Athens journalist Stavros Psycharis has just resigned as the Greek governor of the monastic republic of Athos. He distinguished himself during his five-year term in office primarily by his absence on the Orthodoxy's holy mountain. Yet it was precisely in doing so that he enabled the monks to regain a degree of political independence.

Brother Alexander is the first monk from Switzerland on holy Mount Athos. Christian converts to Orthodoxy had been banned in the monastic state by Greece, the protectoral power of the republic. The proverbial hospitality of the Greeks notwithstanding, well into the current era of reform under Prime Minister Simitis life in this southernmost region of the Balkans has been characterized by extreme insularity and an often nearly hysterical fear of foreign agents. Among those victimized by the fear were non-Greeks living in the monastic republic. One of the most blatant examples involved the Russian mystic Sofroni, a student of Siluan, the last great Athonian starec. Sofroni was suspected of being a spy and deported. Not even after he proved his sincerity by founding an Orthodox monastery in England and becoming a world-famous author of spiritual books was he ever rehabilitated.

The Re-Internationalization of Athos
The situation today is very different. For the first time in the thousand-year history of the monastic state, among those living in the monasteries and cloisters is a large number of Orthodox converts from practically all over the world. The "under-secretary of state" of Athos, Kyriakos, a monastic deacon from the second generation of Greek guest workers in Germany, maintains a liaison to all of them, including French, Italians and Germans, black Africans and Americans of African descent, the first Austrian in Athos, and Brother Alexander. The latter is novel in another way as well. He is strictly affiliated with no single cloister or hermitage. Wrapped in the black robe of a monastic pilgrim, he wanders instead the length and breadth of the Athos peninsula, which forms the easternmost of the three fingers of the Chalkidike peninsula. "It is not yet clear to me which community God wants me to join," says Brother Alexander. Itinerant monks were especially common historically in Russian Orthodoxy, and have become so again since the collapse of communism. They, too, are coming back to Mount Athos, along with Romanians and Serbs, Bulgarians and Georgians.
Athos was settled early, and it gained a special status in the Eastern Roman Empire (that is, Byzantium) with the founding of the first documented monastery after 963. The general privileges granted to monks expanded into a unique form of monastic self-rule – with the monastic order extended, in the form of abaton (the prohibition of females), to the entire 340 square kilometers of the monastic republic. No explicit mention is made in the first Athonian constitution of the right of monks from other countries and nationalities to settle here. (Called the "Tragos," the document was inscribed on a sheep skin and is carefully preserved to this day in the "capital" city of Karyes.) The right is implied, however: throughout the Byzantine Middle Ages, all of the Orthodox were regarded as being of the same people. As in other sacred Orthodox sites in Palestine or in the Sanai, there were Georgians and "Russians" from Kievan Rus right alongside the Greeks from the beginning, and even Italians, Serbs and Bulgarians prior to the schism in the 11th century.

When Athos passed under the control of the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century, its special status did not change. Monasteries are treated very favorably in traditional Islamic law, for one thing. But Orthodox Christians also all belonged together in a millet, a community of faith made up of one people gathered under the patriarch of Constantinople. The monastic republic remained open to all of them. Romanians started coming in greater numbers from the 15th to the 17th century from the principalities of Moldavia, Walachia and Transylvania, which paid tribute to the Sublime Porte. Their hospodars largely took over the role of protectors for the monks on Mount Athos, which had been fulfilled previously by the Byzantine rulers from Constantinople and Trapezunt.

Eastern Slavs were represented in smaller numbers during this period. And it was not yet the practice to segregate the monks, drawn to Athos from all over the Orthodox world, into national monasteries. Instead, they were blended through all of the communities. Certainly, even at that time, Chilander was considered Serbian in origin or Zograf Bulgarian, but most monks in both communities were Greek, just as in others the majority were Slavic or Romanian. A productive life together for the various Orthodox nationalities was facilitated within the narrow confines of Athos by the widespread use of the Greek language throughout the Balkans and into Ukraine, and even Poland and Lithuania, and a shared Slavic ecclesiastical culture, which at that time encompassed Romania.

