Mount Athos

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Seen from the sea — as pilgrims, envoys, and raiders have always first seen it — Athos unfolds in three registers. First the ridge: the easternmost of the three fingers that Chalkidiki extends into the Aegean, a forested limestone spine some fifty-six kilometers long and nowhere more than eighteen wide. Then the monasteries, strung along both coasts: twenty fortified quadrangles, towers and cantilevered balconies, each closed around a free-standing domed church. Last, at the southeastern tip, the thing that names everything: a bare marble pyramid rising 2,033 meters straight from the water, visible from every approach. Homer set the mountain in the Iliad; Herodotus named its towns — Sane, Olophyxos, Akrothoon, Thyssos, Kleonai; Xerxes cut a canal across the isthmus before the invasion of 480 BC, whose line can still be traced near Ierissos. The towns fell to Philip II and were gone by Roman times. What grew in their place is a polity without parallel in Europe: a republic of monks that has been at its single occupation for more than eleven centuries.

The peninsula belongs to the Mother of God. Driven ashore by weather where Iviron now stands, the Virgin asked her Son for the mountain as her garden and received it; the monks hold the place from her, tenants of the Garden of the Theotokos, and she suffers no other woman in it. This is the avaton, the rule of the untrodden, the Mountain’s most famous law. Implicit in the earliest legislation, it was explicit by the eleventh century: the typikon of Constantine IX Monomachos (1045/6) barred women, female animals, eunuchs, and beardless boys; the chrysobull of Manuel II repeated the prohibition in 1406; Article 186 of the modern Charter carries it still, and Greek law 2623 of 19 September 1953 — passed after women came ashore from a cruise ship during a Byzantine studies congress at Thessaloniki that spring — made violation punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment. The exclusion has held for over a thousand years.

The first hermits are older than their records. Iconophile monks took refuge on the ridge in the eighth century; monks from Athos sat at the Council of Constantinople in 843, the Mountain’s earliest firm attestation; Peter the Athonite and Euthymios the Younger made its ninth-century reputation as a desert of solitaries. In 883 the emperor Basil I’s sigillion took the hermits under protection and expelled the shepherds with their flocks — the peninsula reserved for prayer decades before it held a single monastery. In 911 the seat of the Protos, the hermits’ elected head, was fixed at Mese — the later Karyes — and the capital has not moved since.

The monasteries came with Athanasius. A monk from Trebizond by way of Bithynia, Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra at the peninsula’s tip in 963 under the patronage of his friend Nikephoros II Phokas, emperor from that same year. The Lavra was the first great communal house on Athos — the fortified quadrangle with the church at its center, a layout imitated as far as Russia — and the model for every foundation that followed. The hermits fought it. Rallying around Paul of Xeropotamou, they appealed against Athanasius’s building to the emperor John I Tzimiskes, and the answer was a constitution: the typikon issued in 972 (drafted 971/2) and called the Tragos, the “goat,” after the goatskin it is written on. Signed by the emperor — the oldest surviving document bearing a Byzantine imperial signature — and kept at the Protaton in Karyes, the Tragos bound hermits and coenobites into one polity: the republic’s founding charter.

The republic became international almost at once. Georgians built Iviron in the late tenth century; Hilandar went to Sava and his father Symeon for the Serbs in 1198; Zographou gathered the Bulgarians, St Panteleimon the Russians. Twelve of the present monasteries date from the tenth and eleventh centuries, seven more from before 1400 — a century that nearly killed the Mountain and then crowned it. It opened with some three hundred monastic establishments and closed with perhaps thirty-five: the Catalan Grand Company’s raids (1307–1309) began the ruin, Serbian patronage under Stefan Dušan repaired what it could; and in the same decades Athos fought the controversy that fixed the mystical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy. Hesychasm, the prayer of stillness, had its home ground here: Nikephoros the Hesychast was an Athonite, Gregory Palamas was a monk of Athos before his see at Thessaloniki, and the Hagioretic Tome of 1341, answering Barlaam of Calabria, was an Athonite manifesto. The doctrine — the uncreated light, the essence and the energies, the architecture of Palamite theology — has its own history; the place’s share is that it was the laboratory and the fortress, and that the councils of 1341–1351, vindicating Palamas, vindicated the Athonite way of life.

Ottoman rule, when it came in the early fifteenth century, was negotiated rather than suffered. The monks treated with Murad II; autonomy, property, and worship were kept against an annual tribute, and twice — in 1432–3 and 1568 — the estates were redeemed from confiscation with cash. The tax burden pushed many houses from communal to idiorrhythmic life, and Russian, Wallachian, and Moldavian princes became the great donors of the later centuries. The hierarchy reached its final form in this period: with the refoundation of Stavronikita, complete by 1541, the ruling monasteries were fixed at twenty — none may be added, none dissolved. The painted surfaces kept growing toward the roughly 100,000 square meters of fresco and mosaic the peninsula now carries: Manuel Panselinos’s murals in the Protaton (the classic of the Macedonian school, c. 1290), Theophanes the Cretan’s in the Lavra (sixteenth century). In 1749 the monasteries built a school, the Athonias Academy under Vatopedi, directed 1753–1759 by Evgenios Voulgaris — for a decade the Greek Enlightenment held its seminar on the Holy Mountain.

