This report appeared in The Statesman, Sept. 9, 2004.
Wednesday September 9, 2004
With the Olympics over, Athens is once more slipping into the background. But the vision of Greece that surfaced during the Games is incomplete, the glimpses glamorously one-sided. It is in remote places like Mount Athos that you find the other side of this ancient Mediterranean country, its spiritual tradition.
Mount Athos is a peninsula jutting out into the Aegean Sea which is a part of the Mediterranean. Although its territory is within Greece, Athos enjoys a certain kind of territorial autonomy. Nobody can visit the peninsula without special permission. What makes Mount Athos so special? Suffice it to say that it is is a Republic of Monks.
For over 1,000 years, Christian monks have inhabited this densely wooded, mildly mountainous terrain. Twenty large monasteries have been built, besides a good number of smaller monastic settlements, including many hermitages. From all over East Europe, young men have come to join the monasteries on Mount Athos. In its heyday, I hear, some 20,000 monks lived on this 30-km long stretch of land. Nowhere else do we find such an accumulation of monasteries, nowhere else is a whole mountain-peninsula sanctified by the prayer and spiritual practices of a 1,000 years. It is therefore called “Agio Oros”, the Holy Mountain. Even today Mount Athos is inhabited by over 2,000 monks.
This May, a German friend, Rüdiger, invited me to accompany him to Mount Athos. He had visited the place before and planned our week-long trip meticulously. The rule is that every day only 110 visitors are accepted. Most of them are Greeks and profess the Orthodox Christian faith. Only about 10 non-Orthodox men are allowed in every day. I am not sure whether any non-Christians have ever entered the Holy Mountain openly.
Rüdiger and I flew from Frankfurt to Thessaloniki, the second largest Greek city after Athens. From there we took a bus to the small town of Ouranoupoli on the Aegean coast. There is no land route to the Republic of Monks, it is accessible only by sea. So, from Ouranoupoli we took an early morning ferry-boat after our entry permission was carefully scrutinised. One strict and much-contested rule is that women must not ever enter Mount Athos, not even young girls or female babies. Tourist boats are required to keep a half-kilometre distance from the shores of Mount Athos. Apart from other pilgrims, quite a few workers boarded the ferry boat and would disperse to the various monasteries for their daily round of manual labour. The large ferry carried us along the western coast of Mount Athos, briefly stopping at each monastery to let off pilgrims and workers and take on new ones. Many monasteries have been built directly on the shore or at a short distance from it on hilltops to facilitate the transport of supplies.
Official permission is granted for three nights only, and Rüdiger booked us into three different monasteries. But ultimately we could stay on for a week as we found shelter with a German hermit, Monk Panteleimon, for the final three days. The first day took us to the Monastery Simonos Petras. We alighted at Dafni, which is the one stop along the western coast that is not associated with a monastery. Dafni has a few shops and restaurants for pilgrims and travelling monks. At Dafni begins the motorable road leading to Karyes, the only small town on the peninsula which is grandly called the “capital” of Mount Athos. A number of Landrovers were waiting to be loaded on to the ferry, as well as a truck stacked high with timber. This is the dark side of the Republic: the thick forest cover was being thinned out for the money it brings; roads had been cut into the hills for the trucks to be able to carry off the natural wealth of the peninsula.
From Dafni we took a steep, winding path parallel to the coastline until it entered one of those timber roads. After two hours we reached the imposing, seven-storeyed, labyrinthine building complex of Simonos Petras. The massive main building is ringed by a wooden verandah on each storey. It reminded me of Tibetan monasteries in Ladakh. The young Guest Brother, who has a working knowledge of English, came to greet us. As is the tradition, he offered us a cube-shaped, rose-coloured sweet, a tiny cup of espresso coffee and an equally tiny glass of Ouzo, a strong liqueur made of anise which is very popular in Greece. The recently built guest house has modern amenities. The European Union has, I was told, provided large amounts for the restoration of many old buildings and for a modern day infrastructure. Indeed, wherever we wandered in the following days, we encountered a building frenzy. There were scaffoldings around ancient walls and towering cranes were facilitating the movement of building material. We saw a whole herd of donkeys, weighed down by their load, climbing — one behind another — a steep, rocky path from the boat’s pier.
This flurry of activity, we felt sure, was a good sign. Not only is an ancient European heritage being restored, preserved and renewed for contemporary visitors, but Mount Athos was also experiencing a significant monastic renewal. Catholic Christian monasticism in Europe for all its grand, hallowed tradition, of which I am myself very proud, is in the decline. Almost all monastic orders have sunk into a crisis as there are only few new aspirants for the monastic life. Many monasteries had to be closed. Efforts are on to make monastic life attractive again to idealistic young men and women; so far these efforts have been in vain. Interestingly however, the strict contemplative orders, like the Carthusians, have a sufficient number of novices. The orthodox monks on Mount Athos have meanwhile emerged from their crisis, and it was heartening to see so many young, bright faces, obviously infused by a divine enthusiasm, among the long rows of monks in their solemn black gowns and black head scarves. In most monasteries the number of monks is on the upswing, I hear.
