Europe > Greece > Mainland Greece > Mount Athos > Articles > Sailing to Byzantium

This was no country for young men, nor women either, of any age. “Beardless youths”, plus female humans and animals, were all forbidden to land on this mountainous peninsula that was an ecclesiastical state-within-a-state, where the clocks all ran to Byzantine time and twelve was the hour of sunset.

But I was young, it was my first visit to northern Greece, and I was determined to enjoy it all to the full.

Any visitor who “created problems to the monks”, we were warned in a leaflet handed out on the boat as we approached, would be “persecuted with the assistance of the police.” Indeed, all had to tread very carefully, because this was “a land where miracles are liable to happen”.

I arrived with a friend one morning in May, and it was immediately clear to both of us that this wild territory, accessible only from the sea, was cut off from the 20th century by what felt like about fifteen hundred years.

Mist unexpectedly swathed the tops of the mountains as we edged past monasteries that seemed to hang from the vertical cliffs, and soon we were crouching under a canvas sheet to avoid the spray thrown up by a sudden squall. Thunder claps detonated somewhere in the hills as we disembarked on a fragile landing-stage, known surprisingly as Daphne.

There was only one mechanised vehicle on all Athos, we were told, a battered old bus, and into this we climbed. Growling and shuddering, it took us slowly up a winding road to Karyai, the village that served as the capital and was the only significant settlement other than the monasteries themselves.

To get this far we had had to convince the British Consulate in Thessaloniki that we fitted into one of the permitted categories of visitor - diplomats, clergymen, art historians, theological students and a few others. I never knew which category I’d been squeezed into. Perhaps confidential details of an extra, emergency one were pinned out of view behind the clerk’s desk - eccentric enthusiasts who refused to take no for an answer.

Our application had then had to be approved by the Thessaloniki police, and by the time we finally got out of the battered bus, and saw monks walking about under the dripping trees, we were convinced we were about to witness a legend. As we drank a grainy Greek coffee and watched our embossed permits finally being made out - they had all the magnificence of papal bulls - we knew we were at last free to wander unimpeded for five days in this quite extraordinary Greek Orthodox dreamland.

There was one final requirement, however. We must submit to an ecclesiastical haircut. We were gestured into a lean-to shed, and there basins were placed over out heads and any hair visible below the rim was gently scissored away. Finally we were free to go.

We set off along a cobbled mule-track through a forest of myrtle, sycamore and bay. The sun was now out, blackbirds sang, and blue butterflies hovered in the warm light. Chanting voices echoed through the trees, leading us to a group of wood-cutting monks. We arrived at their monastery after descending and ascending two ravines astride an already heavily-laden donkey.

Athos was a dream, a voyage into a distant country of the mind, and in many ways it was a paradise garden too. Yet it had the two-dimensional unreality of a dream as well, and the absence of women and children was mocked by the very vigour and profusion of the natural life of the area. Everything seemed to combine to signal the hopelessness of man’s efforts to create a true idyll, and of the contorted absurdity of his most insistent efforts to do so.

On arrival at a particular monastery - there were twenty - we were greeted with coffee and creme-de-menthe, and sometimes Turkish Delight (at one, a Bulgarian foundation, we were offered a share of a Mars Bar). Then we were free to do what we liked, join in services or not as we chose, and inspect the fantastic sanctuaries where the index-finger of John the Baptist, or a fragment of the Virgin Mary’s girdle, lay in highly-wrought, bejewelled cases.

In the mornings we would leave one monastery and walk on to another. One day we struggled and tore our way along an overgrown track to discover a solitary hermit watering lettuces. At first he shouted out in surprise, then embraced us, made coffee, and looked up ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ in a Greek-English dictionary.

Accommodation in the monasteries was in simple, but often magnificently located, dormitories. We ate with the monks - one meal was bread and a bloater - while portions of the scriptures were read out. Both food and accommodation were free - all visitors, irrespective of the reality, were treated as pilgrims who had come to pray and worship at the holy places.

The histories of the various monasteries were lovingly, and sometimes lugubriously, recalled in primitive but colourful maps handed out as we arrived at the entrance.

Most had been founded as a result of visions, or in gratitude for them. All were crammed with relics or fiercely cherished treasures. Many had been repeatedly burnt, and their inhabitants killed, following either the envy and religious indignation of the Turks or the giddy architectural aspirations of the monks themselves.

Simono Petra, for instance, is built on a pinnacle of rock and could only be reached by a spiralling path. When it was burnt in 1581, not for the first time, thirty monks are said to have died as they flung themselves into the surrounding ravines, hoping that chance, or an angel, would save them.

We found blind faith and heartfelt devotion still present, and strangely mixed. Sometimes the ethos of belief would prove contagious, and I found myself wondering whether some of those monks were actually saved as they fell past Simono Petra’s crumbling walls. At other times, though, a defensive exclusivity would possess the monks, and once we were quite roughly dragged away from the sight of an old painting. “For the Orthodox only”, we were told.

The peninsula ends in a 6,000ft mountain that rises like a finger, or Mount Zion, into the blue Aegean sky. All the way up it were hermits’ caves, some occupied. By then the landscape was stony, desolate, and utterly magnificent.

We saw what must have been priceless Byzantine frescoes half-obscured by swallows’ nests, a handful of ageing Russian monks in a monastery - Panteleimon - built for three thousand, chair-less Orthodox services lasting several hours amid clouds of billowing incense, and monks, like figures of death, fishing sedately in their black robes and tall hats on boats on a shining evening sea.

It was all absurdly beautiful, like youth itself. Monasteries stood massive and tranquil among their vegetable gardens, or were perched on cliffs from which great pines reached out into the scented air above waves breaking in silence far below.

Athos seemed to me an inhabited ruin, an ancient human machine that just happened to be still working. Anywhere more totally in contrast to the modern world it would be difficult to imagine. It was, I decided, Europe’s Tibet.

Because so many of the countries where once Eastern Orthodox Christianity held sway had been overwhelmed by Islam, or were, when we visited, under Communist rule, the long-term future of this self-governing territory was to some extent in doubt. Where would the replenishing supply of young monks come from? Would mass tourism be the answer? Surely not. What would the EU have to say, for instance, about the ban on women visitors?

Today, millions of tourists visit Greece every summer. But it’s part of the country’s attraction that, away from the popular haunts of Mykonos and Rhodes, there are many mysterious and secret places unknown to the adherents of hedonistic pleasure and an endless summer.

Mount Athos is a dream made real, something that shouldn’t exist but does. It’s an absurd, immoral, beautiful, mysterious anomaly, a place where the dying generations catch at the dream of eternity and hold it, impossibly but actually, in brick and mortar, wood and stone.

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