Mount Athos

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Athos is a corner of Greece where women are barred from entering, by national law and by religious tradition alike. The mountain and most of the peninsula beneath it form an autonomous region run by a monastic community. That community answers, in church matters, directly to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. The rest of the peninsula belongs to the Aristotelis municipality, so an ordinary municipal boundary sits beside one of the strangest jurisdictions in Europe. The place is an important center of Eastern Orthodox monasticism. In 1988 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, for its monasteries and for the preserved natural setting around them. How does a stretch of coast end up governed by monks? Who reached it first, and what did they find? And what lives on a peninsula that so few people are allowed to walk?

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• 2. Many Names

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  In the classical era the mountain was simply Athos, and the peninsula was Acté in Latin or Akté in Greek. Modern Greek separates the two. The mountain is Oros Athos, and the peninsula is Hersonisos tou Atho. A third Greek name, Agio Oros, translates as Holy Mountain, and it is the one most often heard today.

  Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian speakers say Sveta Gora, which carries the same meaning. Georgian uses mtats'minda. Yet the Orthodox world does not agree on a single name. In Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian the place is just Afon, meaning Athos. Romanian uses Muntele Athos, or sometimes Muntele Atos.

  Greek myth had its own account of the name, and it began with a giant called Athos.

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• 3. Giants And Fleets

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  In the myth, Athos was one of the Gigantes who rose against the gods in the Gigantomachia. He hurled an enormous rock at Poseidon. It missed, fell into the Aegean, and became the mountain. A second version has Poseidon winning the contest and burying the defeated giant beneath the mountain instead.

  Homer mentions Athos in the Iliad, so the peak was already famous in the earliest Greek poetry. Herodotus supplies a more earthly history. He says Pelasgians from the island of Lemnos settled the peninsula, then known as Akte. He names five cities there: Sane, Kleonai, Thyssos, Olophyxos and Akrothoon. Strabo adds Dion and again Akrothoon, and Eretria also founded colonies on Akte. Akanthos was founded in the Classical period, and some of these cities struck their own coins.

  The peninsula also lay on the invasion route of Xerxes I. His three-year project to excavate a canal across the isthmus, so that his fleet could pass, is dated to 483 BC. Later, after the death of Alexander the Great, the architect Dinocrates proposed carving the whole mountain into a statue of Alexander.

  Pliny the Elder, writing in 77 AD, claimed that the people of Athos could live to their four hundredth year. His explanation was that they ate the skin of vipers.

  After these accounts the written record thins out. Archaeologists have never pinned down where Strabo's cities stood. They are thought to have been deserted before the monks began arriving, some time before the ninth century AD.

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• 4. Land And Sea

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  The Athos peninsula is the easternmost leg of the larger Chalkidiki peninsula, in central Macedonia. It pushes 50 km out into the Aegean while measuring only 7 to 12 km across. Its total area is 335.6 km2. At its southern end rises the mountain proper, with steep, densely forested slopes that climb to 2033 m.

  The geology sets Athos apart from its neighbors. Sithonia and Kassandra, the other Chalkidiki legs, do not share its origin. Athos is instead a geological continuation of the Rhodope Mountains, which run through northern Greece and Bulgaria.

  The sea off the tip is treacherous. Herodotus claimed that in 492 BC Darius, king of Persia, lost 300 ships there under his general Mardonius. Another account puts 20,000 men on those ships, wrecked by a strong north wind as they tried to round the coast. In 411 BC the Spartans lost a fleet of 50 ships under the admiral Epicleas.

  On land, an extensive network of footpaths crosses the peninsula, and many of them go back to the Byzantine period. Many of the paths cannot be used by motor vehicles.

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• 5. Forest And Wildlife

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  At least 35 plant species grow only on Mount Athos, and most of them cluster around the main summit in the south. Two of them carry the mountain's name: Viola athois, and Isatis tinctoria ssp. athoa, a subspecies of woad. The peninsula is also home to 350 species of mushrooms.