The liturgy is the backbone of an orthodox monk’s life. It consists of a long string of prayer-readings, recitations from the Bible and from old Orthodox theologians, and of choral songs chanted jointly. It culminates in the Divine Liturgy which is the ritual commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection, otherwise called Holy Mass. These liturgical prayer sessions, celebrated in the church, begin early in the morning, sometimes as early as 2 am, and continues for several hours until breakfast. In the afternoon, there is another longish session extending until an early supper. The monks sit in their wooden choir stalls, but there is a constant coming and going.
While entering the church, the monks step forward to the so-called iconostasis which is a wall hiding the altar. This wall consists entirely of icons of Christ, Mother Mary, of Christian saints and angels. The monks bow reverently and kiss each icon while making the sign of the cross over and over again with big sweeps of their right hand. These intimate gestures of kissing the holy images, the flowing movements of men advancing and retreating and crossing themselves, while at the same time the singing and prayer continues, create an atmosphere at once contemplative and restive.
Used to the silent practice of yoga as my most essential method of interiorisation, for me the impression of restiveness prevailed. Too many words rapidly, even hastily recited, too many movements, too much of a good thing — I felt. But then, who am I to assess the ascetic efforts, the yearning for the Divine of a whole lifetime? Judging from the many strong, glowing countenances among the monks, I cannot doubt that God has deeply influenced their lives.
Having said this, I confess that I felt appalled by the monks’ conservatism.
Although welcomed as guests, Rüdiger as a Protestant and myself as a Catholic were not allowed to participate in the liturgy fully. We were given seats near the entrance and were stopped whenever we wanted to move towards the altar, for example to partake of the sacramental food. First welcomed — and then rejected! It did not make sense to me. During the second day on the Holy Mountain, we met a monk who spoke some German and I entered into a conversation with him. One of his first questions was whether we were Orthodox Christians. We denied being so. He asked me my profession. I told him I was a writer.
“You are but a very small writer,” he said pensively.
“How do you know?”
“Because you do not live in the truth.”
“How do you know?”
“You are not Orthodox. If you want to be a great writer, better change your religion.”
My respect for the dignified, elderly figure stopped me from arguing with him. I left him with a brief greeting. While walking up to Simonos Petras with the Aegean Sea to our right, I was stirred by the beauty of Mount Athos. The peak of Mount Athos, a mere 2,000 metres above the sea, is silently visible from almost every part of the peninsula. The ocean was calm and smooth and steely blue. The undulating landscape was covered by those lovely green hues. Within them nestled the monasteries and small settlements like airy castles, like bird’s nests. Being used to over-populated India, I came across much less people than I had feared. No swarms of tourists anywhere, no noise from humans, and only a faint disturbance from vehicles!
Although Mount Athos has surrendered its pristine, romantically old-fashioned purity, its ambience is still a far, far cry from the bustling world of, say, Ouranoupoli.
We walked for four days, stopping at several monasteries, spending the night in their dormitories together with the labourers and other pilgrims. We were also given the chance to enter small, cloistered hermitages peopled by just three or four men, who work for their food on their own fields. We took a bus to Karyes, the town, and spent one night in a huge, cavernous, crumbling monastery, St Andrea, which stood almost empty.
Lastly, we spent three days with Monk Panteleimon, that dear man of 57 years, from Stuttgart in Germany. He told us his conversion story, as he must be telling all his guests. It goes thus: once Panteleimon picked up a book at a store in Frankfurt. It happened to be written by a monk of Mount Athos. Completely immersed, he read on and on. When the bookstore was closing for the day, he bought the book to complete his reading at home. That very evening Panteleimon resolved that he would become a monk of the Holy Mountain. It took him two years to wind up his life as a hospital nurse in Germany, leave his family and friends, find a monastery that would accept him, and convert to Orthodox Christianity.
Meanwhile, Panteleimon has spent 20 years there, the last 12 as a hermit. The first years were inordinately hard and harsh, he told us. Yet, he remained loyal to his vocation. With his own hands he has erected this beautiful hermitage with several guestrooms right at the edge of the sea. Over the years he has revived an olive-tree plantation near him and planted hundreds of new olive trees. He grows grapes to make wine and vegetables for his daily food. In his own little chapel, Monk Panteleimon celebrates the liturgy alone or with his guests. They arrive and stay on and many return again. His simple, down-to-earth humour and straightforward wisdom probably attracts them. Looking at this farmer-monk, I realise that he is a fulfilled man, full of God, full of the beauty of Mount Athos.