Mount Athos by John Julius Norwich and Reresby Sitwell with photographs by the Authors and A. Costa
London: Hutchinson, 1966
"The monastic republic of the Holy Mountain is an autonomous protectorate that occupies a remote peninsula in northern Greece. Twenty 'Ruling Monasteries' share government and own the land. In addition, a number of dependencies are to be found: some resemble the monasteries and others vary in size and appearance from small villages to the precarious cliff-dwellings of anchorites. A survival of the Byzantine way of living, set in a landscape that has remained unchanged since antiquity."
The above quote from this book is one of the best short descriptions of what Mount Athos is that I have read. It is the first paragraph of the second part of this multi-authored work, an attractive quarto in which the text is interspersed with pictures from the Holy Mountain. It is an account both of the history of Mount Athos (the first section of the book, written by Norwich), and a description of the authors journey to most of the monasteries and some of the other establishments in the early 1960s (the second section, written by Sitwell).
John Julius Norwich, while an expert on Byzantine history, is no lover of religion. His history of the Mount is shot through with what seems to this reader to be a disdain for the monks there and how they live their lives, with little insight into the religion which sustains them - much as in his history of the Papacy he refused to discuss theology at all. The trip was organised so the authors could see and photograph the architecture and the art, and Norwich's dismay at the treatment of the art and buildings comes from a secular viewpoint of a historian and antiquarian, which is at odds with the religious view of the material world held by the monks. It seems from his disparaging remarks about the food and the monks that Norwich did not have any sort of spiritual experience while on the Mountain. However, his potted history of the peninsula is a good one.
Sitwell's description of their journey is somewhat more sympathetic to the monks and their way of life. He seems to have been able to appreciate the timelessness of life on Athos better than Norwich, and his descriptions of their travels by boat, mule and on foot bring to the reader a flavour of what it must be like to visit and stay at the various monasteries - or at least what it was like in the sixties.
One enduring theme from both writers is that they felt they had visited the Mount just before it ceased to be. Many monasteries were in poor repair, most of the monks and holy men were of advanced years, and weren't being replaced by those younger. Sitwell and Norwich put this down to the advance of western materialism, and, importantly, that many of the countries from which monks were sourced had become Communist and banned religion. They saw their trip as a cataloguing of a way of life that was about to pass.
Fortunately for Athos, and the World, that hasn't happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Second World has led to a revival of Orthodox religion, and consequently the revival - to some degree - of Athos. More men are choosing to go there and live the religious life, and many of the monasteries have refreshed both their buildings and their personnel. There is life in the Mountain yet.
A big part of this book are the 63 plates, which are a mixed bag, photographically speaking. There are some wonderful pictures, but others not so good. They do, however, give the reader some insight into life on the peninsula.
As someone who has a fascination with Mount Athos, I found this book interesting, but really it's a fairly minor work on the subject. One for completists only.
No comments:
Post a Comment