Mount Athos, the monks' republic in the heart of the Aegean

The easternmost peninsula of Chalkidiki, in northern Greece, stretches into the sea for about fifty kilometres and culminates in the summit of Mount Athos, over two thousand metres high. On this wooded tongue of land an Orthodox monastic community has lived for more than a thousand years, governing itself by its own rules. Mount Athos, which the Greeks simply call the Holy Mountain, is one of the places where the Byzantine tradition has been preserved with the greatest continuity.

The Garden of the Mother of God

According to a devout tradition, the Virgin Mary, sailing towards Cyprus with John the Evangelist, was driven by a storm onto the shores of the peninsula. Struck by the beauty of the place, she asked her Son to make it her garden, and since then Athos has been called the Garden of the Mother of God. The legend underlies the avaton, the custom forbidding entry to women, still observed today. By tradition the ban also extends to many female domestic animals, and the peninsula remains separated from the mainland by a guarded border.

Hermits were living on the Mountain before the tenth century, but the turning point came in 963, when Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra with the support of Emperor Nikephoros Phokas. A few years later, around 972, Emperor John Tzimiskes approved the community's first charter, known as the Tragos because it was written on goatskin parchment. The document is still kept in the peninsula's capital, Karyes.

Twenty monasteries, one community

Today Athos has twenty principal monasteries, around which are gathered sketes, cells and hermitages. Seventeen are Greek, while Hilandar is Serbian, Zografou Bulgarian and Saint Panteleimon Russian, a testimony to the Mountain's role for the entire Orthodox world. Each monastery sends a representative to the Holy Community in Karyes, which administers the peninsula under Greek sovereignty and under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The monasteries hold an immense heritage of icons, frescoes, reliquaries and manuscripts, some still to be studied. Many, such as Vatopedi, Iviron or Simonopetra, stand in spectacular positions, on headlands or rocky spurs plunging into the sea. In 1988 UNESCO inscribed Mount Athos on the World Heritage List, recognising both its cultural and its natural value.

Hesychasm and the time of the Mountain

In the fourteenth century Athos was the centre of hesychasm, a current of spirituality that sought inner stillness through unceasing prayer. Its most famous defender was Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk and later Archbishop of Thessalonica, whose teachings were accepted by the Orthodox Church in a series of councils held in Constantinople. Hesychasm remains an essential feature of the Mountain's spirituality.

Time, too, flows differently on Athos. The monasteries follow the Julian calendar, thirteen days behind the civil one, and in many of them the day is still reckoned according to Byzantine time, which begins at sunset. Male pilgrims are granted an entry permit, the diamonitirion, issued in limited numbers, while access is only by sea, from the ports of Ouranoupoli or Ierissos. Thus the Holy Mountain continues to live as a world apart, bound to the rhythms of the liturgy.