the Holy Mountain: A Complete History of Mount Athos from Ancient Times to Present Day

Empires end. Dynasties end. Mount Athos has not ended. For more than a thousand years - through the fall of the Byzantine Empire, nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, Catalan raiders, two world wars, and the whole of the modern age - a narrow, forested peninsula in northern Greece has kept the same way of life it began in the year 963. Twenty fortress-monasteries. The largest collection of Byzantine manuscripts on earth. A community of monks who still wake before dawn to sing the psalms their predecessors sang twelve centuries ago. The Holy Mountain is the complete story of how that happened - and why. From the ancient Greek myths and the first hermits in their caves, through the Byzantine golden age and the founding of the Great Lavra, through Latin crusaders and Catalan mercenaries and five Ottoman centuries, to the strange, self-governing monastic republic that survives inside the modern European Union today. Along the way: the first charters, the manuscript libraries, the fortress towers built against pirates, the thousand-year prohibition on women, and the question the whole book is built to answer - not how this place survived, but why it wanted to. This is not a devotional book. It does not ask the reader to share the monks' faith - only to take seriously the fact of their persistence. It is history: honest, documented, and traceable to a named source at every turn. The place that refused to end, told from the beginning. By the author of the Mount Athos Way trilogy (The 180 Days, The Half We Cannot Measure, The Work We Outsourced).