Mount Athos, a Male-Only Holy Retreat, Is Ruffled by Tourists and Russia.
Father Jerome in Xenophontos Monastery.
Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesMOUNT ATHOS, Greece — The skulls, lined up five deep on wooden shelves, date back hundreds of years, with the names of the more recently deceased scratched onto their foreheads — Monk Theolothelis, 91, 26-6-1986, or Monk Kyprianos, 100, 14-8-87.
They are exhibited in Xenophontos Monastery here on Mount Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual heart of the Eastern Orthodox Church. One skull carries a more philosophical message: “Brother, Look at the glory of man.”
That invitation to reflect on mortality encapsulates why the dead are exhumed and their bones displayed, explained Father Jerome, 50, who has an untamed salt-and-pepper beard and wore washed-out gray robes.
“Today you are here, the next day you are not,” he said. “If you remember death every day, it keeps you from doing evil.”While the skull display underscores human transience, the 20 monasteries and a host of smaller dwellings on Mount Athos seem eternal. Monks have been chanting psalms here daily for centuries.“It is an ancient community, organized just like now for more than 1,000 years,” said Abbott Alexios, 79, who found Xenophontos collapsing when he arrived in 1976, and has since led its rebuilding. “The church has its traditions, but Mount Athos is transcendent.”
Pilgrims getting ready to board a ferry at the pier of the Russian monastery, St. Panteleimon.
Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe peninsula could almost be another Greek tourist resort with its peridot shallows, pine-covered hills and the 6,670-foot Athos peak dominating one end of its nearly 130 square miles.
But the Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain is a place apart.
KOSOVO
BULGARIA
MACEDONIA
ALBANIA
Mount Athos
Aegean
Sea
GREECE
Athens
50 MILES
By The New York Times
For almost as long as there have been monks here, women have been barred — considered a distraction and undue competition for the Virgin Mary, the patron saint. There are no hotels, no bars, no stores, no television and no swimming, plus a daily quota limits visitors.
Travelers arrive on boats providing the only public access to the peninsula. Collectively, the monasteries play host to an average of 1,200 people nightly, all without charge.
The difficult access and the high monastery walls once built against marauding pirates seemed to keep time at bay, too, but now the modern world penetrates on cellphone signals and internet connections.
Modern life intrudes at Xenophontos Monastery.
Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesGeopolitics has sneaked in, too. Greece last summer denied visas to several high-ranking Russian Orthodox Church officials headed to Athos, in which President Vladimir V. Putin has shown a keen interest.
Greek officials fear any revival of the pre-revolutionary effort by czarist Russia to dominate the peninsula.
Athos holds a special place in the Greek psyche, as a throwback to when the might of the Byzantine Empire meant Greek culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean.There have been monks here since the sixth century or so, and Mount Athos is a kind of storehouse of Byzantium civilization, with monasteries sticking to the Julian calendar, 13 days behind the more common Gregorian calendar.
“We preserve the Byzantine Empire because it is a treasure of Orthodoxy, not because this is the relic of a secular state,” said Father Jeremiah, 48, a Protestant convert from San Angelo, Tex., who came to Xenophontos on a pilgrimage 22 years ago and has lived there ever since. “This is not a museum, but a living place.”
Ancient texts dictate the rhythm of daily life for the approximately 2,000 monks on Athos, defining everything from the liturgy to the die.
New York Times.
