Place Experience of the Sacred: Silence and the Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos 9819962145, 9789819962143

Table of contents :
Foreword
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1: Exploring the Sacred
2: The Mountain
2.1 The Mountain of Athos
2.2 Ascending to the Peak of the Mountain
2.3 The Desert, the Cave and the Hermitage
3: The Footpaths
3.1 Walking Through the Athonite Landscape
4: The Monastery and the Cell
4.1 The Monastery
4.2 Silence and Communal Ritual in the Courtyards of the Monastery
4.3 The Cells, the Silent Courtyard and the Talanton Rite
5: The Main Church (Katholikon)
5.1 The Katholikon
5.2 Stillness
5.3 Seeing
5.4 Light
5.5 Movement
5.6 Sound
5.7 Visitors
6: Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals
7: The Cemetery and the Grave
7.1 Journey and the ‘Memory of Death’
7.2 Ritual ‘Memory of the Death’: The Death, the Funeral and the Burial of the Athonite
7.3 ‘Memory of Death’ and Place: The Cemetery, the Grave and the Ossuary
8: Athonite Embodied Topography
8.1 Topos
8.2 Topography
8.3 Moving Through the Topography
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Place Experience of the Sacred Silence and the Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos Christos Kakalis

Place Experience of the Sacred

Christos Kakalis

Place Experience of the Sacred Silence and the Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos

Christos Kakalis Architecture, Planning and Landscape Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISBN 978-981-99-6213-6    ISBN 978-981-99-6214-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Dedicated to His Grace, Bishop Raphael of Ilion and the Brotherhood of the Monastery of St. Gregory at Mount Athos for their support in life and this study

Foreword

Silence is a pause. In music it refers to non-action, to a time of breathing, to an acoustic gap between two consecutive notes. Silence is a spacing between words; it is an interruption in speech. Or rather, it is the very precondition for speech to happen. Silence invites careful listening; and it invites introspection. Often identified as one of the most intense experiences across cultures, silence can be simultaneously associated to the plenitude of eternity and to the terror of the unknown. It can invoke contemplative techniques of quietness as a means for inner transformation, and evoke our uttermost fears. It can be full and empty, positive and negative. Either way, silence is an intrinsically temporal phenomenon, but it is also compellingly spatial: not only does it mark the boundaries of our perception, but it is also experienced more intensely in specific places. One such place, Christos Kakalis reminds us, is Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Orthodoxy. Pilgrims, Kakalis tells us, go to Mount Athos searching for silence, ‘in order to be able to listen’. In today’s noisy culture of organised distraction, silence has become a precious commodity, and places like Athos even more precious oases. Like silence, Mount Athos, with its quiet, daily and seasonal rhythms and rituals, seems to mark a pause, an interruption in a world that is moving at a faster pace than ever. To a certain extent, this has always been the case. Its early monastic dwellers selected the vii

viii Foreword

peninsula for its isolation. By the fourteenth century, Athos had become the stronghold of hesychasm, a monastic tradition of contemplative prayer etymologically rooted in hesychia (‘stillness’, or ‘quiet’). Ever since, entire generations of pilgrims and travellers have perceived Mount Athos as a place where the flow of time had somehow slowed down, or simply followed a different course. The Byzantine intellectual, Nikephoros Gregoras, and his contemporaries likened Athos to a timeless garden of Eden; in the late 1920s, Robert Byron called it ‘the station where all years have stopped’, whereas in the latter part of the century, Philip Sherrard and Kyriakos Markides both re-baptized it, ‘The Mountain of Silence’. And yet, silence has its own sound—and its own topographies. And so does Mount Athos. In the following pages, Kakalis invites us, the readers, to become attentive listeners and pilgrims. An architect by training and a passionate pilgrim himself, Kakalis knowledgeably guides us through Athos’ many silences: from the primordial silences of its ‘vertical desert’ to the carefully architected silences of Gregoriou, one of Athos’ most popular monasteries and the author’s beloved ‘spiritual home’. Silence conceals and reveals. If you attune your ears to its sound, in the course of this fascinating journey you will hear the breath of the sea, the melodic songs of the robins, the solitary cry of the eagle, the whisper of the wind. You might also hear the rhythmic sound of the semandron (a metallic outdoor musical instrument) in the distance, as it calls the monks to prayer; or the heavenly chants of a nightlong vigil mingling with the voices of the cicadas, as you quietly stand before the threshold of the church under the starry vault of the universe, while the rest of the world is asleep. On Athos as elsewhere, silence is articulated through its interplay with sound. We become aware of silence through the experience of noise, of voices, of reverberations. Such interplay—between sound and silence— brings places to life. Crossing the many physical and sonic thresholds that characterise Athonite space, Kakalis shows us how on the Holy Mountain silence is patiently crafted through solitary prayer and communal ritual, and through their microgeographies.

 Foreword 

ix

Silence emerges from Place Experience of the Sacred less as an abstract metaphysical presence than as a malleable substance shaped by the spaces it inhabits. On Athos, you will find, silence is reflected and refracted in the varied topography of the peninsula and it is attentively managed within its monastic precincts. It echoes in the cave, it is dispersed on the mountaintop, it is absorbed in the forest; it is magnified in the church. Silence questions certitudes and dissolves apparent binary opposites. It reconfigures absence as presence, emptiness as fullness, quietness as expressivity, stillness as intensity of life. As an ‘axis mundi’, Kakalis reminds us, Athos holds a similar transformative power. A physical threshold between the earth and the sky, the Holy Mountain lingers between the seen and the unseen. It is a liminal space. Following pilgrims, monks and visitors along its winding paths, Kakalis invites us to explore Athos’ transformative topographies using all of our senses. He shows how every spiritual journey is ultimately a spatial journey. Hence, we are reminded of another silence, a silence that encompasses and transcends all silences—the deep silence of the human soul. There was a very quiet monk who lived in a very busy Athonite monastery, Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra used to recall. It was a large monastery, with streams of visitors coming and going all the time. ‘You are so quiet’, said a pilgrim to him. ‘How can you live in such a noisy place? You should go and dwell in a cave’. But the good monk replied: ‘Oh, but I do live in a cave! My body is a cave for my soul and my soul is a cave for the Holy Spirit’. Royal Holloway, University of London London, UK

Veronica della Dora

Contents

1 E  xploring the Sacred  1 2 T  he Mountain  9 2.1 The Mountain of Athos  10 2.2 Ascending to the Peak of the Mountain  15 2.3 The Desert, the Cave and the Hermitage  19 3 T  he Footpaths 33 3.1 Walking Through the Athonite Landscape  34 4 The  Monastery and the Cell 59 4.1 The Monastery  60 4.2 Silence and Communal Ritual in the Courtyards of the Monastery 68 4.3 The Cells, the Silent Courtyard and the Talanton Rite  79 5 The  Main Church (Katholikon) 89 5.1 The Katholikon  90 5.2 Stillness  91 5.3 Seeing  94

xi

xii Contents

5.4 Light  98 5.5 Movement 102 5.6 Sound 105 5.7 Visitors 111 6 Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals119 7 The  Cemetery and the Grave133 7.1 Journey and the ‘Memory of Death’ 134 7.2 Ritual ‘Memory of the Death’: The Death, the Funeral and the Burial of the Athonite 138 7.3 ‘Memory of Death’ and Place: The Cemetery, the Grave and the Ossuary 140 8 A  thonite Embodied Topography149 8.1 Topos 149 8.2 Topography 153 8.3 Moving Through the Topography 156 A  fterword169 I ndex173

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Christ’s Transfiguration. (Icon by Katherine Sanders, Twentieth Century) 14 Fig. 2.2 Mapping of the Mountain’s Silence-Scape (left) and The Ascent towards its peak (right) 17 Fig. 2.3 Mappings of the movements of monks Joseph and Arsenios. (Drawings by the author) 28 Fig. 3.1 Blog depiction of the path towards Panagouda. (Source: http://www.agiooros.net)36 Fig. 3.2 A ‘map’/diagram depicting the different distances according to the time it takes to walk them (1957). It was included in a guide for the travellers to Mount Athos written by a monk there. It depicts the distances between Karyes (the capital of Mount Athos) and the twenty monasteries, both in kilometres and walking time. The distances between the monasteries are also included. (Source: G. Alexander from Great Laura, Guide of Mount Athos, (Mount Athos, Greece), 1957)39 Fig. 3.3 Handmade Sign pointing towards Simonopetra monastery. (Photo by the author) 42 Fig. 3.4 A map of the path that connects Gregoriou monastery to Simonopetra monastery and its elevation, FoMA Project for Paths43 Fig. 3.5 A depiction of the footpath that connects Gregoriou with Simonopetra monastery (left) by Monk Markos. Monk Markos is an Athonite ascetic who published a small pilgrims’ xiii

xiv 

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

List of Figures

guide in 2000. In it maps such as these are included. They are the result of repeated walks and experiential measurements according to the walkers’ paces, the walking time and other components of the walking experience. Therefore, they differ from the modern cartographic representation 44 Part of a map also showing the footpath that connects the Gregoriou and Simonopetra monasteries. It was created by Reinhold Zwerger, a frequent pilgrim to Mount Athos since 1956. During his long journeys there he kept detailed diaries, made drawings and sketches and mapped the network of roads and footpaths in quite a detailed way. His map, published in 1982, is considered to be one of the most ‘accurate’. The map follows the modern cartographic approach, with clearly designed contour lines and abstractly represented footpaths45 Gregoriou monastery: general organization. (Drawing by the author)64 Mapping of the Litany of the Sunday of Orthodoxy. (Drawing by the author) 72 Mapping of the litany of Great Friday. (Drawing by the author) 74 Photograph of the Ritual Procession of Great Friday. (Courtesy of the Gregoriou Monastery) 75 Mapping of the Easter Monday litany. (Drawing by the author) 76 Photographs from an Easter Monday litany. (Courtesy of Gregoriou Monastery) 77 The exterior of a kodra at Gregoriou Monastery (left) and the interior of a cell at Gregoriou Monastery (right). (Photographs by the author) 81 Mapping of a Talantor Rite at Gregoriou Monastery. (Drawing by the author) 86 The silence-scape of the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery. (Drawing by the author) 94 The lite ritual (left) and censing ritual (right). (Drawings by the author) 106 An external view of the Gregoriou cemetery. (Photograph by the author) 143 An internal view of the ossuary. (Photograph by the author) 145

List of Tables

Table 3.1 The path according to the time periods of its walking Table 4.1 The daily programme of Gregoriou monastery Table 4.2 Relationship between the tasks and the different spaces of the Athonite monastery

46 65 68

xv

1 Exploring the Sacred

The book explores the role of silence and communal ritual in the experience of the topography of Mount Athos, a peninsula in northeastern Greece and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988. It is a semi-­independent realm that belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in which a male monastic community is organised in a network of different structures ruled by twenty coenobitic monasteries. Entrance regulations enhance the clarity of the boundary between inside and outside, allowing only a specific number of male visitors to enter and interact with the natural landscape, the architecture and the ascetic life. The Athonite topography thus acquires the character of a distant, sacred/other place in which ascetics seek to practise hesychasm, a way of life based on the dynamic combination of silent prayer and communal rituals. My interest in Mount Athos began with numerous pilgrimages there, over many years. During these, I was struck by the difference between modern, everyday life and the Athonite one: a difference in the structure of space and time that either reminds the individual of older forms of rural life or communicates an unfamiliar character, connected for the monks to the service of the sacred. Monks repeat the same actions in the same places, access to which is not always allowed to outsiders. Moreover, ‘otherworldly’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_1

1

2 

C. Kakalis

liturgical sounds are combined with long periods of silence, creating an atmosphere worthy of examination. My doctoral research explored the embodied topography of the peninsula, emphasizing how the role of boundaries and in-between zones enhanced these processes, establishing my research interest in religious topography and deepening my relationship with Mount Athos. The book is therefore the result of personal pilgrimages, postgraduate study and further research conducted since 2014. The meaning of the Athonite landscape as expressed in the combination of silence with communal ritual has gradually emerged as the common axis of these quests. Mount Athos is a characteristic example of a sacred topography with strong connections to Byzantine and hesychast traditions that is also visited by a number of outsiders with various motivations. The unique conditions of this environment raise a number of questions that the book seeks to answer. What is the role of embodiment in the experience of sacred places? What is the role of silence and communal ritual on the peninsula? How are the constant repetition of the same actions, silent prayer, and the journey of the outsider reflected in the organisation and embodied performance of the Athonite landscape? In dealing with these questions, this work seeks to develop a new interpretation of the embodied pilgrimage topography of the Athonite landscape, contributing to the hermeneutical discussion of it in other disciplines, such as anthropology, geography and theology. Taking into consideration the results of these academic dialogues, it highlights the importance of human movements and gestures as meaningful ways to explore the topography. The relief of the peninsula is mainly mountainous.1 The plains are to the rear, with a small surface area, and the coastlines are extremely rocky and steep. These conditions of geographical isolation have led to a primitive, untouched landscape, inhabited by ascetics searching for solitude.2 The first written evidence of the presence of ascetics on Mount Athos dates back to  Dimitrios Kotoulas, ‘The Natural Environment’, in Stylianos, Papadopoulos (ed.), Simonopetra: Mount Athos (Athens: Hellenic Industrial Development Bank, SA, ETBA, 1991), pp. 47–56. 2  Giorgos Sidiropoulos, Mount Athos: References to its Human Geography (Athens: Kastaniotis Editions, 2000),, p. 18. 1

1  Exploring the Sacred 

3

the ninth century,3 though it was in AD 943 that the boundaries of the peninsula as a monastic realm were officially inscribed by the Emperor’s ambassadors.4 Gradually, a network of huts (kalyves), cells (kellia), sketes and twenty coenobitic monasteries was organised on Athos, and built during the middle and late Byzantine period.5 In the fourteenth century, Mount Athos became an important centre of hesychasm, which was intensively followed by most of the Athonites. Since then, Mount Athos has been considered an active field of hesychast practice in which hermits and coenobitic monks seek salvation through prayer, and pilgrims visit to communicate with its religious character.6 Describing how embodiment adds to the meaning of religious topoi (places), the book provides a new understanding of Athonite topography as a synthesis of different events of place.7 The investigation of their experience through ritual, silent prayer and the freer movements of the visitors freshly enhances the examination of the place. The individual and collective experience of the Athonite landscape relates to a number of different levels of familiarity experienced in a spatio-temporal field of diverse discourses. The religious qualities of monastic life interact with the temporary experience of the visitors. Monks and visitors are engaged in a dynamic process, during which physical and psychical, material and immaterial, built and unbuilt are not experienced as different qualities, but rather as equal components in the same procedure. Repetitive rituals are combined with silent prayer to express these individual and communal qualities of hesychast worship. Hesychasm derives from the Greek word for calmness or tranquillity (ησυχία—hesychia), and it is based on the ceaseless repetition of the Jesus prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, the sinner’). By the repetition of this  Dionysia Papachrysanthou, Ο Αθωνικός Μοναχισμός  – Αρχές και Οργάνωση/Athonite Monasticism  – Origins and Organization (Αθήνα/Athens: Μορφωτικό Ίδρυμα της Εθνικής Τράπεζας της Ελλάδος), pp. 31–39. 4  Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2002). 5  Archim Aimilianos, ‘Monastic Life’, in Papadopoulos (ed.), Simonopetra: Mount Athos, p. 118. 6  Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, pp. 157–194; Sidiropoulos, Mount Athos: References to its Human Geography, pp. 145–155. 7  As explained later in the Introduction, place is not an abstract mathematically defined space, but rather a multi-layered spatio-temporal situation. 3

4 

C. Kakalis

twelve-word phrase, the prayer may be used at any time, whether the individual is alone or with other people. Its simplicity allows it to turn easily inward, leading to the desired stillness that is considered to be a path towards God with intense transformative qualities. Active participation in communal rituals and practice of silent prayer are interconnected in an ascetic life that greatly influences the formation and experience of architecture and landscape. Through its connection to prayer, silence emerges as a key and meaningful quality of the topography that carries intense religious meanings, also related to the communal rituals. Athonite monks believe that silence has two interconnected levels: the external and the internal. The former is the one that the individual can listen to, and relates to the elimination of intense (idle) sounds. This level of silence is directly connected to the inner one, as for the monks, ascetic life is related to the sensual detachment from the everyday world. For them, external silence results in internal silence, and at the same time, through the benefits from the internal, the external is reinterpreted. The aim of the process is theosis. During these moments, the monks argue that the individual ‘goes beyond even the boundaries of his own body’. The Athonite monks also use the word ‘grasp’ to describe this state, something that includes a sense of forcible detachment from the mundane/monastic sphere, and underlines the intensity of the experience. Silence becomes a key atmospheric quality of the Athonite landscape, with intense religious connotations and meanings. Therefore, the landscape is mapped through the movement of the individual, monks and visitors, to form an embodied topography; a meaningful synthesis of places that are more than abstract mathematical spaces. They are spatio-temporal events taking place in the specific context. Today, not all visitors to Athos are pilgrims: a number of different motivations lead travellers there. People of different nationalities and religions decide to visit this place, which is outside their everyday life, and spend some days interacting with the landscape. On the one hand, Mount Athos attracts a number of pilgrims who want to experience a more undisturbed practice of hesychast life.8 Participation in the daily community rituals, interaction with the ascetics and walking along  Field trip to Mount Athos (August–September 2011).

8

1  Exploring the Sacred 

5

the Athonite network of footpaths are always included in their aims. Thus, the pilgrim is more open to interaction with the sacred associations of the landscape and the life there, as he is closer to the language of the ritual, artistic and architectural metaphors used in the activities held in the places he enters (natural environment, church, refectory, courtyard).9 He is able to understand the events of a religious place and participate in them. Besides participation in the communal rituals, interaction with silence plays an important role for the visitors, either as part of their pilgrimage experience or as a kind of rule set for the protection of the silent qualities of Athonite topography. In this sense, silent prayer may also be part of a pilgrim’s journey, conducted either in the liturgical environment of the church or in the silent qualities of the natural environment. On the other hand, the experience of the tourists is quite different from the above, as their motivations and hence the way they interact with the environment are not always connected to the religious qualities of the Athonite realm. The tourists entering the peninsula include religious tourists, existential tourists and tourists with cultural and environmental interests (eco-tourists). The existential tourists ‘emphasize the spiritual connection to a place, by focusing on those travelling to remote centres and sacred shrines for a quest of spirituality’.10 Therefore, the aim of the existential tourists is to distance themselves from the everyday sphere that cannot meet their existential needs, enter the peninsula and try to ­communicate bodily with the meanings of the natural environment and architecture. Moreover, religious tourists are one of the common groups of visitors at pilgrimage sites today. They are ‘travellers in “package tour groups” who are pilgrims and may be travelling because of “recreational” motivations’.11 In  See: René Gothóni, ‘Pilgrimage as Dialogue’, in René Gothóni and Graham Speake (eds), The Monastic Magnet: Roads to and from Mount Athos (Bern, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 98. And in the same, pp. 102–104: The visitors’ intentional movement through the sacred landscape narrates an encounter between the Self and the world of the Other. Based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of ‘play’, Gothóni argues that pilgrims open themselves to the world of Athos, aiming at a participation in the life-drama there. Thus, monks and pilgrims attend ‘the meaningfulness of ... [a ritual] play’ held either in a church or the refectory of a monastery, which may lead to the transformation of the whole process through the later (re)interpretation of events. 10  Konstantinos Andriotis, ‘Sacred Site Experience: A Phenomenological Study’, in Annals of Tourism Research, 36/1, p. 70. 11  Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan, ‘Religious Sites as Tourism Attractions in Europe’, in Annals of Tourism Research, 19/1, pp. 69–74. 9

6 

C. Kakalis

the case of Mount Athos, religious tourism is mainly connected to group journeys organised by local churches, more formal institutions or informal occasions. Furthermore, tourists with cultural or environmental interests also visit the peninsula. Interaction with the Byzantine monuments and the natural landscape is also included in the framework of ‘alternative tourism’. People go there to see well-preserved monuments, experienced by the permanent dwellers according to the order of Byzantine monastic life. While the aim of this book is not to examine in an ethnographic, anthropological way how the visitors interact with the Athonite landscape and the activities within it, it takes their presence into consideration. Building upon a critical approach to the anthropological studies of the role of the visitor in pilgrimage sites, it explores their movement of gradual familiarisation, which is different from the habitual life of the Athonite ascetics.12 Besides material from interviews conducted during the past six years, the book traces their experiences through published narratives of visitors during the past fifty years. The relationship between literature and topography has been the subject of academic discourse since the early 1980s, with the gradual development of ideas such as ‘literary cartography’, ‘literary geography’ and geocriticism. Arguing about a ‘critical literary cartography’, the theoretician Andrew Thacker underlines the importance of the examination of literature based on cartography that may lead either to ‘authorial’ or ‘readergenerated’ mappings of geography. On the one hand, cartographic representations of geographical space are included in literary texts, influenced by the historical, social and cultural context of the writer.13 On the other hand,  The Turnerian theory was first questioned by the anthropologist Alan Morinis, who argues about the importance of an inner journey that is connected to an actual sacred place, focusing on the notion of personal experience. Also questioning the universality of Turner’s approach, John Eade and Michael Sallnow suggested that pilgrimage is a ‘field of contesting discourses’; a place where different attitudes towards the sacred (permanent residents and visitors) coexist. This conflict is also connected to liminality, as its character is not clear and hence can always be characterised either as an entrance or an exit. On this see: John Eade and Michael Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1991); Alan Morinis, Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1992). 13  Andrew Thacker, ‘The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography’, in New Formations, 57 (Winter 2005–2006), p. 65. 12

1  Exploring the Sacred 

7

readers’ geographic interpretations of literary texts allow them to discover the phenomenal qualities of the depicted places, a process that regards also an imaginative map-making.14 Literature and map-making are therefore intertwined to express different qualities of place. The writers of the published narratives gave me the opportunity to follow them in their journey through their recollections. At the same time, these narratives had the validity of testimony, as they were published under the writers’ names and described past events connected to real places and people. Communication with some of them, like Christopher Merrill and Scott Cairns, was very helpful in the progress of my research, as it helped me to deeper understand their accounts. Another question that this study seeks to answer relates to the role of experiential spatiality in the Eastern Orthodox culture as experienced on the peninsula, adding to the relevant publications of artistic and architectural history and theory.15 A number of scholars investigate the way in which different liturgical elements (chanting, church iconography, incense) were incorporated into meaningful rituals in the built context of the Byzantine Church, basing their arguments on neo-Platonic theories of religious aesthetics. This approach has recently been extended to include in its

 David, Cooper, ‘Critical Literary Cartography: Text, Maps and a Coleridge Notebook’, in Les Roberts (ed.), Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 31; Robert Tally, Spatialities (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 85: ‘In reading, the spirit of place emerges from the writer’s literary cartography which the reader uses to give imaginative form to the actual world’. 15  Publications on Eastern Christian liturgical culture mainly focus on the symbolism of different elements (chanting, church, iconography). See, for example, the following pieces: P.A. Michelis, Aesthetic Examination of Byzantine Art (Athens, 1978); Leonid Ouspemsky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of the Icon (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999); Linda Safran (ed.), Heaven on Earth: Art and the Church in Byzantium (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1997); Fabio Barry, ‘Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, The Art Bulletin, 89/4, pp. 627–656; Svetlana Popovič, ‘Dividing the Indivisible: The Monastery Space – Secular and Sacred’, Zbornik Radova Vizantolośkog Instituta, 44 (2007), pp. 47–65; Svetlana Popovič, ‘The “Trapeza” in Cenobitic Monasteries: Architectural and Spiritual Contexts’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 52 (1998), pp. 281–303. 14

8 

C. Kakalis

theoretical framework phenomenological and hermeneutical ideas.16 As traces of these processes are still found in contemporary religious practice, this book explores the possibility of a new approach to Eastern Christian monastic space, placing emphasis on the development of hesychast practice. Arguing that topography is something more than what is represented in conventional modern maps, the book also illustrates its points through ‘experiential mappings’ of different movements and aural qualities (ritual sound, silence, ritual movements). These are based on observation, actual experience of the topography, and interviews with monks and visitors, rather than on conventional and abstract data. This approach harmonises with the theoretical framework of the study based on the phenomenological understanding of place, as this was expressed in phenomenological interpretations of experiential spatiality by human geographers and philosophers such as David Seamon, Edward S. Casey and Jeff Malpas.17 The aim of this approach is to depict the way different qualities of the Athonite topography (aural and tangible) are performed and perceived by the i­ndividuals, emphasising the significance of silence and communal ritual in these processes of inhabitation.  For example, basing her argument on the Platonic notion of Chora, the art historian Nicoletta Isar introduces the idea of a liturgical choreography, fulfilled through the meaningful combination of the rituals and the space of the church. Moreover, the art historian Bissera Pentcheva extended the notion of the Byzantine liturgical choreography to include also the icons, the incense and the chanting. Similarly, in his essay ‘Space, Time, Liturgy’, Professor Andrew Louth also tries to link the idea of a liturgical space to the notion of Chora and the thought of St Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor. On these approaches, see: Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (eds), Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008); Alexei Lidov, Hierotopy: Spatial Icons and Image-paradigms in Byzantine Culture (Moscow, 2010); Nicoletta Isar, ‘Chora: Tracing the Presence’, Review of European Studies, 1/1 (June 2009), pp. 39–55; Nicoletta Isar, ‘Chorography – A Space for Choreographic Inscription’, Bulletin of the Transylvania University of Brasov, 2/51, pp.  263–268; Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2008). See also Alexei Lidov, ‘Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Space as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History’, in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Hierotopy: Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Progress-tradition, 2006), pp. 33–58. 17  David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (eds), Dwelling, Place and Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, first edition in English 1985); Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape, Painting, Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2006). In these representations the silent-scapes of a coenobitic monastery and a footpath are also included. A silent-­ scape regards the negative condition of a soundscape, highlighting the important role of silence in the Athonite aural environment. 16

2 The Mountain

Walking up to the peak for the first time, I was expecting to reach my destination quickly. Gradually I started to realise that I was not alone. Tens of other people were also walking up to the peak for the pilgrimage. People of different nationalities, who were going to spend the night there. Alone and yet with them, I kept walking while tiredness overcame my body, anticipating the Transfiguration and overcome by thoughts and emotions. They combined to a single feeling when I reached the Shelter of the Mother of God: an alertness for the final part of the ascent. And then the awe of the peak, the solemn tiredness of the all-night vigils, the Transfiguration of the Holy Communion. The return was quicker and full of joy. In the morning, in a cell at Kerasia, sitting in the stall during the morning Liturgy I was recalling the intensity of the previous day’s pilgrimage, while already looking forward to the next year’s.1

Silence and communal ritual play an important role in the experience of the southern part of Mount Athos. The focus in this chapter is on the so-called ‘desert’ of the peninsula, its mountainous end (the area between Karmelion Mountain and the skete of Hagia Anna) that rises to a peak of 2033 metres. There, a number of ascetics have chosen to live either as cave/hermitage dwellers or as wandering ascetics practising hesychasm.  Pilgrim C. at the celebration of the Transfiguration. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2015.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_2

9

10 

C. Kakalis

The mountain is a natural magnet for Athonites’ attention. Worship practices include an annual pilgrimage to the summit of the mountain on 6 August, the day dedicated to Christ’s Transfiguration. This feast commemorates the possibility of communication with the divine. The investigation of Athonite caves and hermitages as the smallest (natural or manmade) spaces for the hermits to practise silent prayer offers an insight into the unique religious character of the place.

