Mount Athos

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 […]

Mt. Athos monastery is occupied by brotherhood unrecognized by Ecumenical Patriarchate

A lengthy statement said the draft bill was not only a violation of the Gospels but in contrivance with the norms of Greek society, calling it “a great crime.”

His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America was once considered a model hierarch: mild-mannered, cosmopolitan, progressive, open-minded, the spiritual descendant of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. But then shadows began to appear, certain reservations and an inexplicable climate of distrust. On the occasion of his visit to Athens, I asked if we could meet to get some answers to my questions. 

Medieval Orthodox monastic rites and traditions on Mount Athos will soon acquire yet another trapping more associated with the 20th century: a modern supermarket. The semi-autonomous monastic community located on a northern Greece promontory first emerged more than a millennia ago, yet only recently did the prospect of opening a supermarket appear. The new store […]