Stories From Mount Athos

Mount Athos, a spectacularly beautiful rocky peninsula on the coast of Greece has been a monastic preserve since the ninth century. This richly illustrated book tells the entire story of Athos, the Holy Mountain, from the first anchorite monks who lived in caves and huts through centuries of political and religious controversy to the thriving monastic communities of today.

The story of literature in sixteen acts—from Homer to Harry Potter, including The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, The Communist Manifesto, and how they shaped world history In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the how stories and literature have created the world we have today. Through sixteen foundational texts selected from more than four thousand years of world literature, he shows us how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas, and the birth of religious beliefs. We meet Murasaki, a lady from eleventh-century Japan who wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji, and follow the adventures of Miguel de Cervantes as he battles pirates, both seafaring and literary. We watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. Puchner takes us to Troy, Pergamum, and China, speaks with Nobel laureates Derek Walcott in the Caribbean and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, and introduces us to the wordsmiths of the oral epic Sunjata in West Africa. This delightful narrative also chronicles the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself—that have shaped people, commerce, and history. In a book that Elaine Scarry has praised as “unique and spellbinding,” Puchner shows how literature turned our planet into a written world. Praise for The Written World “It’s with exhilaration . . . that one hails Martin Puchner’s book, which asserts not merely the importance of literature but its all-importance. . . . Storytelling is as human as breathing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Puchner has a keen eye for the ironies of history. . . . His ideal is ‘world literature,’ a phrase he borrows from Goethe. . . . The breathtaking scope and infectious enthusiasm of this book are a tribute to that ideal.”—The Sunday Times (U.K.) “Enthralling . . . Perfect reading for a long chilly night . . . [Puchner] brings these works and their origins to vivid life.”—BookPage “Well worth a read, to find out how come we read.”—Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

An affectionate testament to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, after 30 years of activity of the Friends of Mount Athos00Mount Athos, the home of Orthodox spirituality and monasticism, has been in existence for at least 1200 years. Home to over 2,000 monks, in twenty glorious monasteries filled with treasures, the peninsular is undergoing a transformation and renewal of faith.00In 1956 there was a proposal to build hotels on Mount Athos. Today it hosts up to 1,000 pilgrims every day! Why? This book will help explain this extraordinary place, the current resurgence, the growing population of monks, the sense of purpose, the love and affection that are so much part of the environment.00This wonderful story, with a preface by HRH Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, is told through the recollections of the Friends of Mount Athos, an organisation that has, for thirty years, provided support for the institutions, landscape and people. Here are the stories of enchantment from over forty people of different nationalities, customs and beliefs.00In addition to the text, there are a collection of special photographs and maps.00Peter Howorth and Chris Thomas are long time members of the Friends of Mount Athos and veterans of multiple path-clearing pilgrimages to the Holy Mountain which is how they met. Despite living on opposite sides of the planet, their mutual passion for the planet, geography, pilgrimage and of course Mount Athos has underpinned their collaboration.

The Aegean Sea laps the shores of the Holy Mountain of Athos, a self-governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Twenty ruling monasteries comprise the republic; one of those is the monastery of St Panteleimon, where services are conducted in Slavonic. It has become known as the Russian monastery on Mt. Athos.St Panteleimon, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century, prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has experienced a strong revival and is now one of the most numerous of the twenty. The vast buildings and its sketes and dependencies seen today are really only a reflection of the history of the past two centuries.In this first comprehensive account of the monastery in the English language, that stretches back more than one thousand years, Nicholas Fennell has drawn from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering the wealth of information he shares in these pages. The history of the community is seen to interact with the wider worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and the modern nation state of Greece, together with that of a Russian homeland whose political character is constantly evolving. It covers the distinct phases in this history: From the tenth to the twelfth centuries when Russian Athonites inhabited the ancient Russian Lavra of the Mother of God, known as Xylourgou; through the six hundred years from the mid-twelfth to the mid-eighteenth century, when the monastery of St Panteleimon was commonly referred to as Nagorny or Old Mountain Rusik; and into the most recent 250 years with their fluctuating fortunes and the questioning of its ethnic identity. Themes explored include the Pan-Orthodox ideal, the role of money and political pressure, sanctity and heroism in adversity, ethnic relations, and the importance of historical memory and precedent.

