FRIENDS OF MOUNT ATHOS BOOK REVIEWS

© 1995

 

Tales and Truth: Pilgrimage on Mount Athos Past and Present. By René Gothóni. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1994. 221 pages. Price h/b US $33.00. ISBN 951-570-215-1.[1]

 

This book is the sequel to the same author's Paradise within Reach: Monasticism and Pilgrimage on Mount Athos (Helsinki, 1993) which I reviewed in Sobornost, 16:2 (1994), 94-7.[2] In the earlier book Gothóni asked such questions as 'What does it mean to be a monk?' and 'Why do laymen come to Athos?' The answers, based on interviews with a cross-section of monks and a cross-section of pilgrims, enabled him to build up an accurate picture of what life is like on the Holy Mountain today for both its inhabitants and their visitors. In this second book he devotes all but the last forty pages to examining a cross-section of travellers' tales from the past. For convenience he divides them into 'Early Accounts' (1420-1560), 'Travellers' Tales' (1677-1801), and 'Critical Tales' (1837-1954), but for practical purposes there is no real difference between them. What this book lacks is the parallel portrait of the monks of the time except in so far as it is provided by the travellers.

            Some of the visitors are themselves monks, such as the Florentine Cristoforo Buondelmonti who visited the Mountain in 1420 and presents a delightful if rather romantic description of this 'palace of angels'. Very different is the report of Fr Isaiah, a Russian monk who spent some time at Chilandari in 1489. By then the Mountain had been under Ottoman rule for nearly sixty years and Fr Isaiah (no doubt at the behest of the oppressed Athonites) gives precise details of the taxes that both the monasteries and the patriarchate were required to pay to the sultan. He also gives figures for the numbers of monks at each of the ruling monasteries at the time and mentions which nationality was predominant at each. Of the twenty, only nine then had a majority of Greek monks; no fewer than five were predominantly Serbian; and there was one each for Wallachians, Russians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Georgians, and Moldavians. But the principal difference between the accounts of westerners such as Buondelmonti and those of Russian Orthodox monks such as Fr Isaiah is that the latter are able to write from within and give a more or less accurate description of Athonite life at the time.

            The first Englishman to write about his experiences on the Mountain was the Revd John Covel, subsequently Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. (We are told on p.47 that 'he died on 19 December 1922', when he would have reached the age of 284!) He visited Athos in 1677 (when he was a mere 39), having spent the past six years as chaplain to the ambassador at Constantinople. He had a serious theological reason for making his visit because he was trying to find out if the Greeks believed in transubstantiation. But his account tells us a great deal besides about the monks at the time and also something about their visitors. The diet of monks at the Lavra does not sound very different from today; but Covel dined with a resident retired patriarch on 'fish, oil, salt, beans, artichokes, beets, cheese, onions, garlic, olives, caviar, rhubarb... oranges and wine... twenty or thirty good glasses at a sitting'. At the major festivals (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Assumption) there were about five hundred visitors at the Lavra; and the previous Easter there had been two thousand at Koutloumousiou. It seems then that, pace Gothóni (pp.134, 154), there is nothing exceptional about the numbers visiting the Mountain today. When I stayed at Xeropotamou for Easter in 1994, I was one of no more than thirty pilgrims. There was no caviar.

            Many of these early travellers were primarily in search of manuscripts, ever hopeful of turning up some lost classical text. Most (not all) were disappointed. They remark on the illiteracy of the vast majority of the monks and on the chaotic state of their libraries. Joseph Carlyle was planning a new edition of the New Testament when he visited the Mountain in 1801. As with Richard Bentley's scheme of eighty years earlier (which had resulted in Trinity's acquisition of NT manuscripts from Athos), nothing came of it. But he wrote back to the Bishop of Durham, 'I may venture to say I did not omit examining one MS., which I had an opportunity of looking at on Mount Athos. I believe their number amounted to almost 13,000.' Even today there are well over 20,000 manuscripts still on the Mountain, so why Goth—ni should regard Carlyle's figure as an 'overstatement' (p.86) is obscure.