2.1 The Mountain of Athos The soil or rocky surface of the ground is the boundary between the earth and the sky. Its high points, the mountains, sometimes acquire the role of threshold with the divine. Being relatively close to the sky, mountain peaks have been connected in different cultures with the idea of encountering the sacred, and enabling the individual’s feeling for the aura of the gods. The mountain of Athos plays an important role in the life of the peninsula as symbolically connected to the event of the Transfiguration and the possibility of theosis. A chapel built at the summit of the mountain is dedicated to the Transfiguration, and attracts a great number of monks and pilgrims during its annual celebration. Moreover, Athos is a constant point of reference for the monks, as a result of its symbolism and as a key feature of the topography. At the same time, its barren, mountainous relief provides an ideal environment for hermits and wandering ascetics to practice hesychasm. This dimension contributes to the wider understanding of mountains as sacred places, as their natural form has long been associated with an otherworldly aura. The physical effort required to reach the peak of the mountain, along with the changes in atmosphere and vision experienced at increasing altitude, leads to a feeling of distance from the everyday world, again associated with communication with the divine. According to Mircea Eliade, a mountain can be a sacred place, a ‘centre’, an axis mundi, ‘where hierophanies and theophanies can occur and where there exists the possibility of breaking through from the level of

2  The Mountain 

11

earth to the level of heaven’.2 The sacred associations of mountains were evident even during prehistoric times.3 On the one hand, they were considered as steps toward otherworldly space, and on the other they were seen as natural habitats of the Όρειοι Θεοί (the gods of the mountains).4 For example, it is said that Zeus had an altar on the highest peak of Mount Helikon, close to a spring dedicated to Poseidon. On the northern slope of the same mountain there was a sanctuary in honour of the Muses, while the Nymphs were worshipped in a cave nearby.5 Usually, the citizens of a city conducted processions towards these sanctuaries on specific days of the year, reaffirming the sacredness of the mountain—as in the case of Mount Lukaion, to which citizens of Megalopolis would walk once a year for a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Apollo.6 Mountains play an important role in the sacred landscape of the Scriptures. According to the theologian Alexander Golitzin, the meaning of the notion of the ‘place of God’ (Τόπος Θεού—Topos Theou) in the Old and New Testaments regards the dynamic synthesis of ‘God, his presence and his house, the link with heaven in the “gate” or “door” thus the note of the axis mundi, joining heaven and earth and the angels, together with  – at least by implication their liturgy’.7 It was from the peak of Mount Chorev (Mount Sinai) that Moses received the Ten  Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, first edition 1952), the chapter ‘Symbolism of the “Center”’, pp. 27–56. See also: Frank J. Korom, ‘Of Navels and Mountains: A Further Inquiry into the History of an Idea’, Asian Folklore Studies, 51/1 (1992), pp. 103–125, esp. 106–108 (paragraph: ‘Eliade’s concept of the “centre” as axis mundi’); Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 373. 3  Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, first edition in German 1977), pp.  26–28. See also: Barbara A.  Weightman, ‘Sacred Landscape and the Phenomenon of Light’, Geographical Review, 86/1 (January 1996), pp. 61–63, Paragraph: Fire: The writer argues about the important role that fire plays in different religious traditions, including the Christian one. 4  Merle K. Langdon, ‘Mountains in Greek Religion’, The Classical World, 93/5, ‘The Organization of Space in Antiquity’ (May–June, 2000), pp. 466–467. 5  Ibid., p. 464. 6  Ibid., p. 468. 7  Alexander Golitzin, ‘Topos Theou: The Monastic Elder as Theologian and as Theology. An Appreciation of Archimandrite Aimilianos’, in Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake (eds), Mount Athos, the Sacred Bridge: The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, first edition 2005), p. 205. 2

12 

C. Kakalis

Commandments and the Prophet Elijah saw God in the Old Testament. In particular, during their journey through the desert, the Israelites decided to stop for a while at the foot of Mount Chorev. Moses then ascended to the peak of the mountain to communicate with God, where he heard His voice telling him to return and inform the Israelites. Three days after his return to the desert, lightning and thunder appeared suddenly over the mountain, while the sound of trumpets was heard, inviting Moses again to the peak, which was obscured by a cloud for six days. Moses finally reached the top alone, after a second ascent in which God asked him to return again and tell the people not to follow, as the place was holy because of a divine presence. After forty days of praying there, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, written by his finger on two stone tablets. (Exodus 19–20:21). Moreover, seeking divine guidance and shelter to protect himself from the Emperor Achaav and his wife Iezavel, the Prophet Elijah was staying in a cave on the same mountain when he was asked to go to the top and ‘stand […] before the Lord’ (1 Kings 19:11–12). At the same time, a strong wind was blowing, followed by an earthquake and a fire. At some point, ‘a still small voice’ was heard, making Elijah exit the cave and listen to God asking him about the purpose of his presence there and advising him to return to the world as a prophet (1 Kings 19: 12–15). Mountains in the Scriptures are therefore points of the relief where a divine aura can be transmitted: the sound of trumpets, the cloud around the peak, rain, earthquake and especially the voice of God. Vision, hearing and touch (the stone tablets) are interconnected with the ascent of the scriptural figures to the peak of the mountains, and their prayerful pauses there (forty days in the case of Moses). The key stages of these journeys involve the paradoxical encounter with God, happening at the peak of a mountain through a multi-sensory aural code that becomes an important sacred communicative atmosphere. Traces of this atmosphere are also carried back, as they return transformed ready to transmit a divine message to the people left behind. Another characteristic case is the Mount of Olives. A necropolis from biblical times, it is an important place in the biblical landscape, containing the tombs of the prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. The sacred character of this mountain is underlined in the Old Testament, as Solomon built altars for the gods there. Moreover, according to Zechariah,

2  The Mountain 

13

God was going to stand on the Mount of Olives and the mountain would split in two, with one half shifting north and one half shifting south (Zechariah 14:4). The Mount of Olives also plays a key role in the New Testament as the place where Jesus taught his disciples. Adding to this, the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ spent his last night before the betrayal silently praying to God, is situated at the foot of the Mount. Finally, the most important scriptural event held at a mountain is Christ’s Transfiguration on the peak of Mount Tabor, which stands as a prefiguration of a paradigmatic Christian life-path, the peak experiences of which are considered to be the paradoxical communication with God. In particular, the New Testament mentions that Jesus asked the apostles Peter (Πέτρος), John (Ιωάννης) and James (Ιάκωβος) to follow Him towards the peak of a mountain. Arriving there, they witnessed Christ’s Transfiguration. As he was praying, ‘his face was illuminated resembling the sun and his clothes became white as the light’, thereby disclosing part of his holiness to his disciples. Moreover, he was flanked by the prophets Moses and Elijah. After a while, Peter suggested building three tents for Jesus and the prophets in order to stay there and eternally preserve the revealing event. Suddenly, they were thrown into shadow by a cloud and a voice was heard: ‘This is my beloved Son. He is the one you should listen to’. The cloud and the prophets disappeared and the disciples started going down the mountain, heeding Jesus’s commandment not to tell anyone about their experience until his resurrection (Mark 9:2–13). According to St Gregory Palamas, Christ’s Transfiguration paved the way for the possibility of theosis, a divine contemplation that is considered to be a pivotal moment of hesychast life and that usually involves the experience of the ‘uncreated light’.8 This is a white light that can be felt, according to him, on both the material and psychological levels.9 Thus, as we will see in the following chapters, these ideas are also conveyed through  Paul Daniel Payne, The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Greek Orthodox Thought: A Study of the Hesychast Basis of the Thought of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras, PhD thesis, Institute of Church–State Studies, Baylor University (2007), p. 140. 9  This non-dualistic approach of embodied experience is also connected to the writings of St John of the Ladder that distinguishes the body from the flesh (σαρξ—sarx). On St John Climacus, see: John Chryssavgis, John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004). 8

14 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 2.1  Christ’s Transfiguration. (Icon by Katherine Sanders, Twentieth Century)

the formation and experience of art and architecture—but also through the different qualities of the Athonite aural environment. For example, Byzantine icon painting is based on the event of the Transfiguration and on the way in which hidden religious meanings can be communicated through the painting and the veneration of an icon, adding to the dynamics of the walls on which frescoes are painted (Fig. 2.1). The Holy Mountain that characterises the peninsula is for the monks an axis mundi, a ‘central point’ that stands as a threshold between the sky

2  The Mountain 

15

and the earth, the seen and the unseen; it is an embodiment of the idea of the Transfiguration emphatically manifested through the small church dedicated to it at its top, and the rituals taking place during the day of its celebration. Therefore, whereas it is not part of the scriptural landscapes, it is connected to them through its spiritual associations with Christ’s Transfiguration and theosis. According to Father L. from Gregoriou monastery: Arriving at Mount Athos and deciding to live here for the rest of his life, the individual learns that the mountain plays an important role in his life, symbolising the transformative experience of transfiguration. Gradually the reference to the sacred dynamics of the mountain becomes part of his daily cycle and the ascent to its peak is always felt as a great blessing and worthy of being conducted.10

2.2 Ascending to the Peak of the Mountain These embodied dynamics of the mountain are mainly manifested today through the annual ascent of monks and pilgrims to the peak, the all-­ night services held in the chapel and the following descent on 6 August, when the event of the Transfiguration is celebrated. In particular, monks from different Athonite monastic structures, and pilgrims ascend the mountain on 5 August to prepare for and participate in the all-night vigils that are held in the chapel. Five different paths meet at the middle of the route, where all the participants gather and start ascending a steep narrow path that passes through the thick forest. The aim is to reach the recently restored Shelter of the Mother of God, a small complex of a communal guest room, a kitchen and a chapel dedicated to the Virgin (at a height of about 1600 metres). They have some rest and an informal meal there, conduct Vespers in the chapel and then continue the ascent to the peak in a processional way. Priests and deacons wearing their vestments are followed by the rest of the devotees carrying icons,

10

 Discussion during my field trip to Mount Athos in August 2012.

16 

C. Kakalis

candles or branches to be used during the service. Chanting, censing and reading are also part of the procession. At the peak, there is the small Church of the Transfiguration, which is still under construction. Construction started in 2012 to replace the previous building (completed in 1977), which was destroyed due to bad weather conditions.11 Outside the chapel there is a small courtyard and a well. The all-night vigils usually start with the Blessing of Holy Water at 20:30, and finish around 06:00 the next morning. The devotees then go back to the Shelter of the Mother of God, where the celebration ends with a meal. Besides this feast the monks conduct pilgrimages to the shelter, combining the ascent and descent with their prayer. This yearly pilgrimage has a clear liturgical character with relatively predefined movements which contrast with the freer movement usually found along the footpaths of Mount Athos. The participants, mostly monks and pilgrims, aim at a possible transformation through the interaction with the different stages of this pilgrimage, the shared rituals and silent prayer. Therefore, the interaction with the rough topography is followed by the ritual procession, which changes the experience by inscribing a new aural line in the silence-scape of the mountain (chanting, reading, censing). The individual body’s tiredness is combined with the hesychast qualities of the topography into an initiation process. The silent desert is inhabited by individuals walking, who either go up to the shelter or follow the litany to the summit. When one person starts walking up, he feels that it will be an experience of solitude and isolation. However, while walking up to Panaghia he keeps meeting other people, and the path becomes a field of pilgrimage walking that is replaced by a ritual walking to the peak after Vespers.12 Standing on the summit of Athos, monks and pilgrims feel the possibility of being exposed to an interaction with the divine. This is also connected to the cooler atmosphere, the  Little is known about the history of the chapel and the establishment of the annual pilgrimage to the peak. The previous one was built in 1895 and it is almost certain that it replaced a previous one, as a chapel is even depicted in Pierre Belon’s 1588 map of Mount Athos and later depictions of the peninsula. On this map, see: Veronica Della Dora, ‘Pre-Limnaean Taxonomies, Edenic Visions and the Cosmographic Dream: Pierre Belon’s mapping of Mount Athos’, in The Griffon 8 (special issue: ‘Mapping the Mediterranean, 2006), pp. 47–61. 12  From my discussions with the visitors walking up to the peak on 18 August 2015. 11

2  The Mountain 

17

Fig. 2.2  Mapping of the Mountain’s Silence-Scape (left) and The Ascent towards its peak (right)

misty environment and the changing/panoptical views of the horizon from above. It is the experience of the distance between the low land and the peak that narrates the possible communication with divine qualities through the invocation of a feeling of awe and the sublime (Fig. 2.2).13 The possibility for visitors to participate in the procession underlines the dynamic opening of communal rituals to the interpretation of outsiders. This is described in travel accounts, such as the ones by Vasileios Stergioulis and Dimitris Kyrou, who participated in the relevant rituals more than once during the past twenty years, illuminating communal ritual as a shared/attuned reading of the natural landscape.14 Thus, the silence of the untouched natural environment approaching the shelter always created for Kyrou a mystical atmosphere in which the walker feels that he is connected to nature. This made him pray. The route begins with a steep uphill path that at some points resembles a staircase. This is the crucial part of the ascent. If the walker does not regret it and return, he then gets used to it and goes on. […] The vegetation is thick in the area. The way is conducted in the silence of the forest, in the wild and shadowy  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2015.  Vasileios Stergioulis, All-night Vigils at the Peak of Mount Athos (Larisa, 2005); Dimitris Kyrou, Ascending Towards the Peak of Mount Athos (Poligiros: Prefecture of Chalkidiki, 2001). 13 14

18 

C. Kakalis

vegetation, under the pine trees and through the beech and chestnut trees, the bushes and the wild trees that rapidly grow in a messy way, blocking the route on the wet and rough terrain …15

Moreover, processional walking of 150 to 200 people along an alpine landscape with the few trees gradually disappearing, leaving the mountainous environment absolutely bare, has the power, for Kyrou, to re-­ generate the rigid environment. This last part of the ascent has intense embodied religious qualities that also made him pray, interacting with the communal ritual sounds.16 Finally, descending to reach the Shelter of the Mother of God on 6 August, Kyrou always felt changed, as the goal of his pilgrimage had been fulfilled. Interaction with the natural environment contributed to his prayer, which followed him even during the all-­ night vigils. The pivotal moment of the pilgrimage for him has always been the participation in the Holy Communion, directly connected to a sense of communitas and the sharing of communal (religious) meanings. In accounts such as Kyrou’s, therefore, we find an interesting mapping of how the natural landscape of Mount Athos is inhabited by the monks and visitors, confirming its pilgrimage character in the life of the peninsula. The repetition of this experience re-affirms the sacredness of the highest point of the landscape, narrating its meaning as threshold both for the insiders and the outsiders. Most of the participants believe that this pilgrimage is a great blessing, attributing to the landscape the sacred dynamics of the Transfiguration: ‘It is the third time I am climbing up and I need to keep focused and dedicated to what is happening here. I walk and I say the Jesus Prayer rhythmically. Isn’t it like we are all becoming one body as we gradually go up for the all-night vigils?’17 The service is the main phase of the pilgrimage, which reaches its peak at the Holy Communion. The all-night vigils are not limited to inside the four walls of the small church. The surrounding landscape takes on worshipping qualities; the pilgrims standing outside are participating in the liturgy even if they cannot hear or watch the  Dimitris Kirou, pp. 12–13.  Ibid., p. 22. 17  Pilgrim N. at the celebration of the Transfiguration. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2015. 15 16

2  The Mountain 

19

event happening inside. This experience of worshipping in the landscape is further enhanced by the litany. The rocky landscape opens an arena for pilgrims walking, praying and waiting to receive the Holy Communion. Either sleeping, because of bodily tiredness, or carefully following the Liturgy in the cold night, they all eventually stand in the queue to receive the Holy Gifts and fulfil the aim of their pilgrimage. The architecture of the shelter and the church is organically combined with the natural landscape through the rituals testifying to the worshipful aspects of the Athonite desert. Climbing a mountain, therefore, involves arduous walking along the ‘difficult line’ of the path that leads to the peak. It is an almost ‘vertical walk’, to use Rebecca Solnit’s term, that requires physical strength combined with hope and anticipation in order to reach the destination.18 As Anja Karina-Nydal suggests, the dynamics of mountaineering are connected to the ‘search for the “difficult” line and the quest to master it’.19 This ‘line’ for Karina-Nydal ‘is simultaneously that space within which the activity of climbing takes place, as well as that space which climbers represent graphically through drawings and photographs’.20 Anticipation and intentionality are merged with these aspects of concrete experience to suggest the pilgrimage qualities of the mountainous Athonite landscape. The climbing up to the Shelter of the Mother of God and the ritual climbing to the peak and the Chapel of the Transfiguration assume the sacred connotations of the mountain, transforming the ‘difficult line’ to the peak into an arena of religious worship.

2.3 The Desert, the Cave and the Hermitage Part of the mountainous environment of the Athonite peninsula, caves play an important role in the topography, as hesychast life in them has been one of the forms of monastic practice on Athos for more than a  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 133.  Anja-Karina Nydal, “A difficult Line: The Aesthetics of Mountain Climbing 1871-Present”, in Christos Kakalis and Emily Goetsch, Mountains, Mobilities and Movement, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 156. 20  Ibid, p. 157. 18 19

20 

C. Kakalis

1000 years. They are the pores of a barren, mountainous relief, whose dynamics attracted ascetics possibly as early as the seventh century, functioning as an ‘anti-landscape’ that, according to Veronica della Dora, embodied qualities of negative (or apophatic) theology. It is the absolute isolation and the difficult living conditions therein that enhance the need of the hermits to alienate themselves from the worldly environment:21 Caves have served as privileged physical and metaphorical settings for both mapping and enacting apophatic doctrines via negativa. Indeed, these spaces are defined for what they are not rather than for what they are. […] Caves can be thus considered as metaphorical spaces in which vision is partly interrupted; as pauses in the physical and spiritual landscape; as silences. […] They also provided hermits with both natural shelters and privileged settings for their ascetic struggle to attain theosis through kenosis. They functioned as natural voids in which holy men who had renounced the world could in turn become empty vessels to be filled with divine grace.22

In this sense, the search for a hermitage in the mountainous environment may be seen as related to the Christian theme of ‘desert’. The theologian James Goehring argues that this kind of life is included in the Christian ‘myth of the desert’, as the ascetic struggles of the desert saints testified to the possibility of fulfilling the biblical commandments. The desert landscape, being part of the biographies of canonical saints, stands as an ideal life-path towards completion.23 According to Zygmunt Bauman, choosing to live in a deserted place is for the Christian hermit an attempt to abandon the mundane world, going to a ‘land that is not sliced into places, and for that reason it is the land of self-creation’. In this otherworldly environment, the individual has the opportunity to work

 Veronica della Dora, ‘Anti-landscapes: Caves and Apophasis in the Christian East’, Environment and Planning D: Place and Society (2011), pp. 761–779. 22  Ibid., p. 764. 23  James Goehring, ‘The Dark Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of Desert’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33/3 (2003), pp. 437–451. 21

2  The Mountain 

21

on their self-redirection towards the divine.24 The monk Theoklitos from the Dionysiou monastery describes these special spatial qualities and their relationship to the Orthodox ascetic mentality: A crack or a protrusion of the rock is enough to constitute an ideal site for the hermit’s settlement, resembling aeries. Both hermitages and asceticism are “formed” according to the spirit of a rough architecture. Nobody should search for leisure in them. […] the mentality of the hermits […] does not follow a ­logical way of thinking. They prefer climbing to walking on flat ground. They are not adventurous but believe that danger is a vehicle of ethical improvement.25

The hierophanic qualities of caves are part of an ancient living tradition. Burkert argues that caves have been related to the experience of the sacred since the prehistoric era. Archaeological findings lead to the argument that, during that period, caves were connected to the worship of the gods through sacrifices (the caves of Arkalochori and Psychro) and other rituals (the dedication of ‘symbols of power’). Their formation even included ‘altar-like elevations’ (the caves of Ideaon and Eileithyia), and libation tables.26 The sacred dynamics of caves are also found in the landscape of the Old and New Testaments. As we have seen, it was in a cave on Mount Chorev that the Prophet Elijah found shelter to protect himself from the Emperor Achaav and his wife Iezavel. And it was from this mountain’s peak (from the same point at which Moses received the Ten Commandments) that he saw God, experiencing a combination of the protection of the rough and solitary environment with communion with God. Moreover, Christ was born in a cave at Bethlehem, combining his

 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity’ in Stewart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996), pp. 20–21. See also: Kip Redick, ‘Wilderness as Axis Mundi: Spiritual Journeys on the Appalachian Trail’, Symbolic Landscapes, 1 (2009), pp. 65–90. The writer presents in a detailed way how the wilderness of the desert has an axis mundi character in the Old and New Testaments, and also in the period of the first Christian hermits (Desert Fathers). 25  Theoklitos monk of Dionysiou Monastery, Saint Gregory Palamas – His Life and Theology, (Mount Athos), p. 134. 26  Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 24–26. 24

22 

C. Kakalis

Incarnation with an ideal ascetic approach to human life.27 Hence, these sacred associations with the mountainous environment are included in the framework of what Kaia Lehari calls the ‘mythopoetical meaning’ of stone, seen as a metaphor of symbolic, mythical and ritual ideas due to its unchangeable physical qualities.28 In the case of Athos, caves are folds in the skin between the earth and the sky, providing the ascetic with a sense of solitude and partial protection from the weather with their organic form. Being part of the living organism of this natural environment, caves are connected with notions of the unbuilt; indestructible, eternal. ‘Primitively eccentric’, these dwellings of the hermits are, for the theorist Giannis Chatzinis, related to a non-rational way of thinking, according to which the individual/hermit builds his relationship to God.29 It is the absolute isolation and the difficult living conditions that enhance their need to alienate themselves from the worldly environment through silence, solitude and work on the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. Caves become for the hermits a kind of physical–spiritual ‘womb’ in which they live, seeking rebirth and psychosomatic transformation through ascesis. Monks who wanted to experience this completely secluded life went to Athos and adjusted their spiritual demands to the existing landscape. They used cavities in the mountain that were most easily accessible on foot, through the minimum of passages. During the Late Byzantine era, asceteria were dispersed all over the Athos peninsula. Nowadays, still-­ active hermitages are to be found mainly in the Athonite desert. We can define two types of caves/hermitages. The first one is quite elaborate and is the result of a hermit’s own building work. These  See: George H.  Williams, Wilderness and Paradise: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), pp. 17, 35 and 37. 28  Kaia Lehari, ‘Mythopoetics of Stone’, in A-T Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, CIV (2009), p. 401. See also: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual Within Life and Culture, translated by Willart R.  Trask (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1961), pp.  155–256 and Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, edited by Diane Apostolos – Cappadona, (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 107. 29  Giannis Chatzinis, ‘The Secret of Mount Athos’, Nea Estia  – Mount Athos (Christmas 1963), pp. 132–133. 27

2  The Mountain 

23

dwellings have a small chapel, one or two rooms, and sometimes also ancillary spaces. The second type stems from minimal alteration of the spaces inside a cave or a smooth folding of the relief. These constitute the smallest inhabitable spaces provided by nature, and carry intense dynamics of solitude, supporting hesychast practice, which is enhanced by the minimisation of built additions and boundaries, to reduce concerns of profanity. Therefore, the extension of the natural space of a cave for the protection of the hermit from harsh weather conditions, accommodating his needs or housing the disciples that gather around him does not always necessitate a new structure. It falls between the natural and the artificial when a dry wall or a rectangular sheet made of wood closes the opening of a cave. Retaining a quasi-natural environment becomes, thus, part of hesychast practice, contributing to the hermit’s progress in communicating with God through silent prayer. Moreover, the practice of wandering also plays an important role in understanding the Athonite desert. In this sense, some ascetics inhabit a cave or a hermitage and abandon it when their silence is disturbed. Wandering and the need for solitude returns these places to become part of the landscape again, either through their total destruction or the smooth incorporation of their ruins into the surrounding context. Hence, even small huts built in the wild landscape as a shelter for one or two ascetics are not considered to be permanent constructions. Their boundaries are always in a process of possible annulment and smooth re-­ integration into the natural landscape. The combination of solitary–silent life and ascetic wandering influences the way the landscape is experienced by the monks, either through its inhabitation or through the structuring of the smallest bounded spaces to accommodate their needs. Difficult to approach and move within, hidden by the thick vegetation or always exposed to the weather conditions, the rocky desert embodies the ideas of the ephemeral, sacrifice and the unfamiliar. Most of the time, a hermitage is almost organically integrated into the environment. The intention of the hermits is to live in an isolated, rough terrain, and sometimes the transformation of a cave is the beginning of such a monastic place. The structural evolution of the complex is therefore related to the development of the ascetic life within it.

