Pagan Mount Athos

  

The Athos peninsula is about 50km long and 10km wide. A central spine of mountain ridge runs down the middle and rises to the peak at the southern tip. Water courses, ravines, and valleys run down like ribs on either side. In the west and on plateaux there is cultivable land while the rest is thick forest, home to boar, foxes, jackals, wolves, reptiles, and birds. 

Paths follow the spine, the valleys down to the sea, and the perimeter shore. People walked them long before the first monks arrived. In the middle of the fifth century BC Herodotus wrote in his, and up to then the only, history book that Athos was a great and famous mountain with cities prosperous enough pay tribute to Athens, which had built an empire on the strength of defeating the Persians.

Settlements included temples to Artemis on the site of Great Lavra monastery and to her brother Apollo on the site of present-day Ierissos. The summit of the mountain had a shrine to Zeus. It was also a signalling beacon, part of a system that could send messages throughout Anatolia and Greece. In his play Agamemnon Aeschylus describes how news of the fall of Troy was relayed by fire and smoke from nearby Mount Ida to Athos and onwards via the mountaintops to Mycenae in Argos where Clytemnestra was preparing to kill him in the bath.

Athos was populated by Greeks until the 6th century CE when it was devastated by plague and Slav invasion. In the 9th century the Byzantines reoccupied the peninsula, bringing in Greeks and Armenians from Asia Minor. In the 10th century the first monks built monasteries on the ruins of the old temples and opened up the same paths that served them a thousand years before. Some of the paved paths survive, called as Kalderimi, from the Turkish kaldırım, a pavement (built). The cobbles and stone slabs are probably the oldest monuments on Athos.

There are other traces of a rich pagan past. High up in the wall of the courtyard of Koutloumousiou, near the main gate, is an ancient grave stele, a tombstone with the bas-relief of a seated woman dipping into a jewellery box held by her maid standing in front of her: a common domestic scene showing the status of the dead woman. It dates from around the middle of the fourth century BC. What are two pagan women doing inside the monastery? Hard to say, unless they were thought to represent some biblical scene. But they point to the probability that Karyes was a thriving settlement. Several other monasteries have traces of a pre-Christian past in the form of sculptures, sarcophagi, and walls. Outside the refectory of the Great Lavra the porch is supported by ancient columns turned upside-down to counter their malevolent influence. 

Since the early Fathers of the Christian church, theologians and historians were hostile to pagan religion, seeing in it the material validation of sins, vices, and passions. At the same time they acknowledged the heritage of language, philosophy, and arts, ideas and imagery they received from their predecessors. In the murals of some monasteries pre-Christian celebrities are co-opted into the Christian narrative. The porch of Vatopedi’s main gate is adorned with Greek philosophers and the Erythraean Sibyl who foretold the coming of Christ. In the refectory of Great Lavra Alexander the Great is drafted in to defeat the Persian Darius, foretelling the battle between Christianity and Islam. 

The Byzantine artist of the murals in the church of Dochiariou goes further, showing Alexander ascending into Heaven and in pomp with the Emperor Augustus, Nebuchadnezzar, and Darius.

Under the gables of the entrance to the refectory of Great Lavra the celebrated fresco painter Theophanes the Cretan depicted the Annunciation in about 1540. The Angel Gabriel on the left announces the ‘Logos’, the ‘Word’ to Mary on the right. Between them is an ancient Greek plaque with a votive inscription and a huge human ear in high relief. The inscription reads, ‘Neuris offered this to Artemis Agrotera (the Wild-One).’ It has been dated to the fifth century BC. The ear has been co-opted into the scene because it was thought to be the organ through which the Virgin received the Logos by which she conceived.  And who is that slinking away in the extreme right of the scene, with no halo, tell-tale red hair and distaff? Artemis.