Dean Christakos« A More Complete Assessment of Mt. Athos - Notes on My First Day | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
May 29, 2006
Day two at Mt. Athos
After spending the night at Xenophontos monastery on my first day on Mt. Athos, I decided to spend my next night at Dochiariou monastery.
While Mt. Athos does have some roads (mostly unpaved) that one can walk on or get a ride on to head to your next destination, most everywhere is connected by a network of footpaths. It was a 30 minute walk from Xenophontos to Dochiariou along a small path by the western coast of the Athos peninsula:
At Dochiariou, the monks work hard-- really hard. The monastery has a very extensive woodshop, and when I arrived, I saw a monk bent overusing a power tool to scrape away the grasses and weeds that had grown up in between the stone pavings outside the monastery. I later found at that Dochiariou was known the monastery with a distinct reputation for working its monks hard.
Here's a picture with a monk standing outside the woodshop which also shows the grass and weeds growing up between the stone paving, giving you an idea of how much work one of his fellow monks had to do:
This monk's name is Fr. Philotheos, who is also, I believe, an ordained priest. He explained to me that there were already thousands of people studying the computer sciences and that there was a greater need for people to enter the clerical vocations. While I understood his point of view, I didn't plan on moving into Dochiariou.
More pictures and descriptions after the jump...
Maintaining a monastery is a lot of work. Right before I left Dochiariou, I got this picture of a monk driving a bulldover for a construction project going on there:
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of pictures of the inside of the monastery, or very many monasteries, for that matter. Most of the monasteries don't want anyone taking pictures of the inside of the complex, so I have no pictures of the churches whose interiors are absolutely covered in frescoes or the common eating area. Pilgrims visiting the monasteries are given a room to stay in that they share with other visitors, and they live, eat, and go to church with the other monks. During mealtimes, which occur after the morning and evening church services, one of the monks reads from a book of hagiographies describing the lives of the saints, and when he finishes reading, the meal is over, and everyone shuffles out of the room.
Another interesting feature of Dochiariou monastery is that they don't use their electric generators for light. Instead, at night a monk comes around and lights all of the oil-lamps which provided a little bit of light, but not much. Late that evening, while talking in the darkness with a Romanian monk who was also visiting Mt. Athos about where I would travel the next day, he pulled out a hand-cranked flashlight and we looked over the map of the Athos peninsula and talked about what routes to take to get to the next monasteries. When I explained that I could not get in touch with any of the monasteries we were discussing, he replied, "I've been here for 2 weeks, and I don't call ahead! The Panagia [St. Mary] is in charge of the Holy Mountain. If she wants something to happen, she will manipulate it to be so!" As it was getting "late" (which is, to say, aroundr 10pm), and the morning church services started a 6 in the morning, I had to go sleep. Keeping in mind that I shouldn't worry so much about whether I had a reservation at a monastery (where the monks really don't answer their phones that much), I decided that the next day I would head to the southeastern end of the peninsula and go to Karakalou monastery.
Posted by Dean at May 29, 2006 7:15 AM
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Comments
Lemee get this straight - you went four whole days without seeing any women?
Did they try to recruit you into the er, monkhood?
;)
Posted by: Betsey at May 29, 2006 9:14 AM
wow, that looks awesome...
Posted by: t-rat at May 30, 2006 10:25 AM