monks live a common life and all wealth is contributed to a common purse) and to adopt a more individualistic (or idiorrhythmic) way of life in which personal wealth and profit were accepted. Though frowned upon at first, this system did eventually win imperial approval and was followed by at least half of the monasteries until the 1980s. As the principal monastic survivor, Athos was able to play a full part in the so- called Palaeologan renaissance, the cultural flowering that Byzantium enjoyed in the fourteenth century while the empire crumbled. Artists such as Manuel Panselinos, musicians such as St John Koukouzeles, scholars such as St Gregory Palamas (whose doctrine of hesychasm is central to the current revival of Athonite spirituality) were active on the Mountain and turned it into an international cultural centre. Emperors endowed the monasteries with estates and treasures, and some were even tonsured as monks, while the monasteries themselves became major landowners. Under Ottoman rule, which on Athos lasted from 1423 to 1912, the monks were deprived of most of their estates but they retained their independence under the protection of the ecumenical patriarch. Spiritual standards were maintained, and while the rural population fell into a state of poverty, ignorance, and despondency, the monks strove to uphold the traditions not only of Orthodoxy but also of Hellenism. In the mid-eighteenth century an academy was founded near the monastery of Vatopedi which flourished for a short while until it was destroyed by fire. Later in the same century a spiritual movement, known as the Kollyvades, sprang up on Athos, largely in reaction to the spirit of Enlightenment that had taken hold of Western Europe. This conservative (some would say fundamentalist) movement advocated a return to the spiritual values of true Orthodoxy and patristic theology: one of its most enduring 4 products was an anthology of spiritual texts known as the Philokalia, first published in Venice in 1782, a work that has retained its popularity and its influence to this day. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Athos felt the impact of political events in the outside world. During the Greek War of Independence (1821- 32) many of the younger monks could not resist the temptation to join up and fight for freedom and the population of the Mountain was seriously depleted for a while. During the latter part of the nineteenth century there was an enormous increase in the numbers of Russian monks at the monastery of St Panteleimonos and the Russian sketes and according to a census taken in 1910 there were more Slavs on the Mountain than Greeks. Whatever the motive for this expansion (and some say that it was at least in part political), it was short-lived: after the Russian Revolution of 1917 borders were sealed and there was a rapid decline in the Russian population of the Mountain. Meanwhile in 1912 Athos was liberated from the Ottoman empire and according to the Mount Athos Charter of 1924 it was recognized as a self-governing part of the Greek state.