Mount Athos

Athos is a small tongue of land that projects into the Aegean Sea, being the eastern-most of the three strips in which the great mountainous peninsula of Chalcidice ends. It is almost cut off from the mainland, to which it is bound only by a narrow isthmus dotted with lakes and swamps interspersed with alluvial plains. It has been well called "a Greece in miniature", because of the varied contour of its coasts, deep bays and inlets, bold cliffs and promontories, steep wooded slopes, and valleys winding inland. Several cities existed here in pre-Christian antiquity, and a sanctuary of Zeus (Jupiter) is said to have stood on the mountain. The isthmus was famous for the canal (3,950 feet in length) which Xerxes had dug across it, in order to avoid the perilous turning of the limestone peak immemorially known as Mount Athos, in which the small peninsula ends, and which rises to a height of some 6,000 feet. From the summit of this peak on a clear day are visible the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, even the entire Aegean from Mount Olympus in Thessaly to Mount Ida in Asia Minor. It is the mountain that the architect Dinocrates offered to turn into a statue of Alexander the Great with a city in one hand and in the other a perennially flowing spring. Medieval Greek tradition designated it as the "high mountain" from which Satan tempted Our Lord. Its chief modern interest lies in the fact that at least from the beginning of the Middle Ages it has been the home of a little monastic republic that still retains almost the same autonomy granted a thousand years ago by the Christian emperors of Constantinople. In 1905 the many fortified monasteries and hermitages of Athos contained 7,553 monks (including their numerous male dependents), members of the Orthodox Greek Church: Greeks, 3,207; Russians, 3,615; Bulgarians, 340; Rumanians, 288; Georgians, 53; Servians, 18; other nationalities 32. The principal monasteries bear the following names: Laura, Iviron, Vatopedi, Chilandarion, St. Dionysius, Coutloumousi, Pantocrator, Xiropotamos, Zographu, Docheiarion, Caracalla, Philotheos, Simopetra, St. Paul, Stauroniceta, Xenophon, Gregorios, Esphigmenon, St. Panteleimon, St. Anna (Rossicon), and Karyses.