Mount Athos: The Monastic Republic

Athos is a rugged finger of land reaching into the Aegean Sea, ending in a peak that rises over two thousand meters straight out of the water. Hermits had prayed on its slopes for centuries, but organized monastic life began in 963, when St. Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra with the support of the Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas. A charter granted by the Emperor John Tzimiskes in 972 gave the community its first written constitution.

By tradition the mountain is the special possession of the Theotokos — her own garden, entrusted to her care. From this comes its most striking rule, the avaton: no woman may enter the Holy Mountain, so that it remains a place wholly apart, given to prayer under the protection of the one Woman it venerates above all creatures.

Over the centuries twenty great monasteries were established, ranked in a fixed order of precedence with the Great Lavra always first. Around and between them cluster smaller settlements — sketes, cells, and huts — down to the wild southern cliffs where solitaries live in near-total isolation. The monasteries govern themselves through the Holy Community, a council that meets at Karyes, the little capital in the center of the peninsula. Spiritually the mountain is under the direct care of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; in civil terms it is a self-governing part of the Greek state.

Athos has long been pan-Orthodox, not merely Greek. Alongside the Greek houses stand the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon, the Serbian monastery of Hilandar, and the Bulgarian monastery of Zographou, with Romanian and Georgian communities besides. For a thousand years monks from across the Orthodox world — heirs of the same Byzantine inheritance — have prayed side by side on the same mountain. Their monasteries are also great treasuries of that inheritance, guarding some of the finest surviving Byzantine manuscripts, icons, and relics anywhere in the world.

Athos has been the great preserver of the contemplative tradition. It was here, in the fourteenth century, that St. Gregory Palamas defended the monks' prayer of the heart and the vision of the uncreated light against its critics — the dispute known as the hesychast controversy, and the mountain remains the living home of hesychasm and of Orthodox asceticism. Through the long Ottoman centuries and a later decline the community endured, and the closing decades of the twentieth century brought a remarkable revival, with the monasteries filling again with young monks from many nations.

Pilgrims — men only, by the same ancient rule — still come to keep the unbroken round of the daily services, to venerate the relics and wonderworking icons the monasteries guard, and to seek the counsel of the elders. Athos is not a relic or a museum but a workshop, offering the whole Church the fruit of lives given entirely to God (see also monasticism and the layperson).