Landscape Essay- Mount Athos

 

Mount Athos is one of the most fascinating places on earth. The mountain itself is a site to behold. Sitting right near the coastline of the Aegean Sea and located give or take a day's boat ride away from the strait of Bosphorus. The mountain can look beautiful and imposing from the coast, however what makes Mount Athos unique isn’t the mountain but what lies around it. The peninsula on which the mountain is situated on is home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries housing roughly two thousand monks from a variety of Orthodox countries such as Russia, Moldova, Romania, Georgia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and of course Greece. Now monasteries in and of themselves aren’t unique they exist all over the planet. Regarding other monasteries throughout the world it depends on if they allow female visitors, most don’t and some do however they usually have a strict dress code (they usually also have a dress code for men it’s just a lot stricter for women)  however what makes Mount Athos unique is that women are prohibited from entering the peninsula itself in fact even female animals are banned from the peninsula (with the exception of female cats for pest control, insects and songbirds (because the birds are impossible to keep out)  women are even prohibited from travelling 500 meters near the coast of the peninsula. It is quite remarkable and unbelievable however it is a fact (as far as we know) that no woman has set foot on the Peninsula in roughly a thousand years! The history of the monastery as you can see is quite ancient. Saint Theophanes the Confessor wrote in the late 8th century as well as George Kedrenos (11th century) that the eruption of the Thera volcano in 726 was visible from Mount Athos meaning the mountain was populated since at least the 8th century. In 1988 Mount Athos was designated a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is granted special autonomous status in Greece and the European Union which helps it maintain its ban on women entering the peninsula. Now the banning of women on Mount Athos has led to some interesting effects on some of the monks who lived here throughout the years. The most notable example of this being a monk named Mihailo Tolotos who is pictured above (1856-1938). Mihailo’s mother died shortly after giving birth to him and after no family members came to claim him, he was dropped on the steps of one of the monasteries on mount Athos. What makes Mihalio so unique is that in his 82 years of living he never met nor saw a woman in person and only knew what women looked like through icons of the Blessed Mother and images of women. He also lived his entire life without ever seeing a car or a plane let alone radio. This man lived 82 years completely isolated from the progress of the Second Industrial Revolution that was raging through Europe during the first half of us life, and many other world events such as the first world war all because of the location he was left as when he was a baby. Overall Mount Athos is quite unique. It is the last place on earth you can visit to experience the arguably unchanged culture and customs of the Eastern Roman Empire of the 11th century which have been preserved by the monks and is one of the few places on Earth where women are prohibited. The landscape itself is “gendered” because everything about it is aimed at preserving the celibacy of the male monks living there. Everything from the laws to the monastic culture of the Peninsula dates back thousands of years and serves this very purpose, many aspects have been unchanged and this has had an affect on the monks (as demonstrated by Mihalio) and outsiders (as demonstrated by it’s ban on women and rules for visitors) Overall the mountainous terrain of the Peninsula has made it easier for the monks to isolate themselves and for the culture of mount Athos to be relatively unchanged for thousands of years.