24 

C. Kakalis

The inaccessible area of Karoulia is where the two types of hermitages are mainly found; the area contains a number of separate hermitages. Even its name reveals the hard ascetic way of life, meaning ‘the place of the pulleys’, which references the old way of accessing these hermitages, as hermits had to haul themselves up by ropes or chains that passed over makeshift pulleys. The harshness of the environment and the intention of the ascetics to practise hesychasm did not enable the creation of a clear network of movement in the area—it was difficult for the paths to be opened and preserved. For this reason, the ascetics had to struggle there, uninterrupted by outsiders. Now the different caves and small huts are connected by a narrow mule track, hard to walk along and dangerous because of its proximity to a steep cliff. Ladders and pulleys are still used to access the hermitages, forming extensions of the mule track. Silence plays an important role in this part of the peninsula. Ascending the steep slope to this area, one finds oneself in a mountainous rocky context whose harshness, combined with thick vegetation in places, intensifies the sense of isolation. The only sounds are those of the sea, the wind and the birds. It is very rare to see the hermits, as they usually avoid interaction with other people. The difficulty of approach to these hermitages enhances this sense of solitude and silence through the creation of a clear boundary between the insider and the outsider. Absence of noise and visibility is experienced both by the Athonites and the visitors, forming an in-between zone in which they co-exist. On the one hand, the ascetic practises silent prayer in the seclusion of his cave/hermitage. On the other, the outsider interacts with this uncanny environment, passing through an unfamiliar landscape that, while not soundless, has a character of otherworldly isolation. Discontinuities in the route towards a hermitage (when a ladder replaces part of a path, or fallen rocks obstruct the way) also make the outsider experience feelings of disorientation and unfamiliarity. Exploring the desert, the visitor is always aware and wondering what is going to happen next. Wishing to hear a familiar noise or acclimatise to aspects of the unfamiliar environment, he reads the landscape through a silent conversation with its constituents. The pilgrim Christopher Merrill describes this in his book:

2  The Mountain 

25

Without a map to consult, I set off on what I later learned was the high trail across the desert, the steep, sparsely inhabited southern slope of the mountain, sometimes following a black plastic pipe that carried water from a spring. But there were no spigots on the pipe. Even in the shade the air was stifling. The question of right relation to the earth is troubling for Christians, who have a long history of interpreting God’s command to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28) in literal terms. […] The vertical desert of Athos was a tonic to a culture predicated on materialism. […] In the heat I realized how far I had strayed from my deepest self, having forgotten what was once an article of faith: the intimate connection between the conservation of the earth and a good marriage – how each depends upon recognizing limits. […] My stiff neck and broken marriage, my hiatus from poetry and lost connection to the earth: they were of a piece.30

Similarly, the pilgrim A.I.B., who went to Mount Athos in the 1970s, began to walk towards the desert just after Vespers to find the hermitage of a monk whom he wanted to meet in order to benefit from his spirituality. The roughness of the landscape at sunset created an atmosphere of mystery conducive to prayer; the terrain dotted with primitive hermitages contributed to a sacred context for the writer. Movement through this landscape enhanced his way to a final destination, what he calls ‘Mount Tabor’ or the ‘Mountain of his life’s Transfiguration’, characterisations related to the apocalyptic experiences that followed. Climbing the mountain was for A.I.B a source of prayer and a preparation for the meeting with the ascetic during which this pilgrimage reached its climax. Difficult to approach, a cave at Athos became the place where an outsider (pilgrim) and an ascetic met. It was common ground, the roughness of which played a vital role in the experience for both of them. For A.I.B. it was the sacred, uncanny environment which helped him to pray more intensively, and for the monk it was the ideal place to practise hesychasm.31 The combination of a solitary way of life and a more communal one in the wider sphere of the Athonite desert becomes clear in the case of the  Christopher Merrill, Things of The Hidden God: Journeys to the Holy Mountain, (New York: Random House Inc., 2005), p. 140. 31  A.I.B. Μία βραδυά στην Έρημο του Αγίου Όρους/ A Night at the Desert of the Holy Mountain (Thessaloniki: Εκδόσεις Ορθόδοξη Κυψέλη). 30

26 

C. Kakalis

monk Joseph the Hesychast (1898–1959), an ascetic of the desert who gradually attracted a number of disciples around him, as this was described in his biography, written by a disciple. Monk Joseph always tried to stay in isolated places in which, according to the tradition, great hermits had lived before. He thus spent his first summer on Athos chasing around the peninsula and practising hesychasm in difficult living conditions, around the Shelter of the Mother of God at the foot of Mount Athos. During the period of these first quests, he participated in the all-night vigils of 6 August at the Chapel of the Transfiguration on the mountain peak, where he met the monk Arsenios, with whom he decided to start a common ascetic life. They settled in a hut at Katounakia, an area close to Karoulia, as disciples of an elder monk called Ephraim. According to Joseph the Hesychast’s biographer and disciple, Monk Joseph from Vatopaidi, their basic concern was to work in silence. For this, Joseph the Hesychast ‘created at the end of their realm and just under a sloping rock, a kind of an artificial cave using pieces of wood’.32 He would spend his nights there, praying. After this, he had a short rest in his cell and then participated in the common programme. Unfortunately, the proximity to other huts disturbed the silence essential for their spiritual work. For this reason, they decided to go to a more isolated place, the Desert of St Basil. They reached this barren realm carrying only their clothes and some of their books. As there were no vacant huts during that period, they had to build their own. After the death of their elder, they decided to spend the summer wandering from place to place, practising hesychasm in famous ascetic sites. They spent the winter in their hut. During the Easter period, they used to ascend towards the peak of the Holy Mountain. They stayed there for some days, praying in the Chapel of the Mother of God. A small copper bowl helped them to boil the snow and to cook some herbs or roots. As the wind at 1600 metres is strong, they had to find ‘safe’ places to spend their nights, such as small gorges or caves. In order not to fall asleep during prayer, they used to

 Elder Joseph from Vatopaidi, Ο Γέροντας Ιωσήφ ο Ησυχαστής / Elder Joseph the Hesychast (Mount Athos: The Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 2008, first edition in Greek 1983), p. 52. 32

2  The Mountain 

27

walk barefoot on the snow.33 They moved from place to place, praying. According to the biographer, wandering helped them feel like visitors, or strangers (xenoi) in relation to their environment. Through their wanderings and the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, they tried to find a way to depart from their mundane sphere and move towards God. Joseph and Arsenios stopped this practice when they were too old to walk long distances. Around the same time, they built a small chapel in their hut in honour of St John the Baptist, which served their liturgical needs. Their spirituality attracted a lot of monks and pilgrims, causing them to search for a cave in the skete of the Small St Anne. The place proved to be ‘appropriate, calm, remote and hidden from the people’.34 Clearly demarcating the field of their ascetic practice, the wall thus played an important role in the protection of their solitude. The entrance set in it was related to their everyday programme, connected to the most important temporal boundary of the day. They had this door open until midday, showing that they were doing manual work and receiving guests. From midday onwards the door was closed, allowing the ascetics to practise hesychasm. Later, they built a small chapel, transforming the interior of a cave. Its dedication to St John the Baptist confirmed the continuity of their common ascetic life. Finally, they built a big hut that was divided into three small cells (1.8 m × 1.5 m). It was set in the edge of the cliff, allowing part of the cave to become a storehouse. These cells were inhabited by the elder, Father Arsenios and the priest who went to conduct the Liturgy (Fig. 2.3).35 According to the biographer and disciple of Father Joseph, the severity of this ascetic way of life was a result of the dynamic interaction between the elder and the distinct natural environment. This rough place permitted Father Joseph to construct only the essential buildings to frame his hesychast life. The landscape and the people became part of the same ascetic topography as the modest constructions filled the voids left by the natural cavities in the mountain.

 Ibid., pp. 110–111.  Ibid., p. 116. 35  Ibid., p. 117. 33 34

28 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 2.3  Mappings of the movements of monks Joseph and Arsenios. (Drawings by the author)

2  The Mountain 

29

In this organic context, Joseph the Hesychast’s emphasis was on the programmed life and the observance of the typika. The canon, the services and the hours of manual work followed the division of the day into smaller parts dedicated to one of these activities. This scheme was also applied to their life in a hut in New Skete.36 Intensifying the practice of xeniteia and homelessness, the small group moved there due to a further disturbance of their silence. It was a complex of small huts for one or two monks. They were gathered around the hut of the elder and the small chapel that they had constructed in honour of St. John the Baptist. Everything was again formed to serve ‘the application of the old […] programme and type of life, in order their ascetic experience not to be disturbed by the change of place’.37 Stories such as the one of Joseph the Hesychast create a context of religious narratives in which wandering asceticism is a unique and difficult hesychast practice. Τhe wanderer is a silent moving body-subject that is only temporarily attached to a place. Athonite monks claim that there are very few wandering ascetics today on the peninsula, and those that remain mainly live in the deserted parts of Karoulia and Kerasia.38 During my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to interact with one of them, a member of a group of wanderers called kabites. He was a Romanian novice who spent his time on Athos silently moving from place to place. A silent figure, dressed in black and with his head bowed, he arrived at Gregoriou monastery on the eve of the celebration of the Death of the Virgin Mary. He never used any means of transportation, but only walked on the peninsula repeating the Jesus Prayer. He slept on benches in the courtyard or in the exo-narthex of the church. During the day he could be found hidden in a corner holding his prayer rope (komposch oini). He participated in meals, but did not enter the church during the rituals. The monks knew him, and he was allowed to silently inhabit the shared spaces of the monastery, questioning with his moving presence the stability and meaning of any spatial boundaries.  Built near the sea in 1757, the New Skete belongs to St Paul monastery and consists of thirty-­ seven cells and huts. 37  Ibid., p. 151. 38  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2012. 36

30 

C. Kakalis

In crossing boundaries, the wanderer is also a silent, moving body-­ subject that is only temporarily attached to a place and mainly inhabits the network of movement on the peninsula—the pathways and few dirt roads. It needs to be underlined here that technological development has affected the more deserted areas of the peninsula. While at Karoulia, one can still find this extremely deserted topography and associated lifestyle, in other parts such as Vigla, which used to have a similar character, the conditions have now changed. Dirt roads make these areas easier to approach (even some of the hermits have their own cars) and change the scale of the landscape formations. The footpaths that lead to them have either been (partly) replaced or are suddenly interrupted by dirt roads— something that changes the landscape in an intense way and questions its hesychast dynamics.39 Mount Athos embodies important theological ideas, such as those of Transfiguration and hesychasm, realised through the annual pilgrimage to its peak and the rituals happening there from 5–6 August each year, but also the hermetic inhabitation of its caves and steep slopes. In its hesychast inhabitation, the silence of nature plays an important role as an atmospheric quality that contributes to the otherworldly, sacred dynamics of the landscape, and its function as an arena for self-reflection and existential quests. Hermits fill the cavities and the paths of the landscape with silent prayer, either through cave-dwelling or prayerful walking itineraries. Visitors interact with silence as bodily fatigue is combined with the natural sounds of the rough environment in a feeling of solitude and isolation that allows their journey to happen in the performative dynamics of the Athonite topography. A range of visitors and Athonites meet on 5 August while walking up to the summit, transforming the mountain into a common place of effort and worship. The construction of the chapel of the Transfiguration at its peak and the opening of the footpath towards it enable the performance of the annual communal ritual. This is a pilgrimage that includes intense initiatory qualities. Silence and communal ritual are in a dynamic discourse,  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2015.

39

2  The Mountain 

31

contributing to a meaningful atmosphere. The latter also communicates with the sacred associations of the mountains as the field of an atmospheric communication between humans and the divine, reaching its climax in the all-night vigils held at the peak. The path, therefore, is an intermediate zone along which the ritual is orchestrated to celebrate the paradoxical possibility of communication with the divine—a possibility that for the monks is also included in the specific procession. On the other hand, due to their organic formation and relationship to the mountain, the caves are also connected to the threshold associations of the former, and they can be characterised as archetypal natural inscriptions of the limits of the individual hesychast practice, which is also related to the alienating deserted environment of specific areas of the peninsula. In their silent-scape, silence is more intense than on the rest of the peninsula, becoming an important in-between zone, in which the insiders and the outsiders meet. The insiders avoid interaction with other people and a silent boundary is hence inscribed, which is also intensively received by the visitors through the uncanny character of their experience. The construction of small additions in the restricted area of a cave ‘slices’ the natural environment into ascetic places, the character of which is generally temporary. Whereas the cave is connected to the notions of eternity and ascetic (re)birth, the built constructions are closer to mundane concerns and the notion of decay. After the death of the hermit, their ruination often leads to their gradual disappearance. This is also enhanced by the wandering qualities of hesychast practice, in which the individual always re-defines himself in relation to the bounded world, aiming to distance himself from it.

3 The Footpaths

Previously I used to walk a lot. Walking along the footpaths was part of the pilgrim’s inner processes during the 1980s. We were almost looking forward to finding ourselves in them. Today, quite a few of them do not even exist. Nevertheless, I still walk a lot when on Athos. Walking is always part of my pilgrimage.1

The Athonite monastic structures, set in different locations on the promontory, create a network of religious places connected by footpaths and roads that are followed by monks and visitors. Physical tiredness, enhanced by recollection of the sacred associations of the landscape, influences the walker, giving a new meaning to his experience. This chapter examines these paths as organic zones that are created and preserved through the walking of the individual, always following the existing topography. Examining the character of a field-path, Martin Heidegger argues that it follows the rhythms of nature in a pre-modern way, harmonically combining them with the surrounding landscape and the movement of the  Pilgrim. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, September 2013.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_3

33

34 

C. Kakalis

individual, and leading to a sense of serenity and renunciation of the everyday modern world.2 This chapter, therefore, builds upon the difference between modern cartography and embodied topography. Whereas the former relates to abstract, two-dimensional representations of the Earth’s relief, the latter is about the corporeal mapping of the place through the movement of the individual. This embodied mapping is emphatically applied in the network of the Athonite footpaths that has been preserved since medieval times, contributing to the creation of a number of special qualities that enhance the walking experience of both the insiders and the outsiders.

3.1 Walking Through the Athonite Landscape Elements relating to this network of paths and the way it is experienced can be found in a number of narratives, such as travel testimonies, oral (blog) maps, abstract cartographic approaches, videos and photographs. Reading them, one realises that this network of paths is an inscription of individual and collective experiences, difficult to map in a modern cartographic way. As part of a special travel experience, it is shared through different means of communication, the combination of which tries to express the sense of real embodied experience. Information about the network of footpaths, therefore, is depicted in an interesting way in the mosaic of the recording media used to answer questions in blogs about Athonite routes. The information is not always valid, as everyone can add material from a journey there. In the  Martin Heidegger, “The Pathway”, translated by Thomas F. O’ Meara, in Thomas Sheehan (ed), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2010), pp. 69–72: 2

But the call of the pathway speaks only as long as there are men, born in its atmosphere, who can hear it. They are servants of their origin, not slaves of machinations. Man’s attempts to bring order to the world by his plans will remain futile as long as he is not ordered to the call of the pathway. (…) The pathway gathers in whatever has its Being around it; to all who pass this way it gives what is theirs. The same fields and meadows, ever changing but ever near, accompany the pathway through each season.(…) But, in one single harmony whose echo the pathway carries with its silently to and fro, everything is made serene.

3  The Footpaths 

35

framework of the preparation for his travel, a visitor tries to be informed about his walking-movement in Athos through these internet sources. Other users of the webpages suggest routes that recollect previous travel experiences. The latter are, usually, people who go there regularly, including in their journey the walking experience as a means of a more ‘authentic’ interaction with this place. Parts of the Athonite landscape are being mapped and ‘preserved’ on the internet, opening up a work-in-progress database of the area to a wide audience. The result is usually ‘oral’ mappings of specific parts of the peninsula through the combination of different narratives of experience. One of these answers concerned a combination of text and images. The user-answerer had videoed the route from Karakalou monastery to the kellion of Panagouda in a previous visit, and in order to describe it more clearly, he used stills from the video and integrated them into his text, creating the following representation (Fig. 3.1): This depiction of walking along a footpath carries elements of the actual experience. Texts and images are integrated into the linear narrative of the bridging of the distance between the two monastic structures. Panagouda was the shelter of the hesychast St Paisios, who died in 1994. Connected to his spirituality, the place has become a pilgrimage destination. Therefore, the path is the result of the pilgrims’ intentional walking to a sanctuary; its preservation is based on their desire to visit a sacred place. In this sense, the above depiction tries to transfer elements of this unique experience through the incorporation of the walker’s gaze in the narrative. Handmade signs, the kellion of Panagouda and paths’ intersections are depicted in the images, making clearer to the viewer and possible future visitor what he is going to see along the route. Conversations of this kind are also open to all the users of the web, redefining the distance between them and the peninsula in a virtual way, and at the same time, adding to the character of the boundary that divides the inside from the outside.3 It has to be underlined here that virtual experience is different from the actual one on which this book focuses. Whereas  This is directly connected to the notions of cyberspace and virtual place. On cyberspace and virtual place, see: Dr. Paul C.  Adams, ‘Cyberspace and Virtual Places’, Geographical Review, 87/2 (April 1997), pp. 155–171. 3

36 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 3.1  Blog depiction of the path towards Panagouda. (Source: http://www. agiooros.net)

3  The Footpaths 

37

embodied experience relates to the concrete happenings of place, in which we are engaged through all of our senses, the virtual is another field of interaction created by different media, such as television, telephone and the internet. Their difference is based on the ability of information to travel faster than people and objects due to technological advancements, creating a global network of communication. According to the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, virtual experiences are ‘telesthetic’, as focus is on the notion of distance between the individual and the object of perception, in our case, the Athonite peninsula.4 Therefore the ‘virtual geography’ of Mount Athos is something different from the actual embodied topography in which the individual maps the place through his movement. Telesthetic perception is a more abstract experience, transforming the landscape into a kind of spectacle, our interaction with which involves new ways of ‘reading’, different from traditional travel literature and twodimensional depictions. It is always the actual walking of an Athonite footpath that expresses its meaning in the most genuine way. Today, the network of roads on Mount Athos can be divided into two main categories. On the one hand there is the wider, primary network of dirt and asphalt roads, along which men and cars move. On the other hand, there is a secondary network of footpaths and cobblestone pavements that serve walkers. This secondary one also includes the passage to almost inaccessible hermitages, created by their inhabitants and used mainly by them and a few pilgrims. Thus, for example: The monastery [of Stavronikita] is today connected to the wider transverse road axis of Mount Athos, which connects Iviron Monastery to Karyes and Karyes to the port of Dafni, at the south coast, through a 7 kilometers dirt-road, which was constructed some years ago for car use. The monastery is also connected to the two neighbouring monasteries of Iviron and Pantocratoros through two narrow footpaths, along the north coast, and to Karyes through an old cobblestone pavement, damaged at some points because of the construction of the new road.5

 McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 25–38. 5  Nikolaos Charkiolakis, Tradition and Evolution of the Architecture of the Holy Monastery of Stavronikita—Παράδοση και Εξέλιξη στην Αρχιτεκτονική της Ιεράς Μονής Σταυρονικήτα (Mount Athos: Publications of the Holy Monastery of Stavronikita, 1999), p. 37 (my translation). 4

38 

C. Kakalis

Walking along these networks seems to be one of the most important means of movement in the peninsula, thus enabling experience of the landscape through a direct and dynamic process. Walking on Mount Athos is important for the experience of the outsiders. It is not connected to a predefined (and quite obligatory/processional) route as, for example, in the case of the Way to Santiago de Compostela.6 The outsider on Athos is free to visit any monastery and spend a night there. He is free to walk from one destination to another. One could say that this kind of freedom is also evident in the formation of these footpaths. They are the result of the repeated passage of humans, leaving their tracks and thus contributing to an always open and dynamic process of path making, preserving or extinction. At the same time, they respond to the existing topography, becoming part of its organic nature. Hence, the notion of distance changes in reciprocity with the real experience of walking. In this sense, monks and pilgrims measure distance according to the time spent in connecting two places by walking, underlining the importance of temporality in human experience rooted in movement. The body of the monk or the outsider is a kind of stylus, which spatially inscribes these zones through the passing of time, connecting them to motility. Real and possible movement along the paths results in an opening of space that is characterised by an eccentric character. Walking along the path is not connected to the interaction with a centre, but to the encounter with the possibility of an adventurous

 The Way to Santiago de Compostela is one of the most important pilgrimages of the Christian Catholic Church. It refers to the collection of different routes that cover Europe, having as their final destination the city of Santiago, whose cathedral is connected with the relics of St James. The most popular route during medieval times was the French Way that started from the Pyrenees and passed through La Rioja, Burgos, Lyon and Galicia. The pilgrims have to walk this long route, and this trial is their preparation for arrival at the cathedral. Along the routes a number of different places, either sacred or not, are connected to the pilgrimage process. Walking is very important for the participants (now not only pilgrims, but also tourists of different types). For the Way to Santiago de Compostela see: Sean Slavin, ‘Walking as Spiritual Practice: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela’, Body and Society, 9/3 (2003), pp. 1–18. 6

3  The Footpaths 

39

Fig. 3.2  A ‘map’/diagram depicting the different distances according to the time it takes to walk them (1957). It was included in a guide for the travellers to Mount Athos written by a monk there. It depicts the distances between Karyes (the capital of Mount Athos) and the twenty monasteries, both in kilometres and walking time. The distances between the monasteries are also included. (Source: G.  Alexander from Great Laura, Guide of Mount Athos, (Mount Athos, Greece), 1957)

wandering.7 Therefore, footpaths become quasi natural things and at the same time quasi manmade things (Fig. 3.2).8 Footpaths are mapped and unmapped at the same time because of their organic nature. Today, technological advances (GPS, satellite data) give the Society of the Friends of Mount Athos the opportunity to map the current line of a footpath (which changes over time because of the  Otto F. Bollnow, Human Space, translated by Christine Shuttleworth, edited by Joseph Kohlmaier (London: Hyphen Press, 2011, first edition in German 1969), pp. 94–105. 8  See also: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 107, 126–127. 7

40 

C. Kakalis

climate and the falling of the rocks) in quite an accurate way, creating a two-dimensional map. This project responds to the rise of a wider concern about damage to the paths due to the opening of new dirt roads. Besides their significance in mapping the peninsula, these maps are still abstractly connected to the real experience.9 Going from one place to another relates to a movement that may not be repeated more than once by the same individual and opens as a dynamic field of embodied experience that includes the elements of both ‘known’ and ‘unknown’.10 Even the walkers who have used the same routes before emphasise that following a path involves a sense of unpredictability. On the one hand, there is the actuality of the connection between two places of certain significance, and on the other hand, the lack of proper direction and the opening to its changeable, organic nature contribute to a dynamic framework that can be mapped in the most genuine way only through the movement of the body.11 The experience of the walkers is also re-defined by their personal sphere (memories, thoughts, intentions). For them, a two-dimensional map plays the role of the ‘general framework’ through which they are oriented.12 Taking photos and videos enhances this process of

 The Society of the Friends of Mount Athos (FoMA) has been trying for twelve years now to map these footpaths. FoMA was established in 1990, aiming at the study and promulgation of knowledge of the history, culture, arts, architecture, natural history and literature of all the monasteries of Mount Athos and those outside the peninsula that are connected to it. Now that new roads are being opened and some of the monastic complexes buy their own car, for practical purposes, the Friends of Mount Athos felt the need to map and preserve the footpaths, as it is considered to be one of the most important parts of the pilgrimage to Athos. A group of people regularly visit the peninsula, trying to map this organic network accurately using oral descriptions and GPS devices. They also work on preservation of the paths by re-opening and signposting them. At the moment, the project focuses mainly on the western part of the peninsula. Peter Howorth is a member of this team. As an architect he is also in charge of creating a two-dimensional map based on the collected data. He bases his research on a combination of existing maps and fieldwork. SPRTM data collected by NASA’s Space Shuttle programme was combined with Greek military maps, Google Earth results and the GPS tracks from the fieldwork of FoMA people. 10  See also: Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, first edition in English 1977), p. 188. 11  This always-changing nature relates to the tangible developments in the landscape due to falling rocks and climatic changes, and the possibility of the path’s extinction due to the disuse of one of the two connected places. 12  Field trips to Mount Athos, (September 2011 and August 2012. 9

3  The Footpaths 

41

recording notable parts of the landscape.13 The footpaths thus become an important part of the topography. Cutting through different zones of the landscape, they have their own character, carrying movements of departure and return, and allowing the walker to stop, meet other people and explore the landscape. They connect and divide different places through the movement of the monk and the visitor, and also play the role of an extended boundary between these places. Underlining the character of the walking experience, the writer Giannis Gikas compares the handmade Athonite signs to the ‘Hermes heads’, the columns that signalled the entrances of an ancient Greek city and gave directions at road intersections. At the same time, the Hermes heads were worshipped through donations made by walkers.14 This may be related to the role that footpaths play in the experience of the Athonite landscape. The handmade signs, connected to St Minas, the Orthodox protector of wayfarers, may also perpetuate this dynamic. They mark the most usual stops in a pilgrimage: the hut or the grave of a well-known ascetic, a monastery and so forth. Their presence is the result of the repetitive walks of outsiders, as they are mostly placed by monks and the Friends of Mount Athos to guide them. By providing a sense of direction they contribute to the experience, reducing the unpredictability of the way. While they are very helpful for the walkers, they also objectify the experience by introducing an element of instrumentality, and create a distance between the walker and the relatively untouched environment (Fig. 3.3). In this sense, Gregoriou monastery was initially connected to Simonopetra monastery through a footpath first made during Byzantine times. Its first part has been replaced by a dirt road for cars. Starting from Gregoriou, the individual thus walks along a relatively wide road. Along the way the road joins the initial footpath—‘the only footpath from Gregoriou to Simonopetra’, as a sign informs the walkers. The difference in the experience of these two parts of the way is intense in terms of scale and construction. The width of the road for cars and the absence of  Characteristically, the writer Christopher Merrill emphasised that taking photos and writing a diary during his journey played a valuable role in the synthesis of his book after his journeys. 14  Giannis Gikas, ‘The Paths of Mount Athos (Where All the Mystical Athonite History has Walked)’, in Ioannis Xatzifotis (ed.), Anthology of Literary Texts about Mount Athos (Athens: Iolkos, 2000, in Greek), p. 115. 13

42 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 3.3  Handmade Sign pointing towards Simonopetra monastery. (Photo by the author)

vegetation, leave the walker absolutely exposed to climatic changes. There are few cars on Mount Athos. Nevertheless, the individual is forced to walk along the edge of the road to avoid an accident. Moreover, red guardrails enhance this different and more directed sense of movement on the peninsula (Figs. 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). On entering the traditional path, the individual feels as if he is passing through a landscape unchanged over time. Often, the more elaborate parts are closer to the monasteries. The thick vegetation of the intermediate sections either creates a secure boundary along the cliff edge, or a dense natural cover that very little light enters. Sounds are mainly from the birds and the sea. Small built structures make the way more readable; some of the handmade wooden signs direct movement, controlling this embodied mapping up to a point. Moreover, handmade dry-stone foundations perpendicular to the footpath help to preserve it. Finally, bigger

3  The Footpaths 

43

Fig. 3.4  A map of the path that connects Gregoriou monastery to Simonopetra monastery and its elevation, FoMA Project for Paths

constructions along the way divide the walk into different stages. Benches, water basins and the entrance to a kathisma allow the measurement of space and time in relation to the direct experience of the footpath.15 This route can therefore be divided into four basic parts by spatial markers, such as the point where the initial footpath starts, and the beginning and the end of an uphill section of road. The stages are: 1. From Gregoriou monastery until the point where the old foot path starts. 2. A downhill path starts from there and reaches the sea, where the area of the ‘flour mill’ of Gregoriou is situated.

 A kathisma is a small monastic structure. This one is dedicated to St Artemios and is connected to Gregoriou monastery. 15

44 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 3.5  A depiction of the footpath that connects Gregoriou with Simonopetra monastery (left) by Monk Markos. Monk Markos is an Athonite ascetic who published a small pilgrims’ guide in 2000. In it maps such as these are included. They are the result of repeated walks and experiential measurements according to the walkers’ paces, the walking time and other components of the walking experience. Therefore, they differ from the modern cartographic representation

3. From that point a difficult uphill road starts, which brings you back to a height of 200 metres above sea level, though over a much shorter distance than the previous section. The end of the third part is a kiosk, also connected by a path to the port at Simonopetra. 4. The last part is an easier cobblestone path in which human intervention is more evident compared to the previous two, introducing the built environment of Simonopetra, the view of which intensifies a sense of expectation. Start early in the morning. Perhaps just after the Vespers. The weather will be cool and pleasant. Walk in a stable rhythm and try not to think of the arduous

3  The Footpaths 

45

Fig. 3.6  Part of a map also showing the footpath that connects the Gregoriou and Simonopetra monasteries. It was created by Reinhold Zwerger, a frequent pilgrim to Mount Athos since 1956. During his long journeys there he kept detailed diaries, made drawings and sketches and mapped the network of roads and footpaths in quite a detailed way. His map, published in 1982, is considered to be one of the most ‘accurate’. The map follows the modern cartographic approach, with clearly designed contour lines and abstractly represented footpaths

landscape. Just walk. It will be a walk of around an hour. You cannot lose your way. Just follow the signs and the paths themselves.16

This basic division of the route may also be depicted according to the time needed to cover the different distances (Table 3.1): The third part of the route is very arduous, and involves climbing a steep cliff. The width of the path dictates walking in single file, while the danger of rocks falling from above is ever present. The landscape is mainly rocky, with wild vegetation that often functions as a protective wall along the cliff edge. Human intervention on this path is minimal, and walking 16

 Monk P., fieldwork at Mount Athos, September 2012.