"It calls for a writer more able at words to picture the sheer beauty of the Mountain. To convey the altering feeling of morning, or high noon; of afternoon, and deep midnight; of the golden scores of stars puncturing the sky." Athos, the Holy Mountain of Greece, is one of the most mysterious places in the world. A rugged pyramid that rises up from the Aegean Sea, the mountain is wreathed in myth, legend and ancient traditions that, to this day, remain largely hidden from view. The heart of Athos started to beat at the dawn of Christianity and its community lays claim to being the oldest democracy in the world. An entirely autonomous region of the Hellenic Republic, it is home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries that cling to its rocky flanks. No women are allowed to set foot upon the peninsula and the monks who inhabit this isolated place still use the Julian calendar, living on 'Byzantine Time', where each day starts at sunset. While living in the mountain's shadow, in Ouranopolis, Sydney Loch spent many years exploring Athos, and here he paints an enthralling, unrivalled portrait of the Holy Mountain.

For more than one thousand years the monastic republic of Mount Athos has been one of the most chronicled and yet least accessible places in the Mediterranean. Difficult to reach until the last century and strictly restricted to male visitors only, the Holy Mountain of Orthodoxy has been known in the Eastern Christian world and in western Europe more through representation than through direct experience. Most writing on Athos has focused on its Byzantine history and sacred heritage. Imagining Mount Athos uncovers a set of alternative and largely unexplored perspectives, equally important in the mapping and dissemination of Athos in popular imagination. The author considers Mount Athos as the site of pre-Christian myths of Renaissance and Enlightenment scholarship, of shelter for Allied refugees during the Second World War, and of a botanical and sociological laboratory for early-twentieth-century scientists. Each chapter considers a different narrative channel through which Athos has entered Orthodox and western European imagination: the mythical, the utopian, the sacred, the scholarly, the geopolitical, and the scientific. Della Dora has assembled a wealth of unique textual, visual, and oral materials without ever having had the opportunity to visit this holy place. In this sense, in addition to making an important contribution to existing scholarship on Mount Athos, the book adds to current theoretical debates in cultural geography and humanities generally about the circulation of knowledge. Imagining Mount Athos's appeal is international and spans Hellenic studies, cultural geography, environmental history, cultural history, religious studies, history of cartography, and art history. The book will be of interest to scholars as well as to a general audience interested in this unique place and its fascinating history.

Searching for forgotten Christian knowledge of man among the monks of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Northern Greece... "Jesus said: 'Let him who seeks not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds, he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled he will marvel, and he will reign over the All.'" (Gospel According to Thomas) DEDICATION: Spiritual men seek among the centuries-old forests of Athos for ten or a dozen holy men who are sanctified to replace a similar number in the hidden corners of Athos' forests and mountains. When these secret-saints die, it is said, ten or twelve new saints are formed, although at any time, only two of them become publicly known. I was blessed to meet one of them on a number of occasions, sometimes being able to find a translator of his Greek, sometimes being forced to learn through the language of love without detailed interpretation. Both ways, it seemed to me that I learned then 'by heart', not just in words, but in new understanding. - Robin Amis BACK COVER: Exploring the Holy Mountain is exploring oneself... Over the past several decades there have been numerous accounts written by travelers and pilgrims to Mount Athos in Northern Greece. Since its beginnings as a monastic republic before the 10th century AD, this narrow peninsula which protrudes for 50 kilometers into the Aegean Sea has captured the imagination of hundreds of writers, scholars, and pilgrims. To this day, there is a constant stream of visitors to its monasteries, which allow their doors to open to a limited number of visitors each day in order to preserve their time-honored way of life, and to protect it from tourism as well as curiosity-seekers looking for the new or exotic in their travels. Robin Amis began writing this book in the early '80's, when he first started visiting the Mountain regularly - visits which now total over 60. His first impressions of what he found there are encapsulated in this account of keenly observed descriptions of landscape and monasteries interspersed with deeply learned 'lessons' - truths brought home to the author by circumstances which so often evoked an inner response. It is these revelations which tie the book together - and as in all true revelations, they do not follow a logical sequential pattern - they come 'out of the blue', surfacing when another relevant memory calls them up into consciousness out of the depth of our being. This book, then, could really be called an 'inner journey', for which external details provide a kind of scaffolding on which to hang the various insights that keep on emerging all the way from the beginning of the book to its end. Views From Mount Athos, may be regarded as a 'travel book' - but it is also a many-layered journey - spiritual, philosophical, and psychological as much as physical. As Robin walks the narrow paths of the mountain from monastery to monastery, he finds himself increasingly detached from the noisy world of the West and travels the mountain tracks within himself. Among his guides on this journey was the blessed Elder Paisios (now Saint Paisios), from whom he learned the 'wisdom of the heart'. Though published near the end of his life, this book is actually his first; the manuscript lay forgotten for over twenty years while he developed his understanding of spiritual life for lay people in the modern world, expounded notably in his A Different Christianity: Early Christian Esotericism and Modern Thought (Praxis Institute Press, 2003).