The libraries are the republic’s deep treasury: roughly fifteen thousand Greek manuscript codices from the fourth century to the nineteenth — the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in the world — alongside more than fifteen thousand portable icons. Spyridon Lambros’s two-volume Cambridge catalog (1895–1900) opened the collections to scholarship; the Lavra’s library was cataloged by the monk Spyridon and Sophronios Eustratiades in 1925; a Library of Congress expedition microfilmed manuscripts in the early 1950s; and the Mount Athos Repository now digitizes manuscripts, icons, and archives under the Holy Community’s authority.

What the Mountain did with that treasury changed the Orthodox world twice. In the eighteenth century the Kollyvades movement set about recovering the neptic fathers, the masters of watchfulness from the Egyptian desert onward. Makarios of Corinth gathered the manuscripts on the peninsula; Nikodemos the Hagiorite, monk of the skete of Pantokrator, edited the corpus; and the Philokalia was published at Venice in 1782 — compiled on Athos, out of Athonite libraries, and the charter of a hesychast renaissance far beyond it. The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie of Paisius Velichkovsky (Moscow, 1793) and the Russian recension of Theophan the Recluse (1877–1890), financed by St Panteleimon on Athos itself, carried the Mountain’s prayer of the heart across the Slavic lands.

The second convulsion ran the other way. In 1907 the schemamonk Ilarion published Na gorakh Kavkaza, with its teaching that the Name of God is God Himself, and by 1912 imiaslavie — the Name-Glorifiers’ confession — had swept the Russian houses of Athos: St Panteleimon and the sketes of St Andrew and the Prophet Elijah. In January 1913 the hieromonk Antonii Bulatovich led the deposition of the Andreevsky skete’s anti-imiaslavie hegumen by a vote of 302 to 70. The Ecumenical Patriarchate prohibited the book and condemned the teaching; the Russian Holy Synod followed in May 1913; and that June and July the Russian navy came to the Garden of the Theotokos — the gunboat Donets and the steamers Tsar and Kherson, carrying Archbishop Nikon and troops. Sailors forcibly removed more than six hundred monks, by some counts over eight hundred, who were shipped to Odessa, defrocked or dispersed, and forbidden to return. The confession outlived the deportation: the theology of the Name passed into Russian religious philosophy, where Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and Losev spent decades unfolding what the monks of Athos had asserted in a word.

The republic survived it all, embedded now in the Greek state and the European Union. On 2 November 1912 a Greek squadron landed at Daphne and Ottoman rule ended; the Constitutional Charter the community drew up in 1924 was ratified by Greece in 1926; Article 105 of the Greek Constitution guarantees the arrangement. The Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain is governed by the Holy Community — twenty representatives, one per ruling monastery, sitting at Karyes — with its four-member executive, the Holy Epistasia, and a civil governor from the foreign ministry. All land belongs to the twenty monasteries; every monk, whatever his origin, acquires Greek citizenship. When Greece acceded to the European Community, Joint Declaration No. 4 of 29 May 1979 recognized that “the special status granted to Mount Athos, as guaranteed by Article 105 of the Hellenic Constitution, is justified exclusively on grounds of a spiritual and religious nature”; the Mountain stands outside the Union’s VAT area, and the avaton stands inside its law. UNESCO inscribed the entire 33,042-hectare peninsula in 1988 as a mixed cultural and natural property. After a long ebb the monasteries have refilled since the 1970s; the census of 2021 counted more than 1,700 monks, and the houses keep receiving.

The goatskin and its readers

For a polity eleven centuries old, the paper trail is remarkably whole and well served. The founding legislation can be read entire in John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero’s Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 35, 2000), which translates Athanasius’s rule for the Lavra and dates the Tragos to 971–972 from the document itself. The avaton’s legal lineage — from the sigillion of 883 through the imperial typika to the penal act of 1953 — is traced in Ioannis Konidaris’s study The Mount Athos Avaton, the standard treatment by a historian of Greek ecclesiastical law. For the whole arc there is Graham Speake’s Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (Yale, 2002; revised 2014), the single-volume history written by the founder of the Friends of Mount Athos around the late twentieth-century revival its title names. Veronica della Dora’s Imagining Mount Athos (University of Virginia Press, 2011) follows the Mountain through the eyes that have looked at it, from Homer and Xerxes’ engineers to Byzantine sacred topography and the modern travelers. The 1913 catastrophe of the Russian houses has its modern account in Scott Kenworthy’s The Name-Glorifiers (Imiaslavie) Controversy in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020), following the deported monks and the philosophers who took up their cause.

Everything the centuries have built on Athos — the goatskin charter and the chrysobulls, the fixed hierarchy of twenty, the fifteen thousand codices, the article in a constitution, the declaration annexed to a European treaty — is scaffolding around one continuous act. The peninsula was emptied of flocks in 883 and of towns long before, and given over to a single industry, the one its founding documents name: prayer without ceasing. In the monasteries the offices turn through the night; in the cells and hermitages of the desert at the peninsula’s tip the prayer continues without the offices. That is the Mountain’s whole produce. The workshop has never closed.

→ Related: Athonite Monasticism · Byzantine Hesychasm · Monastery Of Saint John Of Rila · Nikodimos The Hagiorite