  The vegetation changes with altitude and with direction. Aleppo pine is more common in the north, while broadleaf maquis takes over further south. Above the maquis, a deciduous forest dominated by sweet chestnut forms the next band. Black pine and stinking juniper hold the higher ground. Mixed woods of deciduous oak share the slopes with limes, aspen, hop hornbeam and maple.

  Holm oak, kermes oak, Hungarian oak, oriental plane and cedar are among the typical forest trees. The strawberry tree, cypress, laurel, lentisk and wild olive grow here too, along with heather and scrub. Willow, laurel, oriental plane and alder follow the streams. In spring and autumn the ground carries tuberous and bulbous plants such as crocus, anemone, cyclamen and fritillary.

  The animals are just as varied. Grey wolves, wild boar, red foxes, jackals and European badgers live in these woods, along with beech martens, stoats, weasels, roe deer and red squirrels. Out on the coast, the Mediterranean monk seal is also recorded.

  The birds include the black stork, golden eagle, short-toed snake-eagle, lesser kestrel, western capercaillie and Eurasian eagle-owl. Nightingales and hoopoes are counted among them as well, together with the yelkouan shearwater and Audouin's gull.

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• 6. The Virgin's Garden

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  According to Athonite tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary was sailing from Joppa to Cyprus with John the Evangelist, on her way to visit Lazarus of Bethany. A storm blew the ship off course to Athos, which was still pagan. It anchored near the port of Klement, close to the present monastery of Iviron.

  Mary walked ashore and was overwhelmed by the wild beauty of the mountain. She blessed it and asked her son Jesus to give it to her as a garden. A voice answered, as the tradition has it: "Let this place be your inheritance and your garden, a paradise and a haven of salvation for those seeking to be saved." From that moment the mountain was consecrated as the garden of the Mother of God.

  Historical documents from these early centuries are very few. Monks were certainly present by the fourth century, and possibly by the third. Under Constantine I, who reigned from 324 to 337, Christians and followers of the traditional Greek religion lived there side by side. That balance broke under Julian, who reigned from 361 to 363. His reign saw the churches of Athos destroyed, and the Christians hid in the woods and inaccessible places.

  Under Theodosius I, who reigned from 379 to 395, it was the temples of the old religion that were destroyed. Even so, the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria states that in the fifth century a temple and a statue of Zeus Athonite still stood.

  A new wave of settlers arrived after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the seventh century. Orthodox monks from the Egyptian desert went looking for another quiet place, and some reached Athos. An ancient document records that they "built huts of wood with roofs of straw … and by collecting fruit from the wild trees were providing themselves improvised meals."

  The biography of Saint Athanasius the Athonite tells how the first monastic community was founded, and his name leads into the larger story.

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• 7. Rise Of The Monasteries

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  In 963, the monk Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra monastery, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas. The foundation marked a turning point. Scattered hermitages gave way to large cenobitic monasteries, and Great Lavra became a model for the institutions that followed.

  The groundwork had been laid earlier. During the 9th century the peninsula began to draw hermits and ascetics who wanted isolation for their devotions. By the 10th century organized monastic communities had formed, and Byzantine emperors were granting them privileges and protection.

  Patronage soon came from beyond Byzantium. Rulers across the Orthodox world supported Athos, including those of the Kingdom of Georgia and various Slavic states. Monasteries rooted in different Orthodox traditions were founded, giving the monastic republic a multicultural character.

  The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the spread of the Ottoman Empire did not end monastic life. The monasteries kept working under Ottoman rule and retained a degree of autonomy. They also lived through periods of economic hardship and political instability.

  The 19th century brought a revival. The monastic population grew, helped by donations from Orthodox countries such as Russia, Serbia and Romania. Then, in the 20th century, Mount Athos was incorporated into the modern Greek state while keeping its special status as a monastic community.

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• 8. Crossing The Threshold

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  A visit to Mount Athos begins with a document called a diammonitirion, a special permit that every visitor must hold. The permit is issued under a system run by the monastic authorities in cooperation with the Greek state. Only male visitors may enter.

  The usual route runs by sea. Visitors typically arrive by boat from Ouranoupoli, the main gateway to the monastic community.

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