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In Which I Head Off To Mount Athos
October 11, 2008 by Mike
Stavros
Route: Ouranoupoli - Mount Athos by ship - Stavros
Today wasn't about riding a bike -- even when I got to the small seaside town of Stavros this evening, bought a lollipop and wandered the streets asking "Who loves ya, baby?"
[Just in case you're thinking, Yeah Mike, don't make things up just to sneak in a Kojak gag. But the truth is -- I really did this. Sad.]
No, today was about parking the bike, climbing on board a boat stuffed to the gills with tourists, Greek and foreign, fat and thin, devout and.. well.. me. And riding down the coast of the third prong of the Halkidiki peninsula. Mount Athos, the 'Holy Mountain', is a wee bit special. I've been looking forward to this.
In brief: a couple of thousand monks live in 20 monasteries. They look magnificent. They are stunning examples of architecture, faith and history. It's a 'state within a state' run independently of the rest of Greece. There's no road access -- that's one reason for parking the bike. The other is that I wouldn't want to go to Athos itself anyway. It's because I'm a committed Marxist -- in this case a Groucho-Marxist-with-a-twist -- I wouldn't want to go to any place that doesn't allow women in.
Yes -- and I both chortle and sniffle just to type these words -- women are not allowed to enter Mount Athos, No woman has (legally) stood on its soil for nearly a thousand years.
Monks feel that the presence of women alters the social dynamics of the community and therefore slows their path towards spiritual enlightenment, though they deny that the prohibition is in order to reduce sexual temptation
This might seem strange to you given that the whole place is dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was -- let's remind ourselves -- of the female persuasion herself.
It might seem strange to you -- it seems bloomin' daft to me.
The ban on females extends to female domestic animals. Yes, female sheep might distract the monks from their lives of prayer. Female cats, on the other hand, are allowed.
To be honest, I'd say the female cats would be better off being kept away from the monks.
So, nice as the place looks from a couple of hundred metres offshore, and while I would, ahem, qualify to land if I'd arranged the paperwork and dropped my trousers for whichever official feels the need to check my credentials, I prefer to see it from the outside looking in, along with at least one woman on board the boat who was disguised as a Greek Orthodox monk. If she hoped to sneak onto Mount Athos itself, she should have remembered to wear the beard on the front of her face rather than the back:
The strict rules governing access -- as well as the 'no birds' rule, only a limited number of men are allowed to step ashore each day -- has kept Athos in a fairly pristine state. It makes you realise just how much of an impact man (that is, man and woman..) has on the rest of the landscape.
The monasteries are pretty, too. But it's Mount Athos itself, standing head-in-the-clouds at the tail of the peninsula, that takes the breath away.
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