SEPT

The craggy, steeply-sided peninsula, of which Mount Athos’ 6000-foot-high snowy peak is the very end, juts into the Aegean Sea, an imperious finger projecting from the landmass of Thessaloniki, north western Greece. From earliest times its uniqueness as autonomous, a set-apart, faith-driven territory, has meant it has attracted adventurers, researchers and writers as though with a secret magnet.
The remote location, its rich endowment of ancient icons and manuscripts, the drama of the sparsely-populated landscape, the requirement to trek on foot or go mule-back long distances up and down the peninsula’s serpentine length, clambering high up through scrub and forest on stony paths to reach a monastery, travelling down the coastline on to the next often in precariously small boats, is told and re-told in these travellers’ tales, along with mixed and wry reports of the cuisine and level of comfort provided by their almost always very welcoming hosts.
Male travellers, that is – and that because in the C11th a decree went out from the Byzantine Emperor that nothing female: no woman, no cow, no mare, no bitch was to step within the peninsula’s limits. This was to bring to an end any chance of debauchery on the part of the monks.
First of the modern era to record his Athonian experiences was Robert Curzon in 1837. In a detailed introduction Curzon gives an overview of the history of the Church, the Holy Fathers, heresies and dogmatic controversies. In illustrated manuscripts which are deposited in the British Library, but otherwise out of print, he describes Mount Athos’ natural beauty, the monasteries’ idiosyncratic architecture and hierarchies, and Orthodox religious art, expanding on the icons in the churches. In the text’s main body his personal experiences and emotions surface, this revealing Curzon as an early adopter of embellishing a travel memoir with anecdotes and vignettes, a form of writing with which we’ve become now so familiar.
Some eighty years later Robert Byron and three friends arrived in 1927 to document and photograph the monasteries’ icons and frescoes, hitherto unrecorded, some worryingly neglected. Byron’s The Station: Athos: Treasures and Men is a colourful account of rapscallion adventures wrapped around a serious intent. Recording the place’s unusual history, its untold treasures, and its strange but appealing form of life Byron’s mix of irrepressible wit and impressive erudition comes fully into play. Championing Greek orthodoxy and Byzantine civilization while downplaying the Hellenic, this fresh perspective by the youthful Byron (he was twenty two) challenged his readers as something revelatory. The ‘station’ of his title draws on his book’s concluding line, ‘This is the Holy Mountain Athos, station of a faith where all the years have stopped.’
Two years later the 1929 expedition of three young travellers led by American photographer Floyd Crosby was very possibly inspired by Byron’s account. This group spent 3 months on the peninsula documenting architecture and daily life in photographs and film.  They declared they were there because ‘it was a fantastic place unlike any other in the world.’
Their archival material, including 254 invaluable photographs and 81 lantern slides including our image above, now rest with the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, USA, and is regularly exhibited, having currently just opened at the Imbrian Theotika 2025 festival on the Turkish island of Imbros.
The following words are those of Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged twenty, the culmination of a journey on foot east from the UK in the early 1930s, ‘Rounding the cape, I suddenly saw the goal of my pilgrimage, Mount Athos, a huge, ghostly white peak, as pale and wraithlike as the skeleton moon in the blue sunlit sky.. the Greek name for it is the Holy Mountain and as I now see it across the glancing waves, it does not look as though it belonged to this world’.
Leigh Fermor’s diary entries about his month’s Athos stay form the final section of The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos. Leigh Fermor having read Byron before setting out, and reading The Station by candlelight during his Athos stay (as years later John Julius Norwich did in 1962) noted, ‘The types and the spirit of Athos are caught brilliantly.’
The Leigh Fermor diary records walking alone on the peninsula’s paths and revelling in the courteous welcome proffered to the foreign traveller arriving at all the twenty monastic communities of the various Greek Orthodox Christian liturgies.
These communities date from the C9th and C10th – and at first view tend to astound the visitor with their phenomenal height, their galleried construction and the demands of access to them resulting from their astonishingly precipitous locations often high over the sea. Fermor writes, ‘Time has stood still here and the whole Sacred Mountain seems a relic of some era, aeons ago, when men lived in a sweet air of peace and goodwill.’
Bruce Chatwin, acclaimed travel writer, had shaken up contemporary ideas about travel/history writing with his electrifying accounts of Wales’ Black Hills, Patagonia, Australia, and his photographic records of just about anywhere – but towards his life’s end Mount Athos became his obsession.
Chatwin, who had heard of the mountain from both Byron and Fermor, finally had his opportunity to take up the baton, and made it there in 1985. Already infected with undeclared HIV, he was enthralled by it – and although agnostic was reputedly privately deeply attracted to Greek Orthodoxy – but encroaching illness made him unable to exhaustively document Mount Athos or return to it before his death four years later, at the age of 48.
Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare describes him walking to the Stavronikita Monastery (which Edward Lear had once visited and painted.) ‘He puffed towards it with his heavy rucksack’ and afterwards wrote that, ‘The most beautiful sight of all was an iron cross on a rock by the sea.’ From Chatwin’s viewpoint the black cross appeared to be ‘striving up’ against the white foam and in response wrote, ‘There must be a God.’
William Dalrymple’s book From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium begins at Mount Athos in June 1994. He is struck by the peninsula’s atmosphere of ‘penitential piety.’ ‘My cell is bare and austere,’ he writes of his monastery accommodation.
Kirkus Reviews describes the book as ‘an evensong for a dying civilization,’ explaining that Dalrymple had studied the writings of John Moschos and set off from Athos to retrace the journey Moschos made in 587 AD. Crossing the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorous to Egypt’s deserts, Moschos’  aim was to collect ‘strange stories and remarkable travellers’ tales’, as well as the wisdom of Christians such as the Stylites and the Desert Fathers before these fragile worlds were overtaken by Islam’s great eruption. 
Dalrymple’s last image of Athos is sharply etched one. At the dawning of his visit’s last day, that is as he readies to begin the undertaking of his own monumental journey, his mood is downbeat. He reveals he has read by lamplight all night and describes seeing the silhouette of the Mountain as the first glimmers of light break through, ‘The paraffin in my lamp is exhausted and so am I.’