            Perhaps the best known of the Athonite manuscript hunters is Robert Curzon who visited the Mountain in 1837 but did not publish his account of it, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, until 1849. He was clearly shocked by the state of the libraries and Gothóni is surely right to point out (p.103) that he and others saved quite a few manuscripts that would otherwise have been destroyed and lost for ever. In addition to those he bought from Karakalou, we may note that he bought others from Simonopetra which are now among the few survivors of a library which was totally consumed by fire in 1891. Along with all the manuscripts collected by Curzon, they may now be read in the British Library. And Richard Dawkins reminds us (p.132) that in the 1720s the monastery of Pantokratoros was so short of cash that it appealed to the English universities for assistance. As a result of that appeal six manuscripts were added to Oxford's collection for the price of £50.

            The last of Gothóni's 'critical tales' is that of Sydney Loch who made his home in the tower at Ouranopolis from 1928 until his death in 1954. He writes about a guest master at Xenophontos who could remember a time when the pilgrims at St Panteleimonos 'numbered the hairs on my legs'. Loch's love of the Mountain was shared vicariously by his wife Joice NanKivell who lived on in the tower until her death in 1982. But when Gothóni (p.136) speaks of her as 'the beloved “Martha” of the village', he is surely confusing her with her companion Martha Hþndschen who remains a familiar and much-loved figure in Ouranopolis to this day.

            As early as the 1950s some monks were bewailing the changes that were taking place on the Mountain: 'the tourist was ousting the pilgrim of the past' (p.149); and they foresaw the need for 'newcomers with gifts of leadership and purpose'. At Chilandari Loch found that the number of monks had halved since his last visit and that there were no novices. The guest master however was philosophical: 'Athos has a long history and long histories go up and down. There've been periods in the past when novices seemed falling off. Numbers always revived again.' A decade later John Julius Norwich (Mount Athos, 1966, p.14) was writing 'Athos is dying - and dying fast... The disease is incurable. There is no hope.' We now know who was right.

            Gothóni's last three chapters are devoted to the situation on Athos today. 'Field Tales Today' covers much of the ground already familiar to readers of Paradise within Reach. 'Pilgrimage Rediscovered' looks at the nationality of both monks and pilgrims across time and raises the important issue of a possible revitalizing of the pilgrimage movement among the Slavs in the wake of recent political changes in Eastern Europe. In this context it may be relevant to cite the case of a recent spiritual ecology camp organized by SYNDESMOS (The World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth) which took a working party of thirteen to the Mountain for two weeks in the summer of 1994.[3] The party was made up of four Romanians, two Russians, two Estonians, one Bessarabian, one Dutchman, one Frenchman, one Greek, and the team leader from Great Britain. The last chapter, 'Pilgrimage in a Comparative Perspective', with its impenetrable jargon brings the reader back to comparative religion with a jolt and did not contribute much at any rate to my understanding of Athonite pilgrimage. It was originally published as a contribution to another volume and it might have been better if it had stayed that way. More convincing is the Epilogue where Gothóni concludes (p.198) that 'By listening attentively to what the visitor says and writes in his tale, we realize that he, Greek and foreigner alike, has been touched by Athonite spirituality.' As the Archbishop of Kavalla said to the English traveller Athelstan Riley when they were sitting together on the summit of Athos in 1883 (p.115), 'We are all hadjis now.'

 

GRAHAM SPEAKE

Oxford

 


[1] This review first appeared in Sobornost incorporating Eastern Churches     Review, 17:1 (1995), 95-8, and is reprinted here with the editors' kind permission.

 

[2] That review was reprinted in the Annual Report of the Friends of Mount Athos (1994), pp.60-3.

 

[3] See the report on this camp by Dimitri Conomos, published in the Annual Report of the Friends of Mount Athos (1994), pp.29-38.