Fateful Nationalism
The monastic republic began to see the development of ecclesiastical nationalism only as Russia pressed toward the eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the 18th century. Russian monks managed to infiltrate the Panteleimon monastery on the west coast of the peninsula, and they quickly declared it one of the most sacred places in "Holy Russia," alongside the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev and the Sergius Lavra outside Moscow. When the tactic failed in other monasteries, expansionist tsarist ecclesiastical policy invented a new monastic tradition especially for Athos, the "skete of collective life" (obshcheshytelnii skit). In it, monastic villages were linked with specific monasteries while maintining of a strictly coenobitic way of life.
Nationalist tendencies also took hold among the Romanians and Bulgarians on Athos, less so among the Serbs, before the Balkan wars of 1912–1913. But the Greek monasteries and their offshoots remained open to all the Orthodox. In the monastic republic of the time, neither the modern Greek state nor the Greek national church was in charge, but the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. The peace of Bucharest in 1913 provided for Athos to exist as an independent state under the mutual protection of the "Orthodox powers." But the outbreak of the First World War and then the October Revolution prevented the provision from ever taking effect. The Peace of Sθvres assigned the monastic state to Greece, with relations between Athens and Mount Athos laid out in 1923 in Lausanne. Athos retained the rights of internal self-administration, while everything else was taken over by the foreign ministry in Athens. All monks were granted Greek citizenship.

On the Way To Becoming a Theme Park
This was still not the beginning of Greek nationalism in the monastic state, however. The primary threat from the perspective of Athens at the time was Russian infiltration, and the triumph of Bolshevism brought that to a halt. The Greeks once again allowed entry to exiled Russians, as well as to novices from Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The turn to a completely restrictive policy came only with the communist seizure of power in Bucharest, Sofia and Belgrade, and in reaction to the role played by some Athonian monks in the Greek civil war from 1944 to 1950. Many monastic peasants, as well as a few abbots, had joined the leftist People's Army, demanding expropriation of the 20 large oligarchic monasteries and a voice for the roughly 150 smaller monastic settlements. After that the recruitment of monks from East Bloc countries was subject to a general prohibition. Minimal contingents were allowed in from Tito's Yugoslavia in 1953 and from the Soviet Union in 1961. The consequences, for the Romanians and Bulgarians in particular, were catastrophic.
Thus began 45 years of strict supervision of Athos by Greek governors and their gendarmes. The Ministry for Northern Greece in Salonika took over responsibility for admitting pilgrims, defining the conditions for entry and keeping visitors to the Holy Mountain under police surveillance. The Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian monks grew older, and many of them died. The Serbs living in Chilandar declined to a bare minimum. Even the stream of new recruits from Greece, the only remaining source, was dwindling. Athos had hit bottom. It was threatened with becoming a theme park devoted to Orthodox monastic culture.

But a reform movement on Athos, although barely noticeable at first, was already functioning as early as the mid-1960s. Abbot Emilinos developed the Simon Peter Monastery into a refuge for educated monks with a pan-Orthodox orientation. After that, originating in the Nea Skiti settlement, came Abbot Ephraim's movement of spiritual renewal. The third, Greek nationalist, current began in the mid-1970s, following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. It took over in the important monasteries in Vatopδdi, Iviron and Dionysiou.

By the transformation of Eastern Europe in 1989, instead of more than 3,000 monks from Eastern and Southern Europe living on Athos, as there had been earlier, only a few dozen remained. The deficit was partially offset by an increase in the number of Greek monks to about 2,000, among them a militant faction that wanted to preserve the purely Hellenic character of the Holy Mountain even after the fall of the iron curtain. The first novices and pilgrims to begin arriving from the post-communist reform societies were thus more a source of tension on Athos than a sign of pan-Orthodox revival. The Ministry for Northern Greece enforced a very restrictive policy on visitor permits, since in principle every Russian, Ukranian or Romanian pilgrim to Athos could remain there as a monk. The first visitors who tried to do so were pursued into the woods of Athos by regular hunting parties of gendarmes. But nationalist Greek monastic brotherhoods also moved quickly to occupy abandoned Russian and Bulgarian settlements to prevent resettlement by Russian and Bulgarian nationals. Where the effort encountered the few remaining, very old, non-Greek monks, they were simply thrown out and driven into the woods.

Freer Access
Psycharis, chief editor of the liberal newspaper To vima (The Tribune), was named governor of Athos in 1996. When he was never seen on the Holy Mountain, people began to suspect a farce. But it quickly became apparent that Psycharis's absence was giving the monastic parliament and administration a free hand to gain a new independence from Greece. The most important change involved Athos setting up its own offices in Salonika and at the border for admitting visitors and monks, doing away with the earlier detour through the Greek ministries. Psycharis ordered not a single police action on Athos, and today the Greek presence is limited to a couple of flags and a customs office in the harbor at Dafni.

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