46 

C. Kakalis

Table 3.1  The path according to the time periods of its walking Time Spatial/Aural qualities 00:00 Ascent along the road—Our constant view is the horizon on the sea; no vegetation, very warm. 00:10 Red bollards to protect traffic along a bend (totally different from an untouched landscape). 00:13 Beginning of the initial path. 00:15 Stone steps. 00:16 Wooden sign (navigation). 00:20 Kathisma of St Artemios (first view of the port of Simonopetra; sounds—Water of the sea, rustling of leaves). 00:22 First view of Simonopetra. 00:25 Path supported by mortar and stones. 00:27 Low vegetation, creating a protective wall along the cliff edge. 00:30 Thick vegetation (sounds—Birds and the sea; humidity from the dew). 00:32 A clearing with a water basin (makes the walker stop and take a rest). 00:33 Sea level (makes the walker feel disoriented). 00:40 The ascent of the difficult uphill road begins. 00:42 View of the watermill. 00:45 First 180-degree corner (the walker is totally isolated from the rest of the world; sounds—Birds). 00:52 Wooden bench (the walker is reassured that he is not lost). 00:59 Kiosk, marking the beginning of the gentler path. 01:04 Sounds of mules and sea. 01:12 Second water basin and bench. 01:15 Simonopetra.

along it always makes the traveller feel an intense sense of isolation and silence. Physical tiredness enhances the sense of expectation. The experience of the uncanny fires a search for signs of human presence, traces of familiarity. Arriving at a wooden bench or at a small built complex of a bench and a water basin therefore provides reassurance that the walker is not lost. The landscape seems almost untouched, making the individual feel involved in an embodied communication with the ascetics and visitors who created and preserve these paths. This preservation of the paths is readable in their scale, in the ad-hoc supporting constructions and in the disused branches (that you can see gradually falling into disuse). We left Simonopetra around midday. It was really warm and I did not expect that the first part of the path was going to be so hard. Walking down the steep

3  The Footpaths 

47

slope took us longer that it should have, I think more than an hour. When we reached the sea, it felt like a blessing. Entering the second half of the route, we stopped by the fountain and had some rest. We still had some way to go, but did not know the length and the difficulty of the remaining route.17

The path becomes more relaxing as the walker gradually approaches Simonopetra. The kiosk signals the beginning of this last part of the route, made up of carefully reconstructed stone steps. These gentle stone configurations testify to the presence of the monks. In the kiosk, there is a lectern with an icon of the protectors of the monastery, while a water basin placed between benches invites the body-subject to have some rest. Some metres later, he sees the monastery for the first time, while moving in parallel to the terraces used either as gardens or for keeping animals. This final phase of the approach to Simonopetra is similar to the approach to Gregoriou monastery. The rhythm of trees contributes to a change in the walking experience, making the path more clearly discerned. It supports the rhythm of the individual’s pace and organises the view towards the sea (through gaps between trees). Wooden railings also make the way clearer by indicating the edge of the cliff. The very last part of the path is covered by a pergola, on which vines and kiwis grow. Walking under it, the individual begins to interact with the more organised landscape of the monastery, the core of which still appears unapproachable due to its architectural peculiarity. Therefore, in both of the monasteries, a transitional zone between the more untouched natural landscape and the built monastery is an integral part of the route that connects them. Thus, walking along the paths becomes a way of experiencing the paradoxical interaction between the mapped and the unmapped. In following the path, the walker becomes an active part of the topography as he is trying to find his way in the landscape. The more he walks, the better he knows the path. The way he has to harmonise his pace with the changes in relief, the constant fear of disorientation and the mental alertness needed to reconcile the abstract information on a map that he may carry with an ever-changing route create an adventurous experience. 17

 Pilgrim D., June 2016.

48 

C. Kakalis

In this sense, besides the liturgical ascent to the peak of the mountain that was examined in the previous chapter and the litanies connected to the liturgical life of the coenobitic monasteries which will be explored later, the monks use the paths as part of their everyday life. Monks may be seen walking along the paths for different purposes: to go to work in the cultivated parts of their monastery that may not be attached to it, or to go and visit another monastery, or even to attend the liturgy at a monastic structure, as they may belong to a kellion or a hut that does not have a chapel. Monks also walk in the wider territory of their monastic dwelling to practise silent prayer. Generally, their presence along the paths is very rare and their body posture usually has specific characteristics as they are trying to keep silent: most of the time they do not talk to the people they meet (neither monks nor visitors), keep their head bowed and play with their prayer ropes. If somebody meets a monk while walking, he usually feels that the sense of solitude and silence is intensified. Furthermore, usually the passages towards the caves and the hermitages of the peninsula are extremely narrow and hard to walk, as the ascetics living there want to control both their exit from the hermitage and the entrance of outsiders in order to better serve ascetic life. However, walking seems to play an important role in the journey of the outsiders, and is sometimes even connected to an existential quest. The hiking path is a way opened through an organic relationship to the countryside that invites the wanderer to adapt himself to the terrain. The important thing in the wanderer’s experience is not only arrival at the destination but also the process of walking through the natural environment, into which unexpected events may be harmoniously integrated. Moreover, time acquires its own rhythm, totally different from that of everyday life. In this way, wandering becomes a way of escaping the everyday purposefulness of life and interacting with an uncanny environment, moving towards a more intimate relationship to it.18 It also becomes part of a moving landscape created by the interaction between the walker and the path.

 See also: O.F.  Bollnow, Human Space, translated by Christine Shuttleworth, edited by Joseph Kohlmaier, (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), (First edition in German: 1969), p. 115. 18

3  The Footpaths 

49

In the case of Mount Athos, while walking is perhaps connected to an intentional involvement in a leisurely wandering for (environmental) tourists, it is mostly a process in which the individual chooses to move across the peninsula along the (foot)paths, feeling that this may add to the religious meaning of his journey. Therefore, pilgrims and existential tourists usually prefer to walk from place to place, aiming at a possible opening either to self-examination or to a more direct communication with the material and immaterial qualities of the topography. Motivation plays an important role in this process, mainly for the pilgrims who tend to include walking in their religious quest, feeling that this is part of the ‘trials’ they have to experience in order to fulfil the aim of their journey. Thus, for example, they may pray while trying to reach a destination that is mostly connected to interaction with the ascetics (e.g. the spiritual father), in the hesychast context of a monastic structure. Nevertheless, natural tourism is also a way of experiencing the unbuilt environment of the peninsula. These tourists fulfil the aim of their travel just by walking along the tracks. Finally, the few dirt roads allow some of the monks to travel using the car belonging to the monastic communities to which they belong, even using it as a kind of taxi for the transportation of visitors. This is rare and applies mostly to monks living in small communities (kellia, or huts). Walking, therefore, plays an important role in the journey of pilgrims at Athos. In his article ‘Paths of Athos’, the theorist and frequent pilgrim Philip Sherrard argues that during walking the pilgrim has the ability to distance himself from his mundane life and enter into the unknown, realising his dependence upon God. Of this spiritual exploration, inward and outward, walking is an essential part. His feet tread on earth – the earth from which he is made and from which he is usually so cut off, especially in the more or less totally urbanized conditions of modern life. Through his eyes, ears, nose, he renews his sense of natural beauty – the beauty of God’s creation. (...)

50 

C. Kakalis

But through all this, and through his prayer and dedication and confidence, slowly an inner change is wrought, a new rhythm grows, a deeper harmony. The pilgrimage is at work.19

This spiritual importance of walking to the pilgrimage at Athos is also underlined by the results of René Gothóni’s fieldwork there in 1984. For example, walking involved one of his interviewees in a distinct experience with an intense ‘medieval’ character. The combination of the quite untouched natural environment with the Byzantine monastic architecture was for him the live context of a ‘medieval experience’ in which monks and visitors were active parts of the same whole.20 Similarly, the pilgrim A.I.B. describes in his walk towards the Athonite desert the roughness of the landscape in relation to the sunset, which created an atmosphere of mystery that made him pray.21 He claims that the sacredness of the Athonite landscape forces every pilgrim to undertake constant prayer. For him, the unique natural beauty of Mount Athos intensely affects even non-nature lovers. To support this idea, he includes vivid descriptions of the landscape: During the sunset at Mount Athos! And as the sun was going to set I was going to rise. The sunset found me walking a narrow and rough footpath … I was flanked by high, unapproachable rocks with their sharp peaks touching the sky … In the rocks one can see small houses that are the cells of the monk–­ hermits. One is in a cave, another sticks out and you feel that it is going to fall into the sea …22

Climbing the mountain was for A.I.B. a source of inner prayer and a preparation for the meeting with the ascetic, during which this pilgrimage reached its climax.

 Bollnow, Human Space, p. 155.  René Gothóni, Paradise Within Reach: Monasticism and Pilgrimage on Mount Athos (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1993), p. 159. 21  A.I.B., Μία βραδυά στην Έρημο του Αγίου Όρους—A Night at the Desert of the Holy Mountain (Thessaloniki: Εκδόσεις Ορθόδοξη Κυψέλη). 22  Ibid., p. 20., Ibid., p. 24. 19 20

3  The Footpaths 

51

The intensity of the walking experience on Mount Athos seems to be similar even today. Konstantinos Andriotis, presenting the results of fieldwork there between 2004 and 2007, underlined the role of the network of paths. He saw walking on them as an important way of experiencing the Athonite environment, something that was also confirmed through my own fieldwork. Direct contact with nature and an element of ‘silence and escapism from the everyday world’ enhance the journey of the outsiders, also adding to the ‘spiritual magnetism’ of the place.23 Therefore, one of the most important qualities of the Athonite paths is a sense of ‘silence’, the result of untouched nature and the specific, unchangeable, monastic life. It is mostly connected with the difference between the Athonite soundscape and that in the outside world. The former encompasses the combination of the sound of the birds, the wind and the sea. This sense of silence is also connected to the absence of other people (or their rare presence). Feeling alone in an unfamiliar natural environment, the outsider has the possibility of experiencing silence, a response to his crossing the external boundary of the Athonite landscape. Encouraging the visitors to keep silent, these embodied qualities dynamically contribute to the pilgrim’s journey by opening him to a sensual quality of hesychia, literally meaning silence. As Gerald Palmer says, this silence may be ‘… far more than a mere absence of sound. It has a positive quality, a quality of fullness, of Plenitude, of the eternal peace which is there reflected in the Veil of the Mother of God, enshrouding and protecting her Holy Mountain, offering inner silence, peace of heart’.24 This is possibly connected, according to Richard Coyne, to the relationship between silence and Immanuel Kant’s ideas about human reaction to the sublime, which includes a sense of movement that relates to a feeling of silent vibration.25 Quoting Kant, Coyne argues: ‘This movement (especially in its inception) may be compared to a vibration, i.e. to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object.’ Human imagination has the capacity to represent or describe, and  Konstantinos Andriotis (2009), ‘Sacred Site Experience. A Phenomenological Study’, pp. 64–84.  Gerald Palmer, ‘Silence over Mount Athos’, Orthodox Life (November–December 1968), p. 33. 25   See: Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place: Sociable Places and Pervasive Digital Media (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010), p. 209. 23 24

52 

C. Kakalis

words fail us in the face of the sublime ‘What is excessive for the imagination … is as it were an abyss.’ The concept of vibration, which is readily ascribed to sound, comes to the aid of the acoustic aesthetician in giving an account of silence, the gap, and the tuning of place.26

Silence is a condition shared between the visitor and the path and is not only connected to the absence of noise. The path is an embodied phenomenon, the natural character of which is more silent than our noisy everyday life in modern cities. It creates a sphere of isolation, inviting the walker to keep silent. Any sensual connection to the outer world changes this atmosphere, adding noisier qualities to it. Being part of an organic topography, therefore, silence is not perceived in the same way while walking along a route. Its intensity varies according to the environment that the individual passes through, and is connected to the absence and/or presence of elements such as humans, sense of orientation, light, and view towards the external horizon. For example, the silence-scape of the footpath that connects Gregoriou monastery to Simonopetra can be divided into three basic zones according to its intensity: a) the parts that are closer to the monastery, b) the footpath that is covered with vegetation and c) the third part of the ascent of the steep path, which is considered to be the most silent. A number of different qualities are also included in these three zones, connected either with the changes to the above absences/presences or to unexpected events (meeting someone, stopping at a hermitage and having a short discussion, etc.). These zones are included in the personal map of a visitor, and are difficult to transfer through conventional cartographic approaches.27 This embodied ­interpretation is also influenced by the walker’s horizon, his travel motivation, thoughts, memories and so forth, making its further expression even more difficult. It must be emphasised that this kind of silence is different from that found in the built spaces and the wilder landscape. The silence found in built complexes such as a church or a monastic courtyard is most of the time intentionally preserved to contribute to the silent meditation of the  Ibid.  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, 2011 and 2012.

26 27

3  The Footpaths 

53

monks and is also carefully incorporated into the different rituals held in these places. The sense of silence found in the wild or deserted landscape is even more intense than the one experienced along the paths, making these areas ideal places for the hermits to practise austere hesychasm. Therefore, walking from the one monastery to the other also played an important role in the travels of the existential tourist, Christopher Merrill. At the beginning, it was mainly followed by intense self-examination. The wilderness of the landscape connected to his interaction with the hesychasts, and the other visitors made him recite the Jesus Prayer, something that gradually became an integral part of his walking on Athos, contributing to the change in character of his travels—from ‘journeys with not a specific character’ into pilgrimages. Interpreting his travel experience on Athos as connected to the walking along the paths, he says: ‘Man instinctively considers himself as a wanderer and traveller’ says Thomas Merton, ‘and his second nature is to conduct pilgrimages searching for a special and sacred place, a centre and a spring of incorruptible life. Hope is integrated in his mentality and either imaginatively or in reality his soul is always trying to go back to a mythical spring, a place of “origin”, the home of his ancestors, the mountain from where the Fathers were communicating with heavens, the place where the world was created, the Paradise with the Tree of Life.’ Athos was one of the last authentic places.28

In this sense, while walking along the path that passes through the desert of Athos without carrying a map, he was trying to find his way by following a plastic water pipe that carried water from a spring. He was walking and praying when he felt that he had gone astray from the path of his ‘inner self ’, which according to his words was about ‘the close relation of the individual to earth and marriage – how both of them depend on our ability to recognize boundaries’.29 This made him realise that he had to redefine his relation to both nature and people. Interaction with the hesychast qualities of Mount Athos was the beginning of this effort. Silence was experienced by Merrill as an active component of different parts of the topography. On the one hand, in this unfamiliar environment, 28 29

 Christopher Merrill, p. 275.  Ibid., pp. 211–212.

54 

C. Kakalis

he could feel alone, interacting with the sounds of nature (birds, water, wind) or the absence of other people that made him examine himself or pray. Silence could also be shared between the walkers, as most of the time they preferred not to talk, but just interact with the surrounding environment. Therefore, the silence of the desert connected to a ruined hermitage, and the horizon between the sea and the sky made him feel that he was experiencing ‘his own revelation: that the mystery of the Incarnation remains a constant element of his life’.30 As he admits in an interview: Silence is the key to understanding my journey and this book. It is the dominant motif and the theme, for it is in silence that we may begin to listen for that ‘still, small voice’ that governs our best selves – the space that we make […] for everything that matters. In an increasingly noisy world silence may be our only refuge, and so you could say that I went to the Holy Mountain in search of silence, in order to be able to listen.31

Today, sometimes the silence is violated by the loudspeakers of the cruise ships that sail around the peninsula. One may suddenly hear vague noises, the combination of the sound of the boat’s engine and the voice of the tourist guide. These sounds are quite rare and are audible only to those walking along the footpaths close to the western coast of the peninsula. These elements, which define the silence-scape of the footpath, are connected to its simultaneous mapping and unmapping dynamics that characterise the visitor’s experience, most of the time becoming the reason for including walking in their journey. Adding to the unexpected moments of walking experience, the difference between the footpaths and the roads is usually experienced by the walkers as unpredictable changes in a landscape that they initially considered untouched. This difference lies, according to Otto Bollnow, in the fact that the roads are artificial products of technology, characterised by Heidegger as ‘equipment of walking [Zeug zom gehen] and even  Ibid., p. 339.  Interview with Christopher Merrill, Sunday 27 May 2012, in answer to my question: ‘What was the role of silence in your journeys? You mention a number of events in which silence played a key role (the sharing of moments of prayerful silence with the Russian pilgrim in the cave of St Kosmas, the way the silence of the untouched natural environment enhanced your individual prayer, etc.). Was/Is this connected to hesychasm?’ 30 31

3  The Footpaths 

55

equipment of driving’. Its experience is totally different from that of the footpath, as the road surface separates the foot from the ground.32 Therefore, they can be clearly represented in a two-dimensional map. In the following parts of the map of the Athonite network of movement, designed by the Friends of Mount Athos, we can identify several points where footpaths and roads meet. At these points, some walkers feel a sense of embarrassment, because it is difficult to be harmonically integrated in the embodied narrative of their travel. Visitors highlight the bad condition of some of the footpaths due to the presence of the dirt roads and the opportunity for individuals to move around using one of the very few cars. For example, the monastery of Simonopetra has a small van that collects the visitors every day from the port of Dafni and takes them to the monastery. A fifty-year-old teacher from Greece told me: ‘I cannot find all the footpaths I used to walk along. Some of them are mostly erased by the growing vegetation. Walking here is connected to a sense of exploration, a search for a destination, the hardship of which redefines the arrival at a monastic complex and our interaction with it’.33 Roads for cars can be also used for walking; the difference in the pedestrian experience from one that uses the footpaths lies in the latter’s primary relationship with the landscape.34 Hence, the American pilgrim Scott Cairns, who went to Mount Athos in 2004, decided to move around the peninsula mostly using the network of footpaths in order to enhance his pilgrimage experience. During one of his first wanderings, he felt grateful to God because he was walking along the same paths that actual saints had previously walked. Recollecting a number of Athonite fathers, such as St Gregory Palamas, St Siluan, St  Bollnow, Human Space, p. 109.  Field trip to Mount Athos, August 2012. 34  The examination of walking in the city by the architectural theoretician Gordana Fontana-Giusti provides interesting comparative material on this purpose. Fontana-Giusti underlines the importance of walking in the experience of the city. Building on an extensive historical review of the topic, she discusses the way pedestrian flows perform their own urban spatiality, forming assemblages of different events. Walking in the city is for Fontana-Giusti an embodied way of experiencing the urban environment at both a physical and psychological level. On this see: Gordana Korolija Fontana-Giusti, ‘Mapping the Movements of the Walker—a Spatio-Dynamic Method of Designing a Responsive Environment for the twenty-first Century Pedestrian Culture’, September 2005; Gordana Korolija Fontana-Giusti, ‘Urban Strolling as the Measure of Quality’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 11 (2007), pp. 255–264. 32 33

56 

C. Kakalis

Nikodimos and St Savvas, he suddenly felt the desire to repeat the Jesus Prayer.35 While praying, the writer felt ‘an almost hallucinatory sweetness’ which was unexpectedly changed into ‘an almost hallucinatory melancholy’, as after an hour of walking, the footpath was replaced by a road made of crushed granite.36 Similarly, Merrill describes in a characteristic way the realisation of these changes of the topography of Mount Athos during his route from Dafni to Karyes: The increase in the numbers of pilgrims and preservation works undermines the sense of isolation and silence that are vital for the spiritual life. Thus, the jingle signalling the approaching mules (the only offered means of movement on Athos until recently) was covered by the noise of the chainsaw, that was being intensified as I was going up to the chestnut forest over the monastery [of Xeropotamou]. Somewhere later, at a clearing on my right-hand side, a new kellion was built. Piles of cut poplar trees and small branches were crammed at the side of the road. Another road (opened through felling) leading to the peak was on the other side. […] The opening of roads is the contemporary disaster of Mount Athos. […] Only the most distant parts of Athos – mainly in the area of the Desert, the dry and arduous place at the south end of the peninsula – are still served only with mules.37

In her book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit underlines the significance of walking as ‘a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord’.38 Acknowledging the phenomenal qualities of walking, this quote illuminates the ideas explored in this chapter. Walking on the Athonite landscape is deeply influenced by its pilgrimage character and the diverse  Scott Cairns, Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven—A Pilgrimage (San Francisco: Harper, 2007), p. 39. 36  Research in the books of guests’ impressions of the Gregoriou Monastery for the years 2001–2006 confirmed the above presentation of the use of paths by the outsiders. Therefore, walking along the footpaths and contact with wild nature is part of the sacredness of their travel. Some of them complain about the new roads and underline the important role of the paths in the preservation of the sacred qualities of the experience of the place. A lot of them argue that the Athonite natural environment transmits a sense of tranquillity, calmness and silence that is in accordance with the hesychast tradition of the peninsula. 37  Christopher Merrill, pp. 46–47 (my translation). 38  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 5. 35

3  The Footpaths 

57

qualities of silence and tranquillity along its route. Walking as an embodied mapping can be connected to a kind of a cognitive mapping as the process of generating and narrating a spatio-temporal situation.39 As Karen O’ Rourke interestingly underlines, ‘wayfinding’ carries learning and mnemonic aspects in the model of a cognitive map being created during its course.40 The organic nature of the footpaths, therefore, is directly connected to their creation and preservation through the embodied movement of the walker along the existing topography. Playing an important role in the experience of the topography, the footpaths are quasi-natural and quasi-manmade zones. On the one hand, they are mapped in the most genuine way only through the movement of the insiders and the outsiders. At the same time, they remain unmapped, always changing due to their primary character. The constant interaction between the notions of mapped and unmapped plays the most important role in the walking process of the visitor, being expressed with an intense sense of wandering and adventure. For them, walking involves the initiative qualities of bodily tiredness combined with the embodied recollection of the spiritual meaning of the topography that may contribute to an existential quest (of pilgrimage character or not). Moreover, for the monks, walking is connected to hesychast practice as they keep silent and harmonise the repetition of the Jesus Prayer to the rhythm of their pace. Dirt roads allow the use of the car: something that changes this kind of experience as the travellers now have the ability to reach their destination faster and through a process that distances them from nature and its embodied qualities. A sense of silence is one of the most important elements of the footpath experience, and it is related to a natural soundscape and the absence of people. It is interpreted by the walkers in different ways, depending on their motivations. Finally, the unexpected interruption of silence by the loudspeakers of the cruise ships and the interruption of the natural landscape by the dirt roads are noted by the visitors as discontinuities in their experience, usually surprising them or distancing them from what had been happening until that moment.  Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).  Karen O’ Rourke, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p. 112. 39 40

4 The Monastery and the Cell

Early August 2012. An old monk wearing his inner cassock, a tired hat and holding a wooden stick walks up the cobblestone road that connects the port of Gregoriou with the monastery. He often stops to answer my questions. ‘You see we are a community of people, a small city of people that seek to talk to God and wait for the resurrection of the dead. Everything in the monastery speaks about this journey. We are Grégoriates. We live here wearing only this [showing his cassock] and repeating the prayer. The aim is to always recite it. Everything should breathe out the prayer’. Arriving at the entrance of the monastery, he makes the sign of the cross and enters.1

Echoing qualities of the model of Heavenly Jerusalem, the Athonite monastery embodies meanings associated with the liturgical understanding of hesychast life as experienced by both monks and visitors. Demarcated by the walls and the attached wings, the open spaces of the latter provide a space for silence and enable communal rituals to form an intrinsic part of a liturgical architectural experience. Intentionally preserved by the community, therefore, silence makes an important contribution to the atmosphere of the monastery and is linked to the undisturbed practice of silent prayer. Moreover, ritual movements are choreographed in the open spaces of the complex, and these combine different aural  Fieldwork diary, August–September 2012.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_4

59

60 

C. Kakalis

elements such as instrumental music, readings and chanting. These activities inscribe temporary aural zones within the silence of the complex, with the intention of communicating specific religious messages. This chapter explains the importance of the interaction between silence and communal ritual, as interpreted by monks and visitors. The reciprocity between some of the communal rituals and the silent prayer of the monks also becomes also evident in the spatio-temporal relationship between the monastery and the cell.

4.1 The Monastery All the Athonite monasteries follow a number of general architectural principles, which are related to certain functional, liturgical and spiritual demands. The theologian Stylianos Papadopoulos underlines the cosmic associations of a monastery that, according to Christian theology, is a ‘world in the world’, in which the monks are grouped in a community that anticipates the Heavenly Jerusalem through constant prayer and liturgical life.2 In his book, Athos and its Monasteries, Frederick Hasluck presents in a detailed way the ‘governing [architectural] principles’ according to which a monastery was founded during the Middle Byzantine period in Athos.3 A thick wall marked a rectangular courtyard, in the centre of which was the main church (καθολικόν–katholikon). The other buildings were part of the wall, underlining its role as the boundary, which qualitatively and symbolically differentiated the monastic space, contributing to its sacred character. The refectory was part of the west range, facing the main entrance of the katholikon, and was combined with the kitchen and storerooms for functional reasons. The cells, organised according to the repetition of the same unit, also looked towards the katholikon,

 Stylianos Papadopoulos, ‘Space’, in Stylianos Papadopoulos (ed.), Simonopetra: Mount Athos (Athens: Hellenic Industrial Development Bank, SA, ETBA, 1991), p. 58. 3  Frederick Hasluck, Athos and its Monasteries (New York: Kegan Paul Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924), pp. 92–114. 2

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

61

intensifying a sense of introversion within the whole complex.4 The architect Patrick J.  Quinn presents the results of his fieldwork at Athos in 1985 in a similar way.5 He also underlines the importance of a ‘general plan’ and identifies it with the original organization of Great Lavra (tenth century), which initially followed to a great extent Hasluck’s description, demonstrating a living spatial continuity.6 None of the Athonite monasteries are absolutely similar to this ‘ideal’ model, as they also had to adjust to the mountainous environment of the peninsula. Characteristic examples of this adjustment or transformation are the Simonopetra and Gregoriou monasteries. Nevertheless, these complexes still share the key elements of this ideal organisation. Like all building complexes, the monastery is also a narrative in which the main wall and the way the different buildings are placed within it create a field of human understanding of multiple meanings. Since the early Christian era, monasteries have been connected with the model of the city, also echoing also the symbolic dynamics of the model of Heavenly Jerusalem.7 In The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, we read that the Egyptian desert gradually became a ‘city by monks who … registered themselves for the citizenship in the heavens’. Saint Anthony characteristically said: ‘though we have been contestants on earth, we do not receive our inheritance on earth, but we possess the promises in heaven’.8 Similarly, in his Ladder of Divine Ascent, the seventh-century abbot of the coenobitic monastery of St Catherine of Sinai, St John Climacus, also underlines the  See also Svetlana Popovič, ‘Dividing the Indivisible: The Monastery Space – Secular and Sacred’, Receuil des Travaux de l’Institut d’Etudes Byzantines, XLIV (2007), p.  55: The writer relates this architectural model to the formation of a ziggurat and of an ancient Greek city. In the case of the latter: ‘acropolis bears witness to both elevation (located on a natural mount) and enclosure by an outer wall resembling a sacred fort’. In this framework, Popovič feels that this model is the result of a gradual evolution of sacred space from ancient times until the Byzantine era. 5  See, Patrick J.  Quinn, ‘Drawing on Mount Athos: The Thousand-Year Lesson’, Places, 2/1, pp. 32–47. 6  See: Papadopoulos, Simonopetra: Mount Athos, p.  58; see also René Gothóni, Paradise Within Reach: Monasticism and Pilgrimage on Mount Athos (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1993), p. 113. 7  St. John the Divine, The Revelation Oxford: printed at the University Press for the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1864), paragraph 21. 8  Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, translated by R.C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 42–44. 4

62 

C. Kakalis

desire of the monastic community to materialise a kind of ‘heaven on earth’. The aim is to reach ‘the celestial palace of the Heavenly King; and the many mansions as the abodes within this city, and the wall of this celestial Jerusalem as the forgiveness of sins’.9 These paradise associations are also expressed through the writings of St Symeon the New Theologian, a tenth-century ascetic of the monastery of St Mamas in Constantinople. According to him, the monastery resembles an island in the middle of the sea that is clearly demarcated from the rest of the world, and in which the monks search for bodily communion with God. The monastery is hierarchically organised, with the church playing the most important role in it as the earthly icon of the heavenly liturgy, performed through the daily services.10 These ideas were transferred in the creation of the Athonite monasteries (during the same period) and have evolved into the contemporary embodied realisation of the complex. A series of connections between Athonite monastic architecture and the Heavenly Jerusalem, presented in St John’s Revelation, further elucidates the spiritual associations of the complex and the model of the city. St John’s model is connected to sacred art and architecture, as according to Christian theology, earthly liturgy is a mimetic representation of the heavenly one, embodying the devotees’ anticipation of the return to Paradise.11 Heaven is seen as the communion of the Church (the whole of the devotees) and God, which is also expressed through the idea of a heavenly city. The monastery therefore recollects elements of the desired end. This materialisation is not fulfilled through an actual representation of St John’s model, but through the metaphor of some of its basic qualities: the importance of a surrounding wall, the central position of the  St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, (New York: Harper, 1959), Step 29/14, p. 130. 10  St Symeon the New Theologian, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Saint Mamas of Xirokerkos, Works, Volume Three: Hymns – Letters, Digital Patrologia, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of Aegean, url: http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/pgm/PG_Migne/ Symeonis%20Junioris_PG%20120/Epistulae.pdf, date of access: 30 March 2013, MA: 308, p. 205. 11  For the relationship of the model of Heavenly Jerusalem to Byzantine monastic architecture see: Svetlana Popovič, ‘The Byzantine Monastery: Its Spatial Iconography and the Question of Sacredness’, in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Hierotopy, Studies in the Making of Sacred Space (Moscow, 2006), pp. 150–185. 9

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

63

church, the replacement of the peripheral gates with the cells that also symbolise an opening to heaven, and theosis through the conduct of silent prayer. According to the art historian, Alexei Lidov, the model of Heavenly Jerusalem is a ‘spatial icon’, transferred during the creation and preservation of a Christian church or monastery. It is a metaphor for the relevant religious ideas based on the comprehensive interconnection of different components of the sacred topography (natural landscape, architecture, light, fragrances, music, iconography, dramaturgy) through its liturgical performance and the perception of individuals (Fig. 4.1).12 In this context, three main groups of buildings are interrelated in the Athonite monastery. The first group includes exclusively religious buildings (katholikon, chapels); the second one includes those that serve both religious and practical functions, like the refectory. Finally, there is a third category of buildings with purely practical functions, such as the kitchen and the bakery. These buildings are combined into a liturgical whole through monastic life and ascetic practices, and the dynamic interrelationship of silence and communal rituals plays a significant role in this process. On the one hand, silence is intentionally preserved in the complex, contributing to the silent prayer of the monks. On the other, repetitive communal rituals are also held in both the open and closed spaces. Τhe church plays a vital role in these processes, as the rituals support its axis mundi qualities, materialised through the dome and its relationship to the chancel. Moreover, the refectory becomes part of this environment as liturgically related to the church. At the same time, visitors enter and interact with the life there, contributing by their presence to the meaning of the topos. The surrounding natural environment and its relationship to the monastery, either as an untouched natural context or as the organised fields of plantations, is part of the whole, defining the wider sphere of a monastic complex, and its limits in relation to the horizon of the peninsula.  Alexei Lidov, ‘Spatial Icons: The Miraculous Performance with the Hodegetria of Constantinople’ in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Hierotopy: Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Progress-tradition, 2006), pp.  325–372; Alexei Lidov, ‘The Byzantine World and Performative Spaces’, in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Spatial Icons: Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Indrik, 2011), p.  17; Alexei Lidov, ‘New Jerusalems: Transferring of the Holy Land as Generative Matrix of Christian Culture’ in Alexei Lidov (ed.), New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces (Moscow: Indrik, 2009), pp. 5–10. 12

64 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 4.1  Gregoriou monastery: general organization. (Drawing by the author)

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

65

Table 4.1  The daily programme of Gregoriou monastery Daily programme of Gregoriou monastery 04:00–07:30 07:30–08:10 08:15–17:00 17:00–18:00 18:00–18:30 18:30–19:30 19:30–21:00 21:00

Morning service. Formal meal (sometimes Supplication is also held between the meal and the service). Rest and tasks. Vespers (on Tuesdays and Thursdays a Supplication to the Mother of God is also held). Informal meal (on Tuesdays and Thursdays the meal is formal). Compline. Rest and tasks. ‘Silence’ (signalled by the ringing of the bell).

