It’s taken more than a… millennium, but a modern supermarket has finally opened its doors on the venerable Mount Athos peninsula in northern Greece, the promontory where a semi-autonomous Orthodox monastic community has flourished since the 10 century A.D.
The new store was finally licensed and opened in the all-male monastic polity’s capital of Karyes this past week as a franchise of Greece’s AB Vassilopoulos chain, a subsidiary of the Dutch-Belgian group Ahold-Delhaize.
Eight employees will staff the store, which will occupy a commercial space of just 140 square meters. The administrative capital of the monastic community, which comprises 20 sovereign monasteries under the auspices of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, has hosted other food shops down the decades, but never a bona fide “supermarket” offering roughly 3,500 products.
The opening of the outlet was announced more than a year ago, with AB citing “construction delays”.
An Orthodox spiritual center since 1054, Mount Athos has enjoyed an autonomous statute since Byzantine times. The ‘Holy Mountain’, which is forbidden to women and children, is also a recognized artistic site. The layout of the monasteries (about 20 of which are presently inhabited by some 1,400 monks) had an influence as far afield as Russia and its school of painting influenced the history of Orthodox art.