Liturgical life in the Athonite monasteries is still organised according to the documents of their foundation, the typikon (τυπικόν). Ensuring the continuity of their tradition, the typikon provides a general framework in which the brotherhood experiences monastic life now, always understanding their movement from the past towards the future. Difficult to describe or teach, a typikon, according to the theologian I. Fountoulis, ‘is inculcated by constant daily practice. Its provisions regulate the liturgical life of the brotherhood. […] Its specifications constitute the bounds of liturgical order’.13 On the one hand, a typikon indicates ways of prayer, and on the other it underlines the necessity of everyday work in the monastery. The life indicated in the typika follows Athonite time, which is arranged according to the Julian calendar that was replaced by the Gregorian one (the one that we use now) during the fifth century (Table 4.1).14 A typical Athonite day is divided in smaller parts, each of which is dedicated to either work or prayer. Novices and monks have to follow this programme in order to acquire a daily cyclical rhythm, possibly connected to a religious understanding of recurrent time. Transcribing the words of an Athonite monk, René Gothóni says: According to Father Joachim, there are many cyclical aspects in Orthodox monastic life. There is the liturgical cycle (from vespers to the morning service), 13 14

 I. Fountoulis, ‘Liturgical Life’, in Papadopoulos, Simonopetra: Mount Athos, p. 132.  The former is thirteen days behind the latter.

66 

C. Kakalis

the weekly cycle, the yearly cycle, the agricultural and seasonal cycle, a cycle of Adam’s fall and the monks’ aim at striving, unseen warfare practised again and again by trial and error, gradually, until the passions eventually settle. The spiritual fruits ripen slowly. Monastic life is a lifetime’s retreat, a continuous striving until the last breath is drawn.15

Every single time-unit of the day has a cyclical structure, and every day, monks follow the same programme. The day is divided into certain units of activities that are conducted repeatedly, giving the monk a constant rhythm of life in which he concentrates on individual and shared prayer. This cyclical way of experiencing time is, therefore, related to the more linear eschatological goal of Christian worship to produce a spiral model of time. According to Philip Sherrard, communal life dynamically enhances the monk’s entrance in a ‘symbolic and ritual rhythm’ of everyday life through which he bodily expects to contact the divine.16 Being an Orthodox Christian and frequent pilgrim to Mount Athos, Sherrard characteristically argues: Each act, steeped thus in symbolic or ritual meaning is charged with a potential that goes far beyond its mere physical performance. […] [The community’s] whole devotion to their traditional discipline, induces in him that vital loosening and equilibrium, that recollectness and presence of mind, without which no spiritual work may be done. In this way he is brought into the right frame of mind for the next stage, that in which object and subject, the formal act and the spiritual content, begin to flow together without break; in which imitation is no longer so much a matter of copying the outer pattern, as of consciously learning to exercise control over the inner ways of concentration and selflessness.17

The main axis of this life is worship. The morning service (Mesoniktikon, Matins, Holy Mass) begins a little after midnight. Mass is celebrated daily and the Hours are read at midday. Vespers is held three hours before sunset. Just after dinner (which follows Vespers) is Compline  Gothóni, Paradise within Reach, p. 117.  Philip Sherrard, Athos – The Mountain of Silence (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 80. 17  Ibid., p. 81. 15 16

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

67

(απόδειπνο—apodeipno). Moreover, all-night vigils held on feast days are of great importance to the monks at Athos, as they signal the peak moments of communal liturgical life.18 During the services, the individual participates in rituals in which the community re-actualises past events. For the philosopher, Edward S. Casey, commemoration refers to the transition from one’s individual sphere to the public sphere of ritual observance. It is the movement from the ‘private contemplation of the past’ to ‘remembering through specific commemorative vehicles such as rituals and texts’. The ceremonial embodied movement of a group of people through ritualistic actions repeated in a similar way year after year sets the stage for a shared spatio-­ temporal event of liturgical character to take place.19 According to Monk Georgios, the ex-abbot of Gregoriou monastery, worship and its eschatological perspective is not only related to the ceremonies held in the katholikon—it has to do with the whole life of the monk. Hesychast meditational practice is also based on a cyclical temporal division, as the ascetic has to repeat the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly and also use his body in accordance with this, aiming to reach theosis. The knots of his prayer rope, his komposchoini, help him to constantly repeat it. Their number varies: thirty-three knots (symbolising the age of Christ’s death), ninety-nine knots (three times the number thirty-three), 100, 150 and 300 knots. Counting the knots in their hands, the monks repeat the prayer, dividing the time according to these repetitions and being immersed in a prayerful condition. Pilgrims may also use a prayer rope, but it is not obligatory for them. In parallel to prayer practices, shared work in the community plays a vital role. Certain ‘tasks’ (διακονήματα—diakonimata) combined with the maintenance of the monastic city are distributed to certain monks every year. These tasks have to do with the care of the whole monastic complex, and all serve different practical needs of the monastic city.20 The  Ibid., p. 120.  Edward S.  Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 221. 20  For a detailed list of the different tasks of an Athonite monastery see: I.M. Xatzifotis, Everyday Life on the Holy Mountain (Athens: Papadima Publications, 1999), pp. 268–270. 18 19

68 

C. Kakalis

Table 4.2  Relationship between the tasks and the different spaces of the Athonite monastery Relationship between the tasks and the different spaces of the Athonite monastery Task

Space

Ekklesiastikos Kodonokroustis or Kampanaris Portaris Archontaris Trapezaris Cook Magkipas Dochiaris Nurse Librarian Vordonaris & Chatlaris Arsanaris

Church Steeple Entrance Guest house Refectory Kitchen Bakery Cellar Hospital Library Stable Port

goal of the monk is to recite the prayer even during these tasks. You will often hear the invocation of the prayer travelling from mouth to mouth among the members of a group of monks working on something practical, for example, the preparation of a meal, work in the fields or cleaning. They aim to make the recitation of the prayer their ‘second nature’, as Father L. says, something that influences the atmosphere, the art and the architecture of the place as they contribute to its practice (Table 4.2).21

4.2 Silence and Communal Ritual in the Courtyards of the Monastery Silence plays an important role in the experience of the courtyards and the zones attached to the external faces of the wall. Absence of noise and the rare presence of monks create a silent environment with an intense feeling of ‘void’ and ‘emptiness’. The monks usually walk quickly and bow their heads when meeting with visitors, and visitors must also remain silent while in the courtyards of the monastery. Moreover, they are also  Conversation with Father L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012.

21

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

69

not allowed to enter certain internal and external spaces. These zones are often connected to the cells and the silent prayer of the monks, and signs are used to forbid entrance. In this way, visitors experience an imposed control on their sonic and visual communication with the context. This allows the external, physical silence to be preserved, helping the monks to conduct their silent prayer. In the atmosphere of the coenobitic monastery, two kinds of silence are therefore attuned: an imposed one (closer to the idea of ‘being silenced’) and an intentional, shared one (closer to the idea of being of ‘being silent’) highlighting the importance of an implicit boundary between the inside and the outside, which in some cases may acquire ‘border’ characteristics.22 Preserving the silence of the monastery opens a space for our hesychast practice to take place. It fills the atmosphere with the required physical conditions for the silence of the body and mind to happen. Concentration on the repetition of prayer becomes easier, opening the path to deepening within it.23 I do this pilgrimage regularly. One of the reasons is to contact the hesychia of the monastery and the landscape. The environment is really different from the noise of the city. A noise that is also connected to what you see, the use of the internet and conditions of self-alienation. For me spending time reading or just keeping silent in the courtyard is an important part of my journey.24

This silent environment is sometimes interrupted by discussions among either monks or visitors. In particular, this mainly happens after the evening meal. The monks usually gather close to the main entrance, or just outside it, sitting in the kiosk or along the pergola-covered corridor. The visitors may also sit on the benches in the first courtyard. During the three years of my research, the intensity of noise at that time of the day increased, changing the soundscape.

 Most of the time, during my fieldwork, visitors were asked by the monks to stop talking in the courtyards—which annoyed some. The ideas of ‘being silenced’ and ‘being silent’ are also examined in Robyn Fivush, ‘Speaking Silence: The Social Construction of Silence in Autobiographical and Cultural Narratives’, Memory, 18/2, pp. 88–98. 23  Conversation with Monk L. of the Gregoriou Monastery, fieldwork, August–September 2012. 24  Conversation with Pilgrim G. from Veroia, fieldwork, August–September 2012. 22

70 

C. Kakalis

Apart from these audible events, ritual processions connected to the celebration of specific festivals also enter the silent territory. The different spaces of the monastery are united through the liturgical performance of a specific pathway. Ritual processions were an active part of ancient Greek and Roman festivals such as the Panathenaia, the Dionysia and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Through the conduct of such a pompe (meaning ‘escort’), a group of people was formed, distinguishing themselves from the rest of the citizens.25 Performing the way towards the sanctuary in which sacrifices were going to be held was of major importance, and during the procession, a number of different objects connected to the festival were carried. In this sense, the new robe (peplos) of Athena was carried from the gates of the city to the Acropolis, passing through the agora.26 Dancing and hymns were also part of this tradition, creating a moving multi-sensory event that ritualised the city by the re-inscription of a pathway.27 Similarly, Robigalia was an annual Roman festival of reconciliation with the god of rust, Robigus. This included a procession starting from the Flaminian Gate, passing across the Milvian Bbridge, to reach the fifth milestone on the Claudian Way, and a sacred grove in which the priest made sacrifices.28 For the theologian John Baldovin, these processions are connected to the urban character of Christian worship, expressed through stational liturgies that began during the early Christian period, and traces of which are still active in the liturgical life of both Eastern and Western Christian traditions. According to his words, a stational liturgy is ‘a service of  Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, translated by John Raffan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 99. For the role of pompe in ancient Greek religion, see also: Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, translated by Paul Cartledge (Cambridge, New York, Victoria: Cambridge University Press, 1992, first publication in French 1989), pp.  102–111. For the interaction between pompe and the democratic polis, see: Athena Kavoulaki, ‘Processional Performance and the Democratic Polis’, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 26  Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 99–100. 27  Ibid., p. 102. 28  For Roman festivals and processions, see also: Thomas Bullfinch, The Age of Fable (Boston: S.W. Tilton, 1861), James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1951) and James George Frazer, The Fasti of Ovid, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1929). 25

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

71

worship at a designated church, shrine or public place in or near a city or town, on a designated feast, fast, or commemoration, which is presided over by the bishop or his representative and intended as the local church’s main liturgical celebration of the day’.29 Stational liturgy was an expression of the dynamic interrelationship between worship and urban context. It was the liturgy of the city, uniting the different parts into a consecrated whole. Hence, synaxis, litaneia and litè were the three words used for the different processions in Constantinople during Byzantine times. Synaxis means ‘to bring together’, to create a liturgical assembly during the celebration of the Eucharist. Moreover, the meaning of the word ‘litany’ was ‘supplication made during a procession’, and it was mainly used in reference to the religious processions held outdoors. Finally, litè was also used to refer to ritual processions in which the Emperor and his court were participating.30 Traces of these processions are still found today in a number of different rites held in the church or outside it. Litany and litè are two terms used in Athonite monastic life in reference to such processions. In particular, there are three litanies held in the territory of an Athonite monastery connected to Great Lent and Easter. Two of them are part of a shared liturgical life of Eastern Christianity and the third one (Easter Monday) is a ritual happening only on Mount Athos. Silence penetrates your ears when you enter the courtyard. And it is slightly embarrassing when a monk asks you to stop a quiet discussion with someone else – even whispering becomes a noisy threat for their hesychia. One of the aims of my pilgrimage is to contact this hesychia and participate also in the liturgies. The place is really different when the litany of Easter Monday exits the katholikon …31

Hence, on the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday of Great Lent, the Eastern Christian Church commemorates the victory  John F.  Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987), p. 37. 30  Ibid., pp. 207–211. 31  Conversation with Pilgrim G. from Veroia, fieldwork at Gregoriou Monastery, August– September 2012. 29

72 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 4.2  Mapping of the Litany of the Sunday of Orthodoxy. (Drawing by the author)

of the iconodules over the iconoclasts, with the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The restoration of the icons is celebrated throughout the day by a procession of priests, chanters and the faithful, holding icons, flags and lanterns, moving around the church. A similar procession is conducted on Mount Athos, starting and ending from the main entrance of the iconostasis, signalling its importance in the liturgical life of the community. The procession is held in the main courtyard of the monastery, and is a circular route around the main church during which four stops are made (along each of the four sides of the building) and supplications are said (Fig. 4.2).

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

73

The second procession is conducted during the evening services of Good Friday, when the epitaph of Jesus Christ is held. Epitaph is a Greek word that means ‘on the grave’ and relates to the lamentations conducted during the burial process of a dead person. Hence, during that day in the middle of the church, under the main dome, a kind of bier is placed that symbolises Christ’s grave, and where the epitaph will be placed. The epitaph is a richly decorated embroidered piece of cloth on which the dead body of Christ is represented. After the ‘Lamentation Upon the Grave’ is chanted, the epitaph is lifted up by monks, who are also priests, and a procession is held to recollect the burial of Christ and his movement towards Hades.32 Monks carrying banners, lanterns and metal depictions of cherubim are followed by the priest-monks (all dressed in their liturgical uniform), some of whom carry the epitaph and the chanters. The rest of the monks and the laymen come behind. This litany is held in both of the courtyards and includes four stops at which supplications are said, for: (a) all the dead monks of the monastery (in front of the south kodra), (b) all Christians (in front of the north kodra), (c) for the political authorities (in the first courtyard) and (d) for the donors of the monastery (in the chapel of Saint Anastasia). When the epitaph reaches the closed door of the church the priest symbolically asks Hades to open the doors of the underworld in order for Christ to enter. One more stop is held in the narthex, where prayers are said for all the monasteries of the world. After this, the epitaph is held on the threshold in order for the participants to pass under it, recollecting the human following of Jesus’s example. During the rite, the bell tolls in a death knell (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). Finally, one of the most important religious events of Mount Athos is the litany held in all the monasteries on either Easter Monday or Easter Tuesday. During this rite, the different places of the wider territory of a monastic whole are liturgically united. By the end of the morning liturgy of Easter Monday the whole congregation exits the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery. The order of the litany is similar to that of the epitaph, following the hierarchical organisation of monastic life. Holy relics,  The lamentations are included in the verses of Psalm 118, which is divided into three parts called staseis (stations), the beginning of which is signalled by a censing. During the third part, one the priests sprinkles rose water and throws flower petals all around, recollecting the funeral procession. 32

74 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 4.3  Mapping of the litany of Great Friday. (Drawing by the author)

icons, banners and candles are carried, while psalms related to the event of the Resurrection are chanted. They pass through the main entrance of the monastery and start ascending the footpath that leads to the cave of St Gregory. Initially, the litany reached the cave, where the service of the blessing of the waters was conducted, and they then returned to the monastery. Now, the distance covered by the litany is reduced. They stop at the house of the vineyard (just beyond the monastery) to conduct the service of the blessing of the waters under a pergola, and return to the katholikon. This blessed water will be spread over the gardens, following, for the Athonites, the parallel spring regeneration of nature and the human physical–spiritual one, as a result of the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. During the litany, the Canon of the Easter is chanted and

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

75

Fig. 4.4  Photograph of the Ritual Procession of Great Friday. (Courtesy of the Gregoriou Monastery)

six stops are made to read supplications, for: a) the dead monks of the monastery, b) all the Christians of the world, c) the participants of the litany, d) the dead of the world, e) the monks who live in the monastic structures that belong to the monastery (metochia) and f ) the people (monks and laymen) who serve the monastery. The locations of these stops are not specific, but relate to how the tupikaris (the monk in charge of the rituals) is going to divide the distance into seven different parts (Figs. 4.5 and 4.6). Based on the archetype of journey these circular rituals mark the spaces through the choreographical inscription of a new temporary zone in the open spaces of the monasteries; a kind of ritual walking through the monastery that changes its atmosphere adding to the hesychast character of the place. Each of these zones has its own aural character that introduces ritual characteristics into the silent soundscape of the monastery.

76 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 4.5  Mapping of the Easter Monday litany. (Drawing by the author)

At each stop of the procession, this character changes temporarily as a short service is held with readings, chanting and censing. The different sounds (chanting, censing, bell ringing) penetrate the boundaries of the surrounding wings up to a point, dynamically interacting with their silent qualities. Most of them are empty during these three rites as the monks are also participating in them. Only the sound of the Easter Monday procession can be perceived by people who happen to be in the area of the port and the uphill footpath at the moment when the procession exits the monastery and starts ascending towards the house of the vineyard. Nevertheless, the ringing of the bell (either sombre or joyful) reaches the wider area of the monastery, informing people not in

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

77

Fig. 4.6  Photographs from an Easter Monday litany. (Courtesy of Gregoriou Monastery)

attendance of the progress of the ceremony. Hence, whereas usually only the sound of visitors talking interrupts the physical perception of silence, rhythmical ritual sounds also enter into it.

78 

C. Kakalis

You see, it is like the ‘sacred’ coming out from the katholikon. The courtyard and the slope become a church. Your perception of these courtyards changes and you want to become part of the procession: to go through the monastery sharing the chanting, the censing, the emotion and the common feast. To my mind litany is a ritual walking through the monastery.33

Silence and communal ritual create, thus, a liturgical atmosphere. Journeys of personal and communal prayer are combined in a hesychast narrative of ascetic quests. The monastery becomes a ‘spatial icon’ composed of different religious metaphors that is in a constant state of pulse as a result of these movements. Visitors are allowed to attend these communal rituals in the courtyards if they happen to be there. As observers of an unfamiliar performance, they can become either participants or audience members. Pilgrims and religious tourists are more likely to participate in the religious processions, whereas cultural and recreational tourists usually remain distant, watching and listening to the ‘picturesque’ qualities of the procession. This ritual atmosphere changes not only because of the increasing number of visitors, but also because of the use of a number of technological devices, such as mobile phones and the internet, which for the monks is still controllable. On the one hand, visitors have the ability to use cutting-­edge mobile communication devices that are constantly connected with the outside world, which until very recently was relatively difficult. On the other hand, a small number of monks are also allowed to use a mobile phone. Whereas their use may not disturb the silence-­ scape of the monastery, it does change the way space is perceived in it, which is particularly evident if we think of the possibility of two monks in the same community using their mobile phones to communicate. Reducing the role of bodily interaction with the environment, this adds a sense of digital attunement to place that alters the concrete experience of the topography. Therefore, changes in the perception of space that happened at least twenty years ago in the outside world are happening now in the Athonite realm, bringing into question the way space and

 Conversation with Visitor G., fieldwork, August–September 2012.

33

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

79

time are perceived, and adding telecommunications to the ways of experiencing them. At 21:30 every night the bell rings, informing monks and visitors that sounds should stop in the monastery. The gate closes and the visitors staying at the external guesthouse have to leave. Rarely, monks move silently in the courtyard at night, either preparing the meal for the coming day or finishing another task. The only sounds heard during this time are from the birds and the wind. Hence, the void between the concrete boundaries of the monastery is never totally empty, as even silence (including the sounds of nature) forms an active gesture in the topography. Darkness reinforces the silence by introducing a ‘silence of sight’. Together, the senses create an immaterial sphere of solitude in which the monks pray silently in their cells. Space and time become ambiguous in this nocturnal experience, as everything seems mysterious and remote. The monk knows that this void is not empty, however, but a field for hesychast practice. Without vision, it is difficult for us to express ourselves through speech. We are inclined to whisper or to remain quiet and feel our surroundings through hearing, touch and smell. It is usually during night that most of us practise our canon.34

The monks’ nocturnal recitations of their prayer enables them to measure the passage from one day to the next, until the sound of the talanton invites them again to the morning Liturgy.

4.3 The Cells, the Silent Courtyard and the Talanton Rite Silence has for us two interwoven layers. An external one, the absence of noise or the “silence of the senses”, and an inner one during which the monk practises inner prayer, aiming at a communion with God (theosis). The practice of silence is a passage to a more active listening to God that is both external and internal and pervades our whole life. In the silence of our cells we conduct our 34

 Conversation with Monk L, fieldwork, August–September 2012.

80 

C. Kakalis

canon (κανόνας); our personal prayer  – invocation of the Jesus Prayer and prostrations. The rituals in the courtyards follow this hesychast understanding. When I hear the morning talanton I do not stop my canon and at the same time I am aware the coming service.35

The relationship of the cells to the general organisation of the whole monastery is very important in Athonite life. The cell is a part of the whole that to a great extent defines the identity of the monk who inhabits it, allowing him to distance himself from the shared spaces and work on personal prayer and self-examination. The cell as the built framework of the monk’s silent worship is connected—for hesychasm—to the gradual transformation of his body into a ‘cell’ in which his soul aspires to a conversation with God. This is also found in the way cells were inhabited by the desert fathers, as this is depicted in their biographies.36 For this reason, the cells are usually in the non-western parts of the monastery wall. The repetition of the same simple unit of a small rectangular room was the general plan for this part of the Athonite monasteries; they are organised in buildings called kordes. This word stems from the Latin ‘chorda or the ancient Greek (χορδή – chordi), which means ‘a piece of string that joins the ends of an arc’ and relates to the construction of the buildings around the centrally situated katholikon, which enhances the symbolic connection of the monastery to the model of Heavenly Jerusalem. The movement from the kordes to the courtyard is enabled via an arcade called (emvolon—έμβολον) or (heliakon—ηλιακόν).37 This is a balcony that acts as an intermediate zone between the building and the courtyard.38 Initially, the cells were small rooms with an entrance and an opening towards the arcade. They were arrayed beside each other along the length of the korda. The interior was, and still is, very simple, designed to meet the basic needs of a monk: study, individual prayer and some hours of rest.  Conversation with onk L., fieldwork, August–September 2012.  Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, ‘The Geography of the Monastic Cell in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature’, Church History, 78/4 (December 2009), pp. 756–791. 37  The Holy Mountain: A Millennium of Orthodox Spirituality and Art (Athens: Karakotsoglou Editions, 1960), p. 69. 38  Sherrard, Athos – The Mountain of Silence, pp. 47–48. 35 36

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

81

Fig. 4.7  The exterior of a kodra at Gregoriou Monastery (left) and the interior of a cell at Gregoriou Monastery (right). (Photographs by the author)

Over the years, the network of cells has acquired various forms, falling into three main types. Some of them are rectangular rooms that protrude from the wall. Others are autonomous units of buildings, and finally there are also some integrated into the wall, identifiable only by windows (Fig. 4.7).39 New qualities are added to the meaning of the central wall(s) that are also related to the practice of silent prayer. The wall is expanded through the attachment of kordes to it. Envelopes of monks’ isolation add to the meaning of these walls, co-existing with the movements of the monks and the visitors through the gate. The use of stone from the surrounding environment and the organic configuration of the whole, make these parts of the monastery seem like the result of the abstraction of material from the concrete wall, rather than the addition to it, as their meaning is connected to the way in which the void is filled by the body of the monk. As already mentioned, in the cell the monk conducts his daily canon. Silence as the absence of sound and vision already manifests the active participation of the body in this process. Moreover, constant repetition of the Jesus Prayer is combined with the rhythms of breathing and the posture of the body. For example, the monk may pray kneeling and/or 39

 See also: Quinn, ‘Drawing on Mount Athos’, pp. 34–35.

82 

C. Kakalis

looking to the sky, or seated on a low stall and bowing his head (foetal position). A specific number of prostrations is also included in his canon. In Gregoriou monastery, each monk should say 1200 recitations of the prayer and make 120 prostrations daily.40 The constant invocation of a phrase creates a sense of stillness that can be also enhanced by atmospheric silence and darkness, as it is usual for the hesychasts to conduct their personal prayer at night or in a dark environment. It is important to underline again that hesychast silent prayer is a journey of prayer to the individual’s inner self that can be practised in different ways. It may be individually practised at specific times of day (more ‘structured’ and closer to a personal meditational technique), practised during communal rituals or in a more spontaneous way, freely repeating the prayer during the course of the day (a state of constant repetition), or it may be something that changes the individual’s perception of the environment, adding to the meaning of art, architecture and the natural landscape.41 Through the more strenuous and structured practice of silent prayer in his cell the ascetic aims to achieve the constant invocation of the prayer that follows him during his daily life, giving a new sense of order to his interaction with the world. During its course, the body of the monk who spends a specific period of time daily only on the invocation of the prayer is relatively static, set in the same position and concentrated on its inner stillness. Nevertheless, his environment keeps changing following the rhythms of the sun, the alterations in temperature, and different intensities of wind and sounds. This process may result in a sense of detachment from the mundane world, a gradual movement towards the interior of the self and preparation for the possible communion with the divine. On the other hand, the other two categories may lead to a more active interaction with the world, allowing the incorporation of silent prayer in daily monastic life, as we will also see in the following chapters.

 Fieldwork at Mount Athos, 2010–2012.  Kallistos Ware, ‘Introduction’, in Igumen Chariton of Valamo, The Art of Prayer: An Orthodoxy Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), pp. 22–26; Father Joseph Wong, ‘The Jesus Prayer and Inner Stillness’, Religion. East and West, 10, October 2010, p. 45. 40 41

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

83

At the moment of theosis, the “rapture” as it is called, the individual goes beyond the limits of his body, beyond space and time. He lives in a condition of a vibrating voiceless presence, an ecstatic situation. It is only through silence that this peak event can be expressed.42

Through its openings, the cell is connected to the rest of the monastery. Entering and exiting from the cell is relevant both to individual and communal prayer. In the conduct of the personal canon of the monk, community life is also reflected, and vice versa. The small cell carries qualities of the experience of the church; they are liturgically connected through the significance of silent prayer in both of them. The door of the cell, therefore, is also an important threshold in the life of the monastery, as passage through it allows connection between the public and the private. Its ‘semi-permeable’ character is very important for the experience of the space. In this sense, the monk dwelling in the cell is able to pass through the door, but usually permits entrance only to the other monks, excluding the visitor from interaction with his individual space. Therefore, when a wing of cells is attached to public areas of a monastery, there is usually a kind of barrier that keeps visitors outside. Signs addressed to visitors that read ‘No Entrance’, ‘Keep Quiet’, ‘Monastic Cells’ are usual in the case of Gregoriou, indicating the quiet zones of the complex and highlighting the importance of atmospheric silence within it. In Gregoriou monastery, the cells are small rectangular rooms that may be divided into two smaller spaces. A bed, a table and a chair are usually the only pieces of furniture, though in some cases a bookcase is allowed. On the door usually hangs the icon of the saint in whose honour the monk has taken his name. The cell becomes an absolutely closed space only when it is not inhabited. Its occupation entails the opening to a common life framework as the monk is alone and at the same time part of the living brotherhood.43 Besides the communication with the silence of the courtyards (ensures the required atmospheric silence for the conduct of prayer), the monastic cells also communicate with the open spaces through daily sonic rites 42 43

 Conversation with Monk L. of the Gregoriou Monastery, fieldwork, August–September 2012.  Results of fieldwork, August–September 2011.

84 

C. Kakalis

that inform the monks of the progress of rituals held in the church and the refectory. Acoustic signs therefore play an important role in the experience of the Athonite topography, demonstrated in the cases of the talanton, the semantron and the bell, three instruments that dynamically contribute to the liturgical life of the monastery.44 In this sense, the calls to the services are given by the talanton (τάλαντον), which is a wooden board. A monk carries the talanton, walking around the monastery and beating it with a wooden hammer, calling other monks and visitors to attend the service. According to R.M. Dawkins, the talanton symbolises Noah’s hammer. As ‘the noise made by Noah’s carpentry reminded men of their danger from the flood’, so the talanton calls monks to participate in the rituals in the church, the entrance to which will signal their possible salvation.45 Moreover, the beating usually follows the rhythmic repetition of the word Adam, reminding the monks of their fallen nature. A smaller metal talanton, called the simantron (σήμαντρον), symbolising the angel’s trumpet which the ‘chosen ones’ will hear on the Day of Judgment, is also used to signal the congregation of the monks, usually for Matins. At 03:30 the talanton and the simantron call the monks of Gregoriou monastery to the morning service that will begin half an hour later. The talanton defines its own horizon, signalling the liturgies. Father N. explains: ‘The talanton is used on a variety of occasions. It signals the morning and the afternoon services. Half an hour before their beginning, the ekklisiastikos (εκκλησιαστικός) wears a robe that is connected to his task (he takes care of the church),46 and carries the talanton, striking it rhythmically and passing through the two main courtyards of the monastery. The same is repeated two more times’.47 Space and time are thus experienced in a liturgical way through the use of these instruments.  Talanton: A piece of wood (length: about 2.00  metres, thickness: around 0.03  metres, width: about 0.12 metres); Kopanos: Also a wooden instrument (3.00 × 0.30 × 0.15 metres); Semantron: A metal bar usually placed next to the kopanos. 45  R.M.  Dawkins, ‘Notes on Life in the Monasteries of Mount Athos’, The Harvard Theological Review, 46/4 (October 1953), pp. 217–219. 46  The ekklisiastikos is the monk in charge of taking care of the katholikon (ekklhsia = εκκλησία = church). 47  Field trip to Mount Athos, June 2010. 44

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

85

Sound is spread throughout the whole monastery, conveying a certain message, while its source follows a specific route around the katholikon. During the morning service, the talanton also informs the devotees of the passing from the Mesoniktikon to Matins and from the latter to the Holy Mass, inscribing this liturgical form on the whole monastery in sound. The practice of silence is a passage to a more active listening to God that is both external and internal and impregnates our whole life. In the silence of our cells we conduct our canon (κανόνας), our personal prayer. Invocation of Jesus Prayer and prostrations. The rituals in the courtyards follow this hesychast understanding. When I hear the morning talanton I do not stop my canon and at the same time I am aware for the coming service.48

The ekklisiastikos thus makes circular movements around the katholikon, following the ranges of the different courtyards. The hammering of the talanton aims to connect the monks to a common goal, the achievement of theosis through liturgical life, directing their senses to the church. This movement narrates the fusion of different stories: the monastery and its surrounding landscape, the life of the monks and the experience of the pilgrims. Τhe acoustic synthesis of the talanton with the rest of the percussion instruments (bells and simantron) enhances these connections, contributing to this sacred communicative landscape. The talanton is not heard outside the walls of the monastery, excluding the visitors staying in the external guesthouse from its soundscape (Fig. 4.8). According to Richard Coyne, repetitive sounds contribute to the clearer demarcation of a territory as they create a rhythmical sonic environment in which the individual is able to move and realise its spatiality.49 The monk listens to the repetitive sound of the talanton that periodically switches from louder to softer, depending on where the ekklisiastikos is. On the one hand, this sound reminds the monk about the beginning of the service like an alarm clock. On the other hand, he has the opportunity to turn acoustically towards the katholikon, or the edges of the courtyard, following also the progress/evolution of the liturgy, even  Conversation with Monk L., fieldwork, August–September 2012.  Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place: Sociable Places and Pervasive Digital Media (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 91–99. 48 49

86 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 4.8  Mapping of a Talantor Rite at Gregoriou Monastery. (Drawing by the author)

if he is not in the church. The repetition gives him time to interpret the sound and prepare himself for the service while also being connected with the rest of the community. Therefore, bells also contribute to the soundscape of the monastery, including monks and visitors in its territory and at the same time working as a sonic boundary between different parts of the daily programme of the monks: indicating the beginning of a ritual or a meal. Usually situated close to the main church, the bell tower enhances the dynamics of the monastic core. At the same time, it directs the hearing of monks and visitors towards the katholikon, guiding both the locals and the outsiders towards it. The close relationship of the

4  The Monastery and the Cell 

87

main church to the refectory, both in architectural and liturgical terms, is also supported by the placement of the bell tower close to them. Finally, the sound of the bells interacts with the general periphery of the monastery, as they are supposed to acoustically define that space.50 The monastery therefore embodies important religious ideas. Besides its primary symbolic connection to the model of Heavenly Jerusalem, its perception involves an active communication with hesychasm practised by the monks and the embodied understanding of the visitors. The zone between the natural landscape and the monastery is an in-between filter of preparation and waiting. Pervading the atmosphere of the open spaces of the monastery, silence supports the performance of silent prayer in the cell. At the same time, the daily sonic signals communicate with the silently praying monk, informing him about the daily programme and the progress of the rituals. Furthermore, annual liturgical processions connect the different open spaces of the territory, giving new meanings to openings passed through, and also to the specific places in which they pause. Therefore, between the concrete elements of the territory a meaningful aural environment exists, in which silence and communal ritual movements co-exist, re-defining the notions of void and emptiness.

 For the acoustic perception of the bell, see also: Alain Corbin, ‘Auditory Markers of the Village’, in Michael Bull and Les Back (eds), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2004), pp. 117–125. 50

5 The Main Church (Katholikon)

Silent prayer and communal ritual are organically interconnected in the liturgical experience of the main church (katholikon) of Gregoriou. Unfolding the significance of bodily perception to the architectural experience of the katholikon, this chapter also highlights the meaning of its atmospheric components. The church functions as an active field in which the various liturgical choreographies take place. The participants interact with each other and with the architecture through the performance of the services. The stalls, the visual interaction with the iconography, the flow of natural and artificial light, ritual movements and sound all play a significant role in the different liturgical choreographies. While tangible, the stall provides a place for the practice of silent prayer by the monks and their embodied experience of the rituals, contributing conditions of stillness to them and allowing for a dynamic interaction between individual and communal worship. Adding to this, gazing at the saints and events from the scriptures depicted on the walls adds to the atmosphere of the place, as their tangibility is connected to the intangibility of seeing. Through the illumination of the importance of silent prayer and communal ritual in the hesychast inhabitation of an Athonite church, the essay seeks also to contribute to the relevant academic discourse on the role of the immaterial and the ephemeral in the architectural experience. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_5

89

90 

C. Kakalis

5.1 The Katholikon Demonstrating the significance of the katholikon in the life of the community are the three main daily services take place there: the morning service (Mesoniktikon, Matins and Divine Liturgy), Vespers and Compline. Moreover, in the same space the all-night vigils, special rituals of the festive calendar, the initiation rites and funerals of the monks are also conducted. The plan of the Athonite katholikon is an Orthodox cross inscribed in a square, with side apses (triconchial), a broad narthex (λιτή—lite) and, often also, an outer narthex. The inscribed cross forms a nave, choirs and transepts. The intersection of choir and transepts is roofed by a dome, symbolising in the Christian tradition man’s vertical movement towards God, while the horizontal sequence of the narthex, nave and chancel is a reminder of the communal identity of the monk, as the different spaces are divided and united at the same time through the liturgies.1 It is always the ritual that performs the built metaphors of this model through their synthesis into a spatio-temporal choreography. Art and architecture are dynamically interconnected according to the employment of the ritual praxis as experienced by the participants. For Nicoletta Isar, the platonic notion of chora plays a key role in this process, as it relates to a liturgical choreography in which the ritual movement, the devotees and the sacred space (either built or part of the natural landscape) are united into ‘a living space of presence and participation’.2 Critically appraising Isar’s theory, Bissera Pentcheva underlines the active contribution of aural elements, such as psalmody and censing, in a liturgical choreography of the church through the inscription of sonic boundaries and aural intermediate zones. Byzantine architecture began as the active context of human liturgical movement. The centrally organised plans, consolidated as a common church pattern during the Middle Byzantine period, with their vaulted surfaces and the carefully placed openings give the devotees the opportunity to perform the Christian drama. In this sense, from the sixth century, rituals have mainly been conducted in the  Giorgos Prokopiou, The Cosmological Symbolism of the Architecture of the Byzantine Church (Athens: Pirinos Kosmos, 1990), pp. 105–109. 2  Nicoletta Isar, ‘Chora: Tracing the Presence’, Review of European Studies, 1/1 (2009), pp. 39–55. 1

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

91

church (previously, they were also linked to processions in the city), disclosing the choric dynamics of a whole religious matrix of tangible and intangible elements.3 Following this dynamic tradition, the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery is based on the liturgical interconnection of different spaces that are hierarchically organised: the narthex, the lite, the main church and the chapel of St Gregory. Not all of the participants are allowed to see all the rituals of the services, with the visitors mostly sitting in the two narthexes, the monks in the main church, and only the priests and the deacons having the ability to participate in the events in the chancel. Silent prayer and communal rituals are interconnected to express the aforementioned liturgical dynamics of the place. Sitting at their stalls and silently practising the Jesus Prayer, monks participate in the daily services, dynamically interacting with the celebrant and the communal ritual movements. The flow of the natural and artificial light contributes to the event, embodying important hesychast ideas. In parallel, repetitive ritual choreographies and ritual sounds (instrumental sonic signs, chanting and readings) unite the different components of the place into a liturgical whole.

5.2 Stillness The bodily presence of the monk in the liturgies is defined to a point by the use of his stall, the stasidi. Etymologically, the word stasidi stems from the Greek word stasis, meaning both ‘to stop’ and ‘the way your body stands’. Combining the notion of stagnation with posture, the word stasidi denotes the exact function the piece of furniture performs: it works as the location of a more static, but not totally motionless, active presence of the monks in the services, which is impregnated by the constant recitation of the prayer. The analysis of Gregoriou church, therefore, opens with the examination of a tangible element, a seat, which also contributes to the atmospheric qualities and meaning of the space. For the monks of Gregoriou, its tangibility is mainly realised through physical experience, as  Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), p. 55. 3

92 

C. Kakalis

it suggests different body postures that follow the monks’ prayer and the progress of the Liturgy. Stillness as an important intangible quality of an Athonite church, therefore, regards the condition of a silent vigilance of the monks produced by the rare changes of posture combined with the rhythmical repetition of the prayer, which also influences the dramaturgy that is organised to allow its constant invocation. I usually advise younger monks and novices to stand upright, leaning against the sides of the stasidi during the services, and keep their mind on the [silent] prayer. The prayer is intertwined with the services. When one stands upright one is always attentive both of the prayer and the liturgy.4

Each monk should sit at a specific stasidi in the katholikon, usually attributed to him after his initiation. One of the monks is in charge of keeping the ‘order’ in the liturgy (the tepikaris), checking if the monks sit in their stasidia, if they are awake and if they stand properly. Therefore, if an outsider sits in the stasidi of a monk who may not be in the church at that time, the tepikaris usually asks him to sit in another one. The strictness of the application of this rule is not the same in all of the monasteries. For example, whereas in Simonopetra monastery the order is consistently kept, in Gregoriou monastery the application of the rule is mostly connected to the main church and the chancel. The stasidia, arranged in rows, follow the north, south and west walls of the katholikon. Based on an event from Exodus, they allow the monks to sit in specific attitudes, contributing to the practice of hesychasm. Sitting in their stalls, the monks of the monastery participate in the communal ritual through constant silent prayer. In particular, the structure of the stasidia is based on the sudden attack to which the Jews were subjected when crossing the desert, by the Amalekites. Moses fled to God through prayer, asking for a victory. As Moses was praying, standing upright with his hands outstretched, the Israelites were winning. When Moses was sitting on the ground with his hands down, the Amalekites had the advantage. For this reason, the Jews placed a large stone against which Moses leant, and his two hands were  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015.

4

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

93

each supported by a person (Exodus 17:9–14). The stasidi recollects this attempt to communicate with God, allowing the worshipper to stand in three different attitudes. In the first one, the worshipper stands upright with his hands outstretched. In the second one, he is able to sit at an angle, and in the third one, he can sit properly. Each stasidi is a subspace of the church that defines the silent sphere of the monk, also allowing him to physically interact with the space and the activities. Sitting in different postures, the monks usually keep their head bowed and sometimes lower their hood, trying not to be disturbed by what they see, while the rhythmical movement of the prayer rope in their hand reflects the repetition of the prayer. For the monks of Gregoriou monastery the stasidi plays, therefore, an important role in their lives. For some of them it is considered to be one of the three spaces that temporarily ‘belongs’ to them during their stay at Athos, along with their cell and grave. They feel that it is part of their Athonite identity, rigidly defining their presence in the liturgical understanding of monastic life. ‘Making us feel independent hypostases and at the same time active members of the community’, Monk M. characteristically argues, ‘the stasidia contribute to the realisation of the active co-existence of individual and communal levels of monastic life’.5 At the same time, the suggested postures become the monks’ habitual way of participating in the liturgies. For Monk A., his stasidi is his ‘earthly grave’ where ‘constant invocation of the prayer and active participation in the services feels as natural. Our bodies are used to the postures suggested by it and it makes sense to us to sit and pray in it [he stretches out his hands to demonstrate]’.6 Bridging the tangible and the intangible, the stasidi is something more than a simple seat. It is a place of individual prayer, organically incorporated into the communal identity of the church, the hesychast symbolic associations of which are also performed through its use. Different from a totally static condition, the silent presence of the monk is closer to a situation of rhythmical vibration of vigilance and alertness that dynamically intercommunicates with the rest of the activities happening within the space (Fig. 5.1).

 Monk M., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012.  Monk A., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012.

5 6

94 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 5.1  The silence-scape of the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery. (Drawing by the author)

5.3 Seeing Representations of saints and events from the Scripture adorn the walls of the church and are venerated by monks and outsiders.7 Visual interaction is included in the possible ways in which monks carry out their daily worship, either alone in the cell (which may also be adorned with portable icons) or during communal rituals. The monks are not obliged to look at icons during the services. Nevertheless, looking at them is an action  Margaret Kenna, ‘Icons in Theory and Practice: An Orthodox Christian Example’, History of Religions, 24/4 (May 1985), p. 349. 7

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

95

harmoniously incorporated into the liturgical performance of the church as being theologically connected to the idea of ‘spiritual contemplation’. Physical awareness of the importance of the icons in the liturgies is also fulfilled through repetitive rituals of veneration (when entering the church, when exiting, and before Holy Communion), during which the monks make prostrations in front of them, and kiss them. In particular, icons according to the Orthodox Christian Church are connected to the notion of prosopon, which activates a relationship between the members of the Body of Christ, the Church. Prosopon, literally meaning ‘the face’, is a way of existence for Orthodox Christianity defined by the mutual interpenetration of the three Divine Hypostases of the Holy Trinity (alliloperichoresis: making space for the other). Etymologically connected to the idea of the gaze and divine contemplation, this approach emphasises the co-existence of the individual and communal aspects of each human, who is also a being-in-relation, an active member of the Church.8 Representing the faces of sanctified/transfigured individuals, icons therefore involve two basic qualities: the ‘ascent’ into the heavenly realm and the ‘descent’ into the earthly realm. The descent relates to the Orthodox approach of symbolism, as its aim is to transform the real image into an embodiment of otherworldly experience in which the individual is engaged through acts of worship.9 Icons are not considered to be mere copies or reminders of an original; they are actively connected to it through the devotee’s veneration. Icons are objects that contribute to the service of the sacraments, preparing the devotee to receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. The contribution of the icon is activated through this interaction with the individuals, the architecture and the rituals. Embodied sensual perception plays a key role in this process as, according to St Theodore the Studite, it activates the imagination of the receiver, preparing him for a possible communication with  For the notion of prosopon in Orthodox Christianity see: John Zizioulas, Being as a Communion in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Press, 1985). 9  See also: Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, translated by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Press, 1996), p. 45: […] a common pattern holds everywhere […] the soul is raised up from the visible to where visibility itself vanishes and the field of the invisible opens: such is the Dionysian sundering of the bonds of the visible. And after soaring up into the invisible, the soul descends again into the visible – and then and there, before its very eyes, are those real appearances of things: ideas. This is the Apollonian perspective on the spiritual world.

8

96 

C. Kakalis

its sacred associations: ‘The depicted body is present in the icon, not as to its nature, but only as regards a relation [schesis]. […] [It] is present to a greater or lesser degree, according to the analogy of the receiving nature. Should someone say that God is present in this manner also in the icon, it would not be false.’10 Alexei Lidov characteristically describes the shrinking of the distance between the image and its viewer through their performative interaction. These ‘spatial icons’, as he calls them, are meaningful images performed in space and time, the character of which is different from their traditional understanding as one-to-one flat material depictions of a person, an event or a model described in sacred texts. They are spatiotemporal representations of religious ideas based on the comprehensive interconnection of the different components of a sacred field (art, architecture, light, fragrances, music and so forth). They are in constant movement, as their ritual performance and the individuals’ perception are organically mingled.11 The way in which icons are conceived and synthesised contributes to the liturgical experience of Christian Orthodox life. The linear perspective is usually reversed, with the vanishing point towards the side of the viewer. The represented faces seem to come out of the painting, inviting the devotee into a more active relationship. According to Christian Orthodox tradition, the vanishing point coincides with the heart of the viewer. This aims to highlight the important role that they play in Christian life. The use of one background colour (usually gold) contributes to the process, replacing to an extent any other additions and allowing the iconographic syntheses to adjust to the available surfaces without the Byzantine (reversed) perspective being changed. The background colour functions also as a common canvas on which the different faces (prosopa) or syntheses of events from the Scriptures symbolise the active presence of the originals in the liturgy.12 The other colours are usually bright. The effect of the  Jacques Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca (Paris, 1857), pp. 225–226.  Alexei Lidov, ‘Spatial Icons: The Miraculous Performance with the Hodegetria of Constantinople’ in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Hierotopy: Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Progress-tradition, 2006), pp.  325–372; Alexei Lidov, ‘The Byzantine World and Performative Spaces’, in Alexei Lidov (ed.), Spatial Icons: Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Indrik, 2011), p. 17. 12  Paul Evdokimov, Orthodoxy (Athens: Rigopoulos Editions, 1965), p. 306. 10 11

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

97

lack of shading (lack of black-and-white combined with the use of gold) is to depict the ideas of the transfiguration of the being and the eternal Sun (God).13 The icon is connected, therefore, to the liturgical theology of presence. It ‘presents’,14 (now) historically testified events of transfiguration and leads to the future and the Second Coming through interaction with the devotee.15 In this temporal framework, the wall is something more than a built limit, as it involves an embodied hesychast practice through visual interaction with the paintings on it. Yes, it is not compulsory for the monk to repeat in his mind everything that he knows about icons. They are always there, reminding him the presence of the saints either consciously or not. For a reason, we take for granted their living presence and never challenge it. To gaze at them is just a reaffirmation of this.16

Eastern Christian iconography is, therefore, connected to silence and hesychasm. Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that icons were already connected to a ‘contemplative silence’ after the iconoclastic defeat of 843, allowing the Eastern Christian Church to offer different routes towards a communication with God along with the communal liturgy.17 Whereas a sense of movement is included in the synthesis through the reversed ­perspective and the dynamics of the view, different elements of their creation and organisation on the walls disclose a sense of a ‘sudden pause’, a gap opened to attract the gaze of the viewer and activate a dynamic dialogue with him.18 Moreover, focus on the depiction of the gazes and lack of shading give a ‘sense of rest’ and ‘stillness’ to the icon that is communicated to the individual, especially in the katholikon where repetitive painted pairs of similar eyes look towards the void at the centre of the space. The scant morning light usually illuminates their faces first.  Ibid., p. 307.  Ibid., p. 299. 15  Ibid., p. 300. 16  Monk L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015. 17  Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon, p. 55. 18  Elsa Johnson, ‘Hesychasm, Iconography and Tintinnabulation: Reflections on Art, Music and Theology’, Anamnesis, 4 (2007), p.  12: http://www2.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/bwilkens/ Page.../JohnsonElsa.doc 13 14

98 

C. Kakalis

Therefore, one perceives a combination of human figures placed one next to the other and behind the stasidia that are inhabited by the silent monks and visitors. The individual has the ability to interact with these painted faces in an active way as the lighting changes, directing his gaze from a group of faces, to a specific one or to an event represented higher up the walls. When he looks at the adorned walls, he may also see the silent figure of a monk or a visitor sitting in a stall, which enhances the dynamics of the icon. Dark painted human figures are incorporated into a voiceless interrelationship. Hence, even if they don’t really know how to ‘read’ the iconographic programme, monks from Gregoriou monastery argue that it becomes an embodied recollection of the presence of the saints in the liturgies. You can see their gazes and slightly recognise their figures. Even if you don’t know or remember the names of the saints depicted, you learn how to remember that they are there with you. Most of us feel grateful for the dark iconography. I can always see a brother praying beside me and in front of the large figure of the saint-protector of our monastery.19

5.4 Light The use of natural and artificial light works with the spatio-temporal environment of the church, illuminating some of its religious aspects connected to the idea of the ‘uncreated light’. The use of light in Christian worship, through the arrangement of the windows in the church and the use of candlelight, has contributed to the performance of Christian ritual, connected to the idea of an invisible emitter (God) since medieval times. The dome is the most brightly illuminated part of the Athonite katholikon. Rows of windows, situated high along the drum, allow daylight to enter and become another active component of the katholikon’s environment. Light indicates the basic axes and illuminates the faint faces of the saints represented in frescoes, giving the impression of a mysterious source. According to the architectural historian, Iakovos Potamianos, during the  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, September, 2011.

19

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

99

movement from the narthex to the nave the devotee’s gaze follows a line that is initially horizontal and gradually turns upwards as he tries to discover the source of the light. The light here is coming from the chancel and the dome.20 Therefore, a light path is created that follows the central axis which connects the centrally placed domes of the different spaces (natherx–lite–main church) and the main entrances of the western (external and internal) walls, and the one of the iconostases in the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery. At the same time, this path is flanked by darker parts of the church, the edges of which are covered by stasidia looking towards the central axis, in some of which monks practise silent prayer. The central path carries important ritual movements as the main line towards the central dome and the iconstasis. The natural light is always present, repeatedly presenting itself and disappearing from our perception following the cycles of the day and the seasons, and is thus carried by the path even during the night through the expectation of the coming morning. Darkness thus plays an important role in the liturgical performance of the katholikon. It adds to the practice of silence, enhancing a sense of solitude (the silence of sight). Darkness is a boundary, as it demarcates the individual’s field of sight. It creates an immaterial subspace that may be slightly larger than the stasidi. This immaterial sphere changes as the day progresses and the interior of the church becomes more illuminated. Contributing to the experience of the church, darkness also influences the perception of different (natural or artificial) light-inscriptions. Lack of electrical light in the katholikon of Gregoriou monastery intensifies these cave-like qualities, highlighting the meaning of light in the rituals. Moreover, carefully orchestrated openings on the walls of the church allow the light to enter, sometimes following relatively prefigured routes depending on the time of the day and the season. Combined with the placement of the katholikon in the monastic complex (eastern orientation, location in relation to other buildings), this orchestration of the openings contributes to the specificities of the church’s atmosphere. In the case of the lite of Gregoriou monastery, a window on the north wall and two on  Iakovos Potamianos, The Light in the Byzantine Church (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2000, in Greek), p. 253. 20

100 

C. Kakalis

the south illuminate the space poorly, due to the proximity of the katholikon and the surrounding buildings. This enhances a dark, cave-­like atmosphere within the space. Light from the windows of the two domes is carefully directed to the wall paintings between the three doors that lead to the main church, usually connected to specific rituals. For example, during Vespers and the Supplication (held together in the evening), the face of the Mother of God, to whom the latter service is offered, is illuminated. Wax and oil candles also contribute to the liturgical events as kind of light instruments that direct the individual to look at certain parts of the church and participate in events there. They interact with the boundaries that demarcate the space(s) by illuminating specific icons or frescoes, and following some of the major sub-services of the liturgies. According to the theologian Andrew Louth, the artificial light of oil candles is also connected to the idea of the ‘uncreated light’. In this sense, according to an early Christian hymn sung in Vespers, the glory of the Holy Trinity is connected to the always-burning ‘joyful light’ of the sun. The oil candles symbolise the light of God experienced during theosis, also expressed through the interaction of the represented saints’ faces on the walls with the flames of the oil candles in front of them. A series of burning flames running in parallel with the walls of Gregoriou church create an atmosphere of mystery that influences the individuals’ participation in events. The limited light-sphere of each of them allows the participants to visually interact with the painted faces of the saints, becoming involved in a voiceless dialogue between live and represented human figures. Artificial light is also used to highlight some important rituals of the services, followed by sonorous elements such as chanting and reading. The light inscriptions in these cases are intense, directing the gaze of the participants to the places where they happen. A characteristic example is an Athonite rite called the ‘Chorus of Angels’, that is held during a part of the Mass in which the devotees express their active proximity to the angels by chanting. During this part of the service, the candles of a circular candelabrum hanging from the periphery of the dome (with the same diameter as the dome) are lit, and the whole is set in a smooth circular movement,

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

101

symbolising the angels and their live presence at the liturgy.21 In this sense, the chorus repeats the periphery of the dome, inscribing a moving lightboundary whose character is both spatial and temporal, and its role in the liturgy is quite important.22 It ‘gathers’ the gazes of the devotees around the dome and invites them to look towards both the internal edge of the dome on which the Almighty is represented, and the chancel. The role of light in the church is interpreted by the monks of Gregoriou monastery in different ways that disclose an active, almost organic, interaction with it. On the one hand, often combining silence with the tranquillity of the night and darkness, they feel that the early morning services (starting at four o’ clock in the morning) and the gradual natural illumination of the church allows them to keep the rhythm of their prayer. You enter the dark katholikon. You can hear the readings of the Mesoniktikon, but you cannot see very well. It is four o’ clock in the morning. You navigate yourself to a stasidi. You know where you are going to find it and you feel ­grateful when you sit and start the prayer, feeling almost alone in the thick darkness. By the time the light of the morning starts entering from the windows you have been immersed in the liturgy and silent prayer.23

In parallel, some of the monks are aware of the role of light in Christian theology and are able to communicate bodily with the relevant symbolisms. Their participation in the Holy Communion, for example, happening at the area of the central dome, is also connected to the lighting of the space. Movement from the darker parts of the church to the most illuminated ones is followed by participation in the most important ritual of the service. ‘Light coming from the dome represents God; whereas He cannot be seen, He can be felt through His energies. One knows that God is simultaneously known and unknown. Even the warmth of the light rays  Ibid.  This may also be connected to the important role of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre, the ritual significance of circular dance in Greek culture and the cosmic associations of the circular/ spherical scheme. On this see: J.W. Fitton, ‘Greek Dance’, The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 23/2 (November, 1973), pp. 254–274; Dagmar Motycka Weston, ‘Greek Theatre as an Embodiment of Cultural Meaning’, in Paul Emmons, John Hendrix and Jane Lomholt (eds), The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 7–11. 23  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015. 21 22

102 

C. Kakalis

that we feel is a reminder of this’, Father N. explains.24 Darkness and light are therefore interacting with hesychast worship, allowing an aural communication between silent prayer and communal ritual to happen. In this atmosphere, the monks praying in their stalls interpret the communicated messages, manifesting also the almost organic incorporation of the stasidi into the liturgical experience of the church.

5.5 Movement On entering an Athonite katholikon, the individual is thus able to participate in a liturgical event in which silent prayer and communal ritual movements reciprocally interact. Ritual movements unite everything into a meaningful whole, usually following circular routes and aurally inscribing them in the atmosphere. The idea of the Entrance plays a vital role in the whole process, carrying the liminal qualities of the Eucharist, which is believed to be the threshold between the members of the Church and the Kingdom of God. This is made even clearer by the fact that during the early Christian period, the circular rituals from the altar to the nave and back began from one church or even a public square, and in a processional walking through part(s) of the city reached the church where the Eucharist was going to be held.25 This change is also connected to the transformation of religious events into more theatrical ones during the Iconoclastic Controversy (eighth to ninth centuries). Initially, the ‘Entrance’ rituals were concerned with the processional gathering of the devotees in the church (Small Entrance) or the collection of the bread and the wine (the ‘offerings’) by them during the liturgy (Great Entrance). Since then, circular rituals have been held in the church, re-enacting the earlier ones and sharing with them important symbolic associations.26

 Father N. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, June 2010.  Khaled Anatolios, ‘Heaven and Earth in Byzantine Liturgy’, Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal, 5/3 (2000), p. 3. 26  Pavlos Koumarianos, ‘Symbol and Reality in the Divine Liturgy’, Synaxi, 711,999), pp. 22–37. 24 25

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

103

Therefore, the Orthodox Christian liturgy is organised around the Small Entrance and the Great Entrance, two rituals that enact the unity of the building through the openings of the iconostasis. The Small Entrance is a ritual held at the beginning of the service. The priest takes the Holy Gospel from the Holy Altar and goes out to the nave through the north opening of the iconostasis. He then goes to the east side of the building and stops in the middle of the church. He blesses the entrance and, raising up the Holy Gospel, sings: ‘With Wisdom, stand up’. Until the seventh century, this was the beginning of the Holy Liturgy, as the priest used to take the Gospel from the skeuofulakio,27 which was an independent building, and enter the church to signal the start of the service. The Great Entrance is conducted during the middle of the liturgy when the priest takes out the Holy Gifts, the bread and the wine, from the north entrance of the sanctuary. He then walks around in the church and enters the sanctuary through the main entrance to place the gifts on the altar, the holiest place in the church, on which the Eucharist is performed. It symbolises the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem through a cheering crowd only a few days before his sacrifice.28 The pivotal ritual during the liturgy is the Holy Eucharist, which is based on the event of the Mystical Supper and in which the bread and the wine are ritually transformed into the body and blood of Christ and received by the devotees.29 Besides these key Entrance choreographies, other movements take also place during the liturgies in an Athonite katholikon, like the ritual of the lite during the all-night vigils, the distribution of the antidoron (meaning blessed bread) at the end of the morning service, or the incense ritual. The latter is a characteristic ritual repeated during the services and inviting the individual to participate in the ritual even through the sense of smell, something common in a number of different religious traditions. The censing takes place in specific moments of the liturgy and follows certain routes in the church. Starting from the iconostasis, the monk  The room in which objects used in the services are kept.  Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (London: S.P.C.K., 1983). 29  Andrew Louth, ‘The Eucharist and Hesychasm, with Special Reference to Theophanes III, Metropolitan of Nicae’, in I. Perczel, R. Forrai and G. Geréby (eds), The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy: Issues of Doctrinal History in East and West from the Patristic Age to the Reformation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), pp. 199–205. 27 28

104 

C. Kakalis

hierarchically censes the rest of the icons and the congregation, calling them to participate in the common prayer. Ritual use of incense is found both in the Old and New Testaments (Exodus 30:34–38; Luke 1:9–11; Revelation 83–5) and was gradually incorporated into Christian liturgical life during the fourth and fifth centuries, enhancing the olfactory qualities of the religious experience.30 The incense symbolises the prayer of the devotees ascending to God, and God’s Grace poured into our souls.31 This is also depicted in the words read silently by the priest before every censing: ‘We offer unto Thee, Christ our God, this incense for an odour of spiritual sweetness which do Thou accept upon Thy most heavenly altar, sending down upon us in return the Grace of Thy Holy Spirit.’ The censer is an object composed of a metal vessel hung by chains with small bells that are connected at one end, in which incense is burnt.32 The ekklisiastikos of Gregoriou monastery holds it from this point and moves it rhythmically backwards and forwards while also moving around the church. Hence, the ritual of the censing of the katholikon inscribes the space both through human movement and sonic signs. The sound and the smoke are spread in the space, communicating with the participants’ senses of hearing and smell. Therefore, the monks are informed that they should stand up, get down off their stalls and wait with their heads bowed to be incensed. Opening their eyes to make these movements they can interact with the light shining on the clouds of incense hanging in the atmosphere of the katholikon. The shadows created by the censing appear to move the light towards the dome. Even when the movement of the ekklisiastikos has stopped and the small bells of the censer are muted, the  Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 75–83; Menahem Haran, ‘The Uses of Incense in the Ancient Israelite Ritual’, Vetus Testamentum, 10/2 (April 1960), pp.  113–129; Emanuel Schmidt, ‘Solomon’s Temple’, The Biblical World, 14/3 (September 1899), pp. 164–171; Paul Leslie Garbor, ‘Reconstructing Solomon’s Temple’, The Biblical Archaeologist, 14/1 (February 1951), pp. 1–24. 31  Reverend Father Theodore Ziton, ‘Liturgy and Life: The Use of Incense in Church’, World Magazine, publication of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (1968), electronic form: www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org 32  This is the most commonly used censer. However, there is another one known as katzion that has a church-like form with a handle underneath and bells along its periphery. The ekklesiastikos holds it and follows the movements described for the other type of censer. 30

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

105

incense is still there, silently interacting with the light and its symbolic associations. Besides the sonic sign, the incense also contributes to the inscription of a silent aural zone that fills the space afterwards, becoming an embodied recollection of a ritual ‘noisy’ procession that has just taken place. Following a circular movement, the rituals combine the components of the church into a whole. They inscribe routes in the church that embody key theological ideas (like the one of the Entrance) and may have a special aural character (as in the case of the incense). My fieldwork has shown that while the presence of the monk at the stasidi is relatively static, he actively contributes to the rituals. Monks of Gregoriou monastery argue that the repetition of the movements and the sounds (censer, chanting, readings, bells and other instruments) allows them to keep the rhythm of the prayer, while at the same time acoustically communicating the progress of the services. The involvement of smell adds another element of embodied participation in the liturgies. The voiceless presence of the incense also allows for the inner prayer to continue, and the interaction between the shadows and the movement of the light suggests an almost otherworldly atmosphere (Fig. 5.2).

5.6 Sound Meaningfully filling the atmosphere of the katholikon, different kinds of sounds also contribute to its multi-sensory experience during the liturgy: the ringing of the bells, the beating of the talanton (a wooden musical instrument), the kopanos (an immovable talanton) and the semantron (a metal instrument) enhance the perception of the monks. This is characteristically experienced during the morning service, the movement from one stage of which to the next is also followed by a combination of different sonorous markers. Half an hour before the morning service, therefore, the ekklisiastikos (the monk in charge of taking care of the church) rhythmically beats the talanton three times, making circular routes in the courtyards of Gregoriou monastery and around its katholikon, informing the monks who are still in their cells of the coming morning service. The third hammering signals the beginning of the Mesoniktikon (a preparatory

106 

C. Kakalis

Fig. 5.2  The lite ritual (left) and censing ritual (right). (Drawings by the author)

service that symbolises the division between the darkness of the monk’s previous life of ignorance and the illuminated one that he expects to experience through individual and communal hesychast practice). The passage from this service to Matins is followed by the rhythmic percussion of an immovable talanton (kopanos) and the simantron (a metal instrument) by the ekklisiastikos. At the end of Matins, he hammers the talanton again, making three circles around the katholikon. At the same time the priest goes to ring a small bell in the chancel, and all the monks in the stalls silently commemorate names of both living and dead people. The ekklsiastikos lights a special candelabra called drakontio, and the Holy Mass begins. During Matins and the Holy Mass, a number of incense rituals also take place, filling the space with their bell ringing. Sonic markers follow the narrative of the different ceremonies, informing the monks of their progress. They are important acoustic bonds between different ritual episodes that enhance the experience of the katholikon and sonically connect it to the rest of the complex. The monks sitting in their stalls have the ability to

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

107

navigate around the church either by following the sonorous route of the censer or by listening to the readings and the chanting, usually happening at the area in front of the iconostasis (choruses, royal entrance and so forth). Thus, they can perceive architecture without visually interacting with its concrete elements. This enhances the aural qualities of the place, adding to its hesychast atmosphere. The careful rhythmical repetition of these sounds allows the monks to continue the silent invocation of the prayer, harmonising their pace with them. This is also the case with chanting that follows a great part of the liturgy, thoughtfully incorporated into it to dynamically interact with the other components. For Ivan Moody, Christian liturgical music is a ‘sonorous icon’ created by the composer using a specific language, and performed by the chanters according to certain rules.33 Through the ritual repetition of similar melodies a rhythm is produced which aims to give the participants a sense of entering a different temporal environment with sacred associations. The eight modes of Byzantine chanting are combined with the ison (drone), a steadily accompanying sound of the previous note sung in parallel with a melody. Ison works as the common context in which the different tunes are synthesised, in the same way that the golden background contributes to the unity of an iconographic synthesis. Whereas ison plays the role of the keynote sound, the modes are sonic figures combined into a whole due to the dynamics of the ritual plot.34 In the Athonite katholikon, the choruses stand along the periphery of two apses (the choirs) that flank the central dome, giving the building its cruciform, triconchial, general plan. The concave walls of the church intensify the volume of the sound and direct it towards the rest of the space. Flow through the solid and void parts of the intermediate walls also contributes to the soundscape of the church, producing different intensities of sounds. Until the tenth century, the focus was on the meaning of the words chanted, which led to dialogic, responsorial and antiphonal performances of singing. The dynamic interaction between the meaning of the texts and the way they were chanted aimed at the ritualistic performance of the  Ivan Moody, ‘Liturgy, Music and Silence’, IberoSlavica 2011: A Yearbook, (International Society for Iberian-Slavonic Studies, CLEPUL5, 2011), p. 75. 34  Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), p. 9. 33

108 

C. Kakalis

notion of relationship: relationship between the different members of the community, and between them and God. Thus, according to St Basil: ‘[the monks] divide themselves into two groups, and sing psalms in alternation with each other … and then they entrust the lead of the chant to one person, while the rest sing in response’.35 During the Late Byzantine period, there was a kalophonic turn in Byzantine chanting that led to an ‘evolving freedom from the use of standard, traditional material; free invention; technical virtuosity, and replacement of old material with new […]’.36 More emphasis was on sound. Nevertheless, elements of the genuine liturgical framework of Orthodox chanting were preserved. During the past thirty years, Mount Athos has been trying to return to the first chanting tradition.37 Chanting in the communal services also includes the rotation of readings and psalms based on the notions of dialogue and repetition. The dialogue between the two choirs (representing the whole congregation), and between them and the priest is ritually enhanced by the repetition of parts of the service, leading to a dynamic process in which chanting and listening to it become parts of an embodied liturgical experience that also influenced the birth of the Athonite triconchial type.38 Hence, the two choruses of Gregoriou monastery enhance the dynamics of the intermediate zone between the nave and chancel, giving it sonorous qualities. The placement of the two choirs facing each other results in the creation of a stereophonic, dialogical sonic phenomenon that allows the sound to be merged with architecture in a harmonic way.39 The sound along this zone is louder than in the rest of the building, drawing the monks’ attention towards it. It is in this zone that the most important  Letter CCVIII, p.  32, as quoted in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); p. 68, as quoted in David Drillock, ‘Music in the Worship of the Church’, Jacob’s Well, 1996: http://www.jacwell.org/articles/1996-FALL-­ Drillock.html 36  Drillock, ‘Music in the Worship of the Church’. 37  See: Tore Tvarnø Lind, The Past is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos (Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), especially the chapter, ‘Musical Blossom’, pp. 37–74. 38  See: Drillock, ‘Music in the Worship of the Church’. 39  On this, see also: David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile Books, 2013), pp. 123–133. 35

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

109

rituals take place, culminating in its crossing during the Holy Communion, in which a sonic threshold is also created by the two choruses that flank the main entrance of the iconostasis. In parallel, sound also interacts with the concave external walls of the building, being amplified through inter-­ reflection on them and reverberating in its interior, flowing through the intermediate walls. Sound not only becomes a way to direct yourself to its source, but the different intensities of its echoes also provide a sonic perception of the surfaces that surround you. The individual feels part of an almost otherworldly environment in which sound is harmonically incorporated. Besides its seemingly antithetical relationship to the notion of silence, as an absence of sound, chanting also interacts with it through silent gaps, the rhythmical repetition of specific tones and the constant presence of the ison, a sonorous stillness that echoes/transposes the desired stillness of the repetition of Jesus Prayer. A characteristic way of communication between Byzantine chanting and silent prayer are the kratemata or teretismata. These relate to the prolongation of the melody by adding extra syllables to the words of the hymns. The result is a repetitive, almost monotonous sound that has no literal sense. This music practice was introduced in the fourteenth century, a period during which hesychasm was established as one of the main ascetic frameworks for Eastern Christianity. Connections of kratemata to ancient Greek ritual practices as substitutes for musical instruments that accompanied them are possible but not historically confirmed. Basing his argument on fieldwork at Mount Athos, the ethnomusicologist Tore Tvarnø Lind suggests that these ‘[seemingly] nonsense syllables’ acquire a paradoxical meaning through their communication with the silence of the monks. For the writer, the paradoxical co-existence of meaning and ‘nonsense’ in these phrases supports the silent participation of the monks, as they become a sonic path that is able to carry their internal constant prayer, and it orients them eastwards, towards where the Eucharist is held.40 This was also confirmed during my fieldwork, with the monks of Gregoriou highlighting in my conversations with them the importance of

40

 Lind, The Past is Always Present, p. 182.

110 

C. Kakalis

the regular rhythm of chanting kratemata in the practice of silent prayer.41 Breaking the normal vocal code, the teretismata and the silent gaps are also connected to negative theology.42 Their chanting has an intense performative character, as what is said is also acted: a choral transposition of the meaningful co-existence of polarities such as knowing and not-­knowing, sensible and not-sensible. Monks from Gregoriou monastery often refer to how music and chanting suggest a path for the recitation of the prayer, at the same time, directing their hearing towards the chancel where the Eucharist takes place. As Monk L. characteristically mentioned: ‘We can put it this way: without rhythmical chanting everything would have been totally different in liturgy. Even the way that we practise prayer during the services’.43 Rhythmical repetition of sounds is harmonised with the rhythmical invocation of the Jesus Prayer. Furthermore, ison creates a common sonic background that helps the monks to concentrate on the prayer. Sonorous communal rituals and inner prayer are combined into a hesychast experience of the church that is also organically interrelated to the other aspects of monastic life. ‘This hesychast liturgy of the morning daily service is extended to the rest of the monastic life, allowing for a liturgy to take place after the liturgy’, as Father L. told me, describing this condition. ‘You will find sound being incorporated into our lives in a similar way, repetitive sounds that change in regular tempos, allowing for our inner prayer and practice of inner stillness to keep happening’.44 According to Monk Georgios, the late abbot of Gregoriou monastery, the different ways of worship in Athos have a dynamic character. This becomes clear during the services in the katholikon.45 For example, non-­ ceremonial movements of monks who are in charge of the practical needs  Characteristically, a monk said: ‘Isn’t it like breathing in and out the [Jesus] prayer when you listen to kratemata being repeated?’, fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012. 42  Moody, ‘Liturgy, Music and Silence’, pp. 75–81; Alexander Lingas, ‘Hesychasm and Psalmody’, in Anthony Bryer and Mary Cunningham (eds), Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism: Papers from the Twenty-eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham (Hampshire: Variorum, 1996), pp. 155–170. 43  Conversation with Monk L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015. 44  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012. 45  Archimandrite Georgios, Orthodox Monasticism and Mount Athos (Mount Athos: Holy Monastery of Mount Athos, 1998), p. 83. 41

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

111

of the ceremony are combined with the well-ordered ritual. According to Monk Georgios, even the use of artificial (candle) lighting testifies to the fact that Orthodox worship is a vivid organism. The simultaneous presence of ceremonial and free movement actively collaborates with materials that decay during the liturgy (wax candles), all included in worship (and hence all serving an existential-eschatological goal).

5.7 Visitors The presence of the visitors is an integral part of the organic ritual situation that Monk Georgios suggests. Most of them are allowed to participate in the rituals of the church (except for the non-Greeks and non-Orthodox individuals in some of the monasteries) and interpret their multi-layered, meaningful performance. The distinction between the inside and the outside of the church is therefore unclear. During my fieldwork at Gregoriou monastery, I participated in conversations held after the services and before meals, mainly connected to what the people had already experienced. Sometimes non-religiously motivated people kept silent, as they could not express their opinion about the services. Answering questions such as ‘Why can’t you express your opinion?’, they usually replied that they needed to re-experience it before answering, or that the difference of this experience from their everyday sphere made them feel unable to judge it critically. Some of the pilgrims focused on receiving the Holy Communion, and some other Christian Orthodox visitors reacted in a way closer to a religiously touristic one. There were also tourists who did not attend the liturgies and woke up only some time before the meal began. There were also some people in the church following the gestures of the rituals and playing with their prayer ropes during the liturgy, after which they also kept silent. It was quite difficult for me to hold a conversation with them. I have been coming to the monastery once per year for three years now. It is a pilgrimage for me. Waking up at 4 o’ clock in the morning and attending the services is possibly the most important part of it, receiving the Holy Communion

112 

C. Kakalis

also. I try to keep repeating the prayer and get into the rhythm of the liturgy. I know that outside Athos I will miss these experiences.46

The presence of the visitors in the katholikon may be inconvenient for the monks. In the Gregoriou monastery, the monks sometimes cannot find a stall at which to sit due to the increasing number of visitors, and must either stand outside or listen to the liturgy through a radio transmitter, which they find uncomfortable. Adding to this, twenty years ago it was decided that visitors to this monastery were free to sit wherever they wanted, in the framework of a loosening of the boundaries and prohibitions reflected in the clear zoning of the building. This caused a severe problem, as on feast days and during the summer period it was common to see even the choirs full of visitors. Extra chairs had to be added on these days, covering the free space and changing the character of its liturgical chorography. The Assembly of the monks therefore decided that they either had to build a church only for the visitors, outside the monastic core, or return to the previous regulations governing inhabitation of the different spaces in the katholikon. The former solution proved to be totally inappropriate for the life of the community, as they could not exclude the visitors from the actual services. Therefore, they decided to go back to the previous typikon, restoring the hierarchical character of the external and internal walls of the main church. A monk characteristically recollected: ‘It was a matter of orchestration. The role of visitors is undeniably important for the spiritual aspect of the community, but we needed to draw again the limits of our personal and communal integrity’.47 In this way, the balance between the inside and the outside may be transformed, influencing the liturgical event of this place. The seats of the monks were occupied by visitors not practising inner prayer, and their character changed from devices of hesychast practice into simple chairs. The stasidi is no longer only the penetrable silent cubicle that is actively involved in the communication between the praying monk and the rest of the ritual. It is used also by persons varying from pilgrims, who may interact with the events in a meaningful way, to members of an audience gathered to watch a  Pilgrim C., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015.  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012.

46 47

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

113

religious performance. The ritual is objectified and a distance is created between the event of a place and the viewer transforming it into more of a spectacle. In this sense, silence is usually the response of the visitors who enter the dark and uncanny liturgical environment of the katholikon. Richard Coyne describes the way silence becomes a response to our interaction with specific architectural environments, such as the soundscape of a Renaissance church in Venice.48 Quoting the architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, he states: A powerful architectural experience silences all noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude. Certain architectures at times take our breath away. The sublime is also that which escapes the reflective observer’s capacity to imagine or describe: the extent of the constellations, the size of an atom, pure transcendence, complete silence […].49

The silence of the visitors is mainly connected with the absence of sound, and is different to that of the monks. Encountering the unfamiliar environment, they silently observe it in order to familiarise themselves with it. Almost all the published travel accounts of visitors include descriptive mappings of the unfamiliar environment of the church. The observational qualities that are incorporated in the place-event with the entrance of the visitors change the intermediate aural environment of the space, calling for their orchestration in the ritual happenings.50 For example, the Christian Orthodox pilgrim, Scott Cairns, describes his experience of the interior of an Athonite katholikon in a characteristic way. At two o’clock on his first morning at Mount Athos, Cairns was woken by the rhythmic hammering of the talanton, signalling the approaching morning service. He stood up, got dressed and went to the church to attend the liturgy. The interior of the church was dark. He  Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place: Sociable Places and Pervasive Digital Media (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010), p. 209. 49  Ibid., p. 210. 50  On the terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid’, see: Victor Turner, ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’, Rice University Studies: The Anthropological Study of Human Play, 60/3, pp. 53–92. 48

114 

C. Kakalis

pushed the door ‘to enter and had the strange sensation that the door was still closed’. The whole space resembled a void which had to be inhabited by monks and visitors during the liturgies. An oil lamp just next to an icon of the Mother of God was the only source of light. He walked towards it and realised that he was not alone: ‘[m]ost of the stalls lining the walls of the narthex were already occupied by monks, seated and praying, though some seemed to slump so low in their stalls – a blur of ink in the midst of deep shadow […]’.51 Some moments later, he could discern the knots of a prayer rope being drawn between a monk’s fingers. Cairns lit three candles (one for his wife and two for their children) and set them in the stand, while a monk from the chorus read the six familiar psalms of Matins. He venerated the icons and stood at a corner just behind the semicircle of the left-hand choir, feeling touched by the chanting of the monks, ‘hearing […] a mysterious otherness being sung this way, as if in that confusion of sounds they became less like petitions and more like communion – that is, more nearly occasions of prayer’.52 During the liturgy, he kept reciting the Jesus Prayer.53 A number of similar experiences are included in Cairns’s travel testimony. In them, space and time are dynamically interrelated, being part of the happening of a topography in which he gradually felt engaged. On entering a katholikon, he was always trying to find his ‘habitual corner’ behind the choir, free to sit and attend the services while saying the Jesus Prayer. He was seeking to be attuned to the religious event. During the fourth day of his first pilgrimage, the long service in the katholikon made him feel that ‘the rhythm of worship, the rhythm of [silent] prayer, and to some extent, even the rhythm of life on Athos was becoming  – had become  – familiar and satisfying’.54 Therefore, starting from a distant silent stance, Cairns gradually felt immersed in the rituals through interaction with the dynamic combination of communal rituals and silent prayer.55  Scott Cairns, Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven: A Pilgrimage (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 54. 52  Ibid., p. 55. 53  Ibid., p. 56. 54  Ibid., p. 111. 55  See also: Nikolaos Koufos, Holy Week on Mount Athos (Mount Athos: The Holy Monastery of Iveron, 1997). 51

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

115

In some cases, this process of familiarisation is followed by actual participation in the rituals, something that mainly happens in the experience of pilgrims and religious tourists, as it is also included in the aims of their journey. Pilgrims are usually physically engaged in the rituals and at the same time may pray silently in their stalls, closing their eyes, bowing their heads and playing with their prayer ropes. Most of the time, participation in Holy Communion is part of their experience, usually following the confession of their sins to one of the Athonites. Participation in the Holy Communion there was one of the aims of Scott Cairns’s journey.56 Several pilgrims I encountered during my fieldwork stressed the importance of participation in Holy Communion in one of the churches of the peninsula as the peak experience of their journey. Most of them received Holy Communion during their last morning service on Mount Athos, leaving the peninsula ‘transformed’.57 Similar religious quests are also found in the accounts of non-­Orthodox travellers such as Christopher Merrill and Ralph Harper. In the monastery of Esphigmenou, therefore, Christopher Merrill, as a non-Christian Orthodox, had to stay outside the katholikon during Vespers. As he was listening to the repetition of a shortened version of the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Have Mercy’), he felt disappointed that he could not see the interior of the church during the rituals. He also felt that his experience on Athos was similar to Robert Frost’s description of the ‘sound of sense’:58 ‘a  Cairns, Short Trip to the Edge, pp. 58–59.  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, 2010, 2011, 2012. 58  See the official site of The Friends of Robert Frost (http://www.frostfriends.org/sounddevices.html): 56 57

The Sound of Sense: This is a term coined by Frost that, most importantly, governs his theory of sound. Frost best explained the concept in two letters he wrote when his first books of poetry were published—one written to his friend John Bartlett on 4 July 1913 and the other to Sidney Cox on January 1914 (worth reading in full, in Selected Letters). Here are some excerpts: … the sound of sense is ‘the abstract vitality of our speech’. ‘The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words’. Sounds … ‘are summoned by the audile imagination and they must be positive, strong and definitely and unmistakenly indicated by the context’ [sense]. We get ‘cadences by skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter’. Frost’s use of the sound of sense leads to his special interpretation of tone. Still seems confusing, doesn’t it? William Pritchard explains this idea very well in his book, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (pp. 78–100).

116 

C. Kakalis

conversation through a door in which the words are interrupted’, disclosing the presence of a frontier between himself and the happenings of Athos, at both the material and the immaterial levels, that was no longer solid and impenetrable as he was gradually communicating with the sacred dynamics of the place. The wall was sonically transparent, materialising the idea of a physical-spiritual journey from the outside to the inside. Similarly, while attending the Divine Liturgy from the glazed exo-­ narthex of the Pantokratoros monastery, he felt that the ritual was all about ‘a movement from one door to another door, one world to another world’. This idea was followed by the realisation of the difference between the dark interior of the church and the illuminated courtyard.59 For him, his experience on Athos was an opening to the unexpected: Each step that we take can enact the movement from one world to another, from the present into the eternally present, though it is also the case that we are generally oblivious to the spiritual possibilities inherent in our every word and gesture. We walk and talk most of the time, and then, occasionally, something pulls us out of our daily routines and we may be transported out of ourselves. This is what the Divine Liturgy enacts, and so it is that whenever we participate in a church service, with our whole being, we move from the quotidian into eternity. […] [Similarly] the interior of an Orthodox church seems to me to be an essay in doors and windows onto eternity – which was the subject of Things of the Hidden God and my continuing quest.60

The refusal of entry to the katholikon during the rituals almost always surprises the non- Christian Orthodox visitors and influences the progress of their journeys. During my field trips I sometimes saw foreigners insisting on entering the katholikon and/or asking for further explanations of this barrier.  Christopher Merrill, pp. 281–287.  Interview, Sunday 27 May 2013. Answer(s) to my questions: You mention at some point that while attending the Divine Liturgy from the glazed exo-narthex of the Pantokratoros monastery you felt that the Liturgy was all about a movement from one door to another door, one world to another world. This is also followed by the realisation of the difference between the inside and the outside of the church. I would like you to explain a little more what you mean by the quoted phrase in relation to your pilgrimage. Is this connected to walking along the paths and the stops at the monastic complexes? How is this connected to the architecture of the church in which the Divine Liturgy is held? How was this translated in your existential quest? 59 60

5  The Main Church (Katholikon) 

117

I do not attend the liturgies any more [said a Mexican visitor who attended his first liturgy from 4 o’ clock in the morning and was asked to leave the church when the Divine Liturgy began]. It feels pointless to barely hear what I want to fully experience.61

This is characteristically depicted in the published account of Ralph Harper, who went to Mount Athos in 1986.62 His participation in the rituals of the katholikon and the refectory played an important role in his journey. The initial period of a distant familiarisation was transformed into an existential experience of the space that gradually transformed his travel into a pilgrimage. In this sense, the sonic boundaries of the talanton and the semantron, for example, were transformed from simple time-­ signals into invitations to a communication with the mystical element, and the liturgical chorography in the unique aural environment of the church was an unexpected ‘soul stirring experience’ that he felt the need to examine through the actual participation in them. This existential quest was interrupted when he was not allowed to enter the katholikon during the services at the Zografou Monastery. From this point onwards he tried to re-live the experiences of the first three days. The constant (almost enforced) recollection of those moments was the only motivation to continue his journey. He was so anxious to find himself inside a church again that whenever he reached a monastery, he tried to find the door of the katholikon to enter. Harper felt that his journey was an ‘adventure’, the meaning of which related to the ‘crossing of the boundaries of safety’. At the end of this journey, he even doubted the meaning of the ‘spiritual element’ that he had experienced initially but never managed to define.63 Therefore, while staying at Gregoriou monastery, he tried to enter the church to attend Vespers and recollect the previous special Athonite ritual experiences. Once again, he was not allowed to enter the church and, as a result, his feeling of ‘euphoria’ was abruptly interrupted. He tried again to enter, giving several reasons, such as that he was a Christian and that his  Roman Catholic pilgrim at Gregoriou, fieldwork at Mount Athos, June 2015.  Ralph Harper, Journey from Paradise: Mount Athos and the Interior Life (Millau: Editions du Beffroi, 1987). 63  Harper, Journey from Paradise, p. 63. 61 62

118 

C. Kakalis

wife was Greek. His attempts were rejected. He had a feeling of ‘making a fool of himself ’, but he did not mind. He wanted to enter the church at all costs and relive the ‘revealing moments of the first three days’.64 At some point, a young man came up to him and led him behind an open window of the church from which he could see the whole ritual. He, who could not participate, could at least see and listen: While I stood outside the church a young man came up to me and told me that if I followed him I would be able to see and to hear. I had not noticed that I had attracted attention. He led me to an open window in the naos [main church]. When I looked through the bars, I could see what was going on inside. The trouble was I was on the outside – or was I? – and there were bars in between. Who was in prison, I or the monks? 65

Every time one enters the katholikon of Gregoriou, one has the ability to be engaged in the texture of different horizons that are fused in the coexistence of silence and communal ritual. The silence of the prayer, the sound of the ritual, the silence of the observer, the warmth of the light and the odours of the incense are all orchestrated into a harmonic whole according to a ritual narrative—that while it involves predefined movements and gestures, it is still open to unexpected movements and presences. Tangible and intangible components are combined into a harmonic whole.

 Ibid., p. 102.  Ibid.

64 65

6 Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals

The liturgy of the morning service is extended to the rest of the monastic life, allowing for a liturgy after the liturgy to take place. It is something that you have also experienced with the meals following the services. Silently eating and listening to the reader, we continue living in a prayerful communion.1

According to the monasteries’ foundation documents, normally the trapeza’s (refectory) construction was connected to that of the katholikon. The two buildings were ritually combined, influencing both their location within the complex and their architectural formation.2 Therefore, the Athonite monastery’s refectory is included in the ‘zone of religious

 Conversation with Monk L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2012. During our conversation, Monk L. emphasised the part shown in bold. 2  See also: Svetlana Popovič, ‘The “Trapeza” in Cenobitic Monasteries: Architectural and Spiritual Contexts’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 52 (1998), p. 292. According to the writer this is the Great Lavra’s monument, which became a paradigm for most Athonite monasteries and monasteries elsewhere in the Byzantine sphere. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_6

119

120 

C. Kakalis

worship’.3 The completion of the services is followed by a common meal in the refectory.4 The Athonite monks believe that the connection between services and meals is based on the model of the life of the first Apostles and the early Christians. Even for those who do not have the knowledge to make these connections (or at least, who did not mention them in discussions with me), the interrelationship of the two spaces is included in a process of liturgical performance that binds every aspect of their life (material or immaterial) into a whole: Everything is included in a religious framework that is realised through the everyday programme of alternating rituals and more profane actions, like the meals or the different everyday tasks. But even the latter are felt like part of a wider service, repetitively conducted and aiming at our spiritual re-direction.5

The notion of sacrifice plays an important role in communal meals in different (religious) traditions, defining the interaction between the giver and the receiver, the host and the guest.6 Thus food is a ‘sacrificial gift’ prepared and given by a host to the participants of a meal, activating the interrelationship between two or more individuals. This offering gives rise to what Gerardus van der Leeuw calls a ‘mystic power […] which establishes communio’ as it is shared and always open to a possible returned gift.7 With the dynamics of a reciprocal interaction, the gift itself becomes the heart of a sacrificial act; its movement plays the most important role in the whole process. The sacrificer’s effort to prepare and distribute food is embodied in the transfer of the gift, assuring the relationship between the two parties, as it is also used in different religious traditions to affirm the relationship between man and God.8  Ibid., p. 282.  See also: Alice-Mary Talbot, ‘Mealtime in Monasteries: The Culture of the Byzantine Refectory’ in Anthony Bryer, Leslie Brubaker, Kalliroe Linardou (eds), Eat, Drink and be Merry: (Luke, 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 119. 5  Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2012. 6  Gerardus van der Leeuw, ‘Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology’, in Jeffrey Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 152. 7  Ibid., p. 154. 8  Ibid., pp. 156–157. 3 4

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

121

In this sense, food rituals were also part of ancient Greek culture. Meals were included in festivals and were usually characterised as the ‘fulsome banquet[s] of the gods’, as Greeks believed that the gods were also participating in them. Therefore, numerous gods were invited to the banquet included in the festival of Theoxenia that was held in Delphi. Seats were prepared for them around the table and portions of food were served to them, which after the meal were distributed to men.9 The notion of ‘sacrifice’ (thusia) played a major role in these processes, connected to both rituals of consecration and offering, either to gods or to dead mortals or heroes.10 For example, in the case of the Panathenea festival, animals were sacrificed by the priest on an altar after a long procession through the city. After thusia, the meat was equally distributed among the participants.11 Libations (sponde) played an important role in these rituals. They had to do with the pouring of a liquid on to the ground, while at the same time the conductor was addressing them to a god or to a dead hero through prayers. Libations were also part of symposia.12 The symposium was a gathering of important members of a Greek polis, ritually connected to Dionysus, which followed a formal banquet and at which only wine was served. Religious meals are also included in the Old and New Testaments, always connected to the revelation of the divine. Through the Parable of the Great Banquet (Matthew 22:1–14), Jesus Christ introduced the importance of ritual meals as retrievals of His sacrifice.13 Moreover, at the Last Supper He prefigured the Eucharist, showing the way people would liturgically retrieve future communion with the Trinitarian God. Another typical example is that on the way to Emmaus, Jesus was not recognised by His followers until ‘he was at the table with them, he took bread,  Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, translated by John Raffan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 107. 10  Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Panter, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, translated by Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29–30. 11  Ibid., pp. 34–35. 12  Ibid., pp. 39–40. 13  The parable describes the organisation of the wedding banquet for the King’s son. The people invited could not come for a number of different, minor, excuses. The King then invited all of the rest of his people, who could come as long as they were prepared, clean and wearing proper clothing. 9

122 

C. Kakalis

blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’ (Luke 24:30), confirming the role that communal meals can play in the liturgical life of the faithful. According to the theologian Dennis Smith, early Christian meals as depicted in the Scriptures are linked with ancient Greek food rituals. The combination of the banquet and the drinking element of the symposium may also be connected (in terms of borrowing ritual schemes as vehicles of religious ideas) to the prefiguration of the Eucharist through the Mystical Supper, as described by the Evangelists.14 The important role of daily meals in Athonite life, therefore, is possibly related to the agape, the ancient Christian religious communal meal, based on the Christian character of food rituals discussed above, and the importance of the Last Supper, but of different liturgical value to that of the Eucharist: It is well known that a meal, or better a communal meal, was very important for the first Christians, whether monks or ordinary believers. Even the first anchorites, who mortified the flesh for the salvation of their souls, gathered twice a week to eat together with other brethren. It is also well known that the agape – a religious meal performed by the first Christians, with its roots in Judaism  – was different from the Eucharist whose liturgical source was the Last Supper.15

Athonite communal meals are organised as rituals included in the daily programme of the monastic community, materialising the extension of liturgy to all the different levels of personal and communal Christian life. The beginning and end of meals are marked with chanting and prayers; sonic connections with the rituals held in the church. Usually, the visitors enter and take their seats first. Then the monks enter in a ceremonial way, wearing their formal uniform (as during the daily service at church), while one of them chants. The main phases of the meals—the beginning, the middle and the end—are signalled by the abbot ringing a bell at specified moments. During the whole process, a monk reads religious texts. The ringing of the bell is therefore a sonic boundary that divides the  Dennis E.  Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 15  Popovič, ‘The “Trapeza” in Cenobitic Monasteries’, p. 282. 14

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

123

meal into different parts, allowing the reader to start reading, allowing the participants to start drinking water and wine, and signalling the beginning and the end of the process. As Christopher Merrill describes: The meal served in the refectory was almost inedible: cold fish-and-potato soup, spinach, stale bread, olives, an apple, a tin cup of sour red wine – our reward for the short two-hour daybreak service following the vigil. The monks fast on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, avoiding dairy products and olive oil; during the Great Fast, which begins seven weeks before Easter, they take one meal a day; meat is never eaten; fish is served only at the feasts. The refectory was silent save for the monk at the lectern reading aloud from patristic literature. St. Basil, the Cappadocian father whose Shorter and Longer Rules codified Eastern monasticism, said monks should listen “with far greater pleasure than they eat or drink, in order that the mind may be shown not to be distracted by the pleasure of the body, but delighting rather in the words of the Lord”.16

The refectories are constructed as closed spaces conditioned by a sense of introversion. They invite all the senses of the participants to focus on their interior. Therefore, the iconographic programme is mainly connected to scriptural themes related to food, such as the Last Supper, but also including other themes, creating quite a clear frontier between the interior and the exterior.17 At the same time, the readings and the chanting are also connected to the liturgical and festal cycles. They all create an aural environment of communal ritual that is different from the outside, although it is sensually connected to the events held previously in the katholikon. Therefore, it feels like an extension of the church, a place of communal worship in which eating and drinking are organically incorporated. Each monk must sit silently in a specific seat, trying to follow the readings. At the same time, the varying number of visitors dynamically enhances the temporal character of the building, the clarity of the boundary between the inside and the outside. One eats quickly and quietly after the Liturgy to begin the day. I keep the fasting periods that the monks follow and participate in their life as dictated by the 16 17

 Christopher, Merrill, Ibid, p. 39.  Popovič, ‘The “Trapeza” in Cenobitic Monasteries’, pp. 298–300.

124 

C. Kakalis

programme of the monastery. The meals are like thresholds between the Liturgy and the rest of daily life: partly rituals, and also parts of a daily routine.18 I realised that the meals are a kind of ascesis, not satisfaction. The senses are detached from the idea of food’s enjoyment and are focused on the meal’s ritual qualities. In the short period of time that you have to eat your lunch, you listen to religious readings, watch ritual movements, while you still remember what was previously happening during the Liturgy. I felt it as a kind of ascetic body control.19 I feel that for us [the monks] the ritual and rhythmic elements of the meals (the short period of time, the silence, the prayers, the readings) invite our senses to be re-directed. It is more of an experience, difficult to articulate in words. Sacrifice and sharing perhaps are two words that can depict the meaning of this constant effort.20

The way food is consumed has always been included in the embodied practices of the ascetics of different religious traditions.21 Control of the diet, through avoidance of eating luxury foods (such as meat) and fasting periods, sometimes connected to the festive calendars, aim to contribute to an embodied realisation of the Athonites’ hesychast life. Self-discipline and self-restriction are therefore enhanced through specific dietary habits intended to achieve a kind of purification.22 This is degraded in relation to the different ways of ascetic life; hence, the hermits of the Athonite desert usually do not cook, instead consuming small amounts of dry food that is mostly brought to them from bigger monastic structures or donated by visitors who happen to pass by their hermitage. It is also usual to see small food containers left at specific points along the footpaths (usually at intersections, or at clearings) to be filled by the passersby.23 At  Pilgrim C., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015.  Visitor A., fieldwork at Mount Athos, June 2015. 20  Monk L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2015. 21  For the role of fasting in Muslim tradition, see: Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 124–126. 22  See: Deborah Lupton, Food, The Body and the Self (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 133. 23  For the role of dietary control in the life of the Desert Fathers, see: Lupton, Food, The Body and the Self, pp. 6–10. 18 19

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

125

the same time, the kinds of foods (and drinks: wine and water) consumed during the meals in a coenobitic community are usually cooked with the products of the monastery’s plantations, following the festal cycles, as the Christian calendar is divided into fasting and non-fasting periods. For example, the monks do not consume meat, dairy products, olive oil or wine on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and some Saturdays (if preparing to receive Holy Communion the following Sunday). The same dietary rules are followed as an embodied preparation for forty days before Christmas, forty-seven days before Easter, fifteen days before 15 August (Celebration of the Assumption of the Mother of God) and also for a period of time that varies each year before the celebration of the Angels’ Assembly (30 June). In this sense, a number of temporal boundaries are also applied in the use of the refectory, liturgically combining it with the katholikon and the rest of the monastery. The choice of the texts read during the different periods also contributes to this process, as they are mostly connected to its liturgical meaning. The location of the refectory building within the monastery supports this devotional character through its relationship to the katholikon, as illustrated in the following plans. The space between the two buildings thus acquires a special meaning. Either open or covered, it connects their entrances, allowing the daily procession of monks and pilgrims after the services. It becomes an extended threshold, where the passage re-­actualises the above religious connotations of a meal. The following plans show the close relationship of the buildings and how the intermediate spaces are formed in order to support this. The L-shaped refectory of Gregoriou monastery is situated opposite the katholikon, and was totally refurbished in 1993. The space that connects the two buildings is trapezoidal and semi-open. On its north side, there is a series of windows, and on the south side, a water basin and the beginnings of a narrow remnant of the yard that runs parallel to the side wall of the katholikon and leads to the eastern wing of the cells. Similarly, in order to enter the narthex of Simonopetra Monastery, one has to walk along the balcony that is connected to the courtyard and find a rectangular recess on the left-hand side. Opposite this opening, the Deisis and St Simon the Athonite are represented next to another opening that leads to the transitional space between the entrances to the lite

126 

C. Kakalis

and the refectory.24 On the left-hand side of this special exo-narthex, we find the main entrance of the church between the depictions of the archangels, Gabriel and Michael. This space is an important linking element in the monastery. The wall that separates it into two semi-open recesses acquires an intense liminal character as it defines two different liturgical acts: on one side, the entrance to the church after the wall paintings have been venerated, and on the other, the entrance of the congregation to the refectory for the meal. The refectory is directly related in terms of location to the katholikon. The aforementioned intermediate semi-open passageway connects the two spaces. Controlled entrance of natural light and air enhances its transitional character: enabling the movement from the lite to the refectory after the morning Supplication to the Mother of God and the afternoon Vespers. Three series of tables are set along the arms of the refectory of Gregoriou monastery, around which monks and laymen sit according to their position in the community hierarchy. The outsiders sit at the tables near the entrance, and the monks at the inner ones. The reader stands between these two zones. In the middle of the long wing there is a central table used only by the monks who are priests. At its eastern side, just on the corner between the two wings, there is a small table at which the priest of the day and the abbot sit. Different rituals that are included in the typikon of the monastery refectory are held in this space. They relate to the formal meals that follow the morning services and some of the evening ones. Special rituals are held after the Sunday liturgy, the all-night vigils and the feast days aiming to embody the aforementioned liturgical meanings. The iconographic programme of the refectory is included in the same liturgical framework. On its walls one can read the artist’s attempt to embrace the monks in a hagiographic narrative, the themes of which communicate with the liturgical experience of the space. Therefore, the representations of the Almighty and the Resurrection frame the central entrance. Themes related to food also play an important role: the Blessing of the Loaves, the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. In the most central position in the refectory, just over the table where the priest of the day and the abbot sit, the Mystical Supper is depicted flanked by the  The enthroned Almighty flanked by the Mother of God and St John the Baptist.

24

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

127

protectors of the monastery, St Anastasia and St Nicholas. Finally, in the niche that looks to the north, the old stone oven is surrounded by a number of representations of Athonite saints. There is the intention to create an iconographic programme starting from the food (material) and focusing on its liturgical approach by the monks, connected to the history of the monastery and the salvational character of Christian religion, as depicted on the walls.25 The connection between the church and the refectory is emphatically underlined during the Sunday meals and some of the great feast days.26 The abbot wears a cloak after the Dismissal of the Holy Mass (black on Sundays and a pontifical one on the great feast days, also holding a pontifical rod). The trapezaris (in charge of the function of the refectory) makes a prostration (a ‘repentance’) in front of him and rings the bell, inviting the monks to enter the building. The chanters go first, singing the hymn of the saint of the day, or an Easter one. The ekklisiastikos, holding a blessed piece of bread dedicated to the Mother of God (called the ‘Panagia’), is followed by the abbot. The process continues with the monks and the guests entering in a processional way. As usual, the reader reads religious texts and the abbot signals the different phases of the meal by ringing a small bell. After he has signalled its end, the chorus starts chanting the Axion Estin (hymn dedicated to the Mother of God) or the Katavasia of the Ninth Ode of the feast,27 while Panagia is distributed. The abbot is the first to eat this special bread.  Nevertheless, this (contemporary) iconographic narrative has not been expressed in the best way, as the causal relationship between the different hagiographic events is not always clear. In the case of Simonopetra’s refectory, we find a more harmonic narrative in the iconographic programme. In particular, each wall is divided into three horizontal zones. Important Orthodox ‘fathers’ and Athonite saints are represented on the two lower zones of both of the walls. Therefore, St Nikodemos from Mount Athos, St Maximus the Kausokalivitis, St Maximus the Confessor, St Efraim the Syrian, St Anthony the Great and others remind the devotee that in order to achieve theosis he must follow their example. Moreover, the life of St Simon crowns the synthesis of the northern wall, inviting the brotherhood to continue their struggle along the same hesychast path that supported the creation of the monastery. Finally, on the upper zone of the south wall, events commemorated during Holy Week are depicted, also illuminating the eschatological perspective of Orthodox life. This narrative is also enhanced by two large representations of the birth of Christ (northern wall) and the Climax to the Heavens (southern wall). 26  These rituals are also held in other Athonite monasteries, such as Simonopetra. (Fieldwork at Mount Athos, September 2011.) 27  A religious reading that is relevant to the feast. 25

128 

C. Kakalis

Meanwhile the ekklisiastikos is censing, following the trapezaris, who holds the Panagia. Monks and laymen cut a small piece of the bread. They bless it by passing it horizontally through the emitted incense, then eat it. The trapezaris and the ekklisiastikos close this ritual by making a ‘repentance’ towards the east, after having eaten their share from the Panagia. The reader does not close the meal with the usual ‘Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers have mercy on us and save us, Amen’, but exits in silence and stands on the left side of the refectory’s entrance with the cook and the trapezaris. The abbot is followed by the chanters singing the hymn of the day, the monks and the visitors. He goes to stand on the right-hand side of the refectory’s entrance, blessing the participants. When the refectory is empty, the cook and the trapezaris kiss the right hand of the abbot, and the reader leads the chanters to the church. The abbot stands under the candelabra of the lite with the chanters on his right-hand side. The reader says ‘With the prayers of our Father have mercy on us and save us, Amen’ and kisses the abbot’s right hand after making a ‘repentance’. The same is done by the chanters and the ekklisiastikoi.28 This Sunday and festal ritual underline the liturgical relationship between the refectory and the katholikon. The fact that the meal begins and ends in the church supports this idea, highlighting also the liminality of the intermediate space that connects them. Therefore, the passage through this extended threshold plays an important role in the experience of the refectory. Whereas it is usually regarded as the remnant of the courtyard between the two buildings, it becomes an important space through the movement of the people, and also the flow of ritual sound and incense during the Sunday and festal meals. Communal meals are connected to the reaffirmation of the community through the sharing of (religious) meanings. The sacrificial qualities of the sharing of the same food and the way the different people are integrated into the process embody different qualities of the community’s character. Hence, allowing outsiders to participate in the meals is in  The description is based on a combination of in-situ observation and the typikon of the monastery’s refectory. 28

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

129

accordance with the open form of some of the monastic rituals. In addition, the space is zoned according to the hierarchy of the monastery. The outsiders sit closer to the exit, the abbot is centrally placed and is flanked by the tables for the ordinary monks, while the monk-priests have their own table. At the same time, meals also take on a journey-like formation with the stages of departure, staying at a place and return playing an important role, also signified by rituals, specific movements and gestures and physically highlighting the significance of the space between the refectory and the church. It is important to emphasise that in the case of the refectory we can also find the dialectical relationship between silence and communal ritual. According to Alice-Mary Talbot, ‘the rule of silence was universal in monastic refectories [during the Byzantine period]; virtually every typikon enjoins the monks and nuns to remain silent during meals […]’.29 This rule is still part of Athonite monastic life, influencing the experience of space as the reading plays over any noise of the eating process, and only the abbot at the eastern side says the opening and closing prayer of the meal. Meanwhile, the monks eat without talking, with their heads bowed trying to follow the reading. Silence therefore becomes a kind of boundary that frames the body-subject of the monk; a porous boundary penetrated by the reader’s voice and transgressed by any noisy disturbance caused by the visitors. Almost all the visitors attend these ritual performances of meals. Most of them keep silent and observe the event, transgressing the immaterial limits of the zoning, as in the case of the katholikon. Some of them, mainly foreigners, cannot keep silent or follow the readings (in Greek). The common meal, the iconography, the unfamiliar context and the silence of the rest of the participants is not always enough to make them follow the predefined conduct of the meal. However, there is always the trapezaris to remind them to stop whispering. The silent presence of the monks interacts with the above rituals to contribute to the reciprocal discourse between polarities as a way to express an almost paradoxical relationship to the divine. Silence during the meal allows them to be sensually connected to the hesychast qualities 29

 Talbot, ‘Mealtime in Monasteries’, p. 119.

130 

C. Kakalis

of Athonite life. At the same time, the penetration of this silence through the inscription of ritual movement and the flowing of ritual elements (sound, incense, blessed bread) contributes to the creation of a dynamic aural communication, the character of which changes following the events happening within it. The materiality of the meal introduces a more profane aspect to the refectory’s atmosphere, which is also connected to the quite distanced approach of some of the visitors. Their participation is mainly related to covering their physical needs.30 Additionally, the refectory is only used for meals. For the rest of the day, it remains closed, transformed into a silent space, and the boundaries of the building acquire an implicit character. Whereas the door is never locked, nobody enters the refectory when no meal is being held in it. On the one hand, this enhances the silent qualities of the main courtyard during the day, creating a quite intense silent sphere around the main church that is sonically penetrated when the talanton signals the beginning of a service. On the other hand, the fact that the refectory is only inhabited just after the services in the church imparts an anticipatory sense to its character that is also enhanced by the preparation of the communal meal, cooking the food and laying the table. Hence, a metallic cap in front of each seat, metallic beakers each containing cutlery for four participants and metallic jugs are rhythmically laid on the surfaces of the wooden tables, pre-mapping a coming ritual event. The uniform objects, all made of inox and having similar shapes, carry past and future (ritual or not) movements. They are always laid in the same way, repeating the form of a previous meal and in readiness for a coming one. Their placement is part of the meal’s preparation by the ‘giver’, the monks in charge of the cooking and the refectory. The silence of the closed space implies the coming silent interaction between a number of participants-receivers. At the same time, the small bell that is always in front of the abbot’s seat and the book from which the readings of the day will be read contribute to this waiting dynamic, being connected to ritual sounds. Visual  During my field trips, very few visitors connected the everyday ritual meal to its symbolic associations. Nevertheless, participation in the Sunday and festal rituals was initially transformed into a spectacle during which some of the outsiders felt involved in a religious experience. They were mainly pilgrims who could share the meaning of the events. 30

6  Silence and Ritual of Communal Meals 

131

penetration of the walls through their openings allows the communication of these characteristics to the outside. In this way the waiting, silent and closed space carries the gestures of the laying that ‘wrote’ on the stable context of the refectory a (pre)narrative of the meal that will follow a coming service. This is an embodied narrative, steadily repeated twice per day and usually open to reading by the outsiders through the windows (as in the case of Gregoriou monastery) before the actual events take place. Tangible and intangible components are interconnected in the liturgical performance of the refectory by monks and visitors. The Christian tradition to ritual meals enhances the importance of daily meals in the programme of the community. The main church and refectory complex forms a field for the inscription of circular communal rituals intertwined with the silence of the participants, to give a new meaning to a practical aspect of life. The space between the two buildings plays the role of an extended threshold, contributing to the liturgical event.

7 The Cemetery and the Grave

Memory of death characterises Athonite life, as it is one of the monk’s key ascetic practices. Remembering death enhances the undisturbed walking along the monastic path, making clearer that life never ends with death.1

The rituals related to the end of an Athonite’s life are included in the context of the hesychast practice of the ‘memory of death’, the constant awareness of the undeniable possibility of passing away. Death is a rite of passage divided into three different stages: the departure that relates to the period between the death and the funeral; the liminal stage that is connected to the funeral, the burial and the three years of the burial; and the return stage of the relics’ exhumation and their placement in the ossuary of the monastery. These are further divided into a number of different phases connected to the movement of the dead body in the monastery and its commemoration after death. The built and natural landscape of the monastery is harmoniously incorporated into these events, redefining the meaning of the topos in the liturgical context of hesychast praxis. The

 Conversation with Monk L., fieldwork at Mount Athos, August 2013.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_7

133

134 

C. Kakalis

church, the courtyard and the cemetery become the active field of rituals that either recollect the death of a person or facilitate the constant remembering of the future mundane end and Second Coming.

7.1 Journey and the ‘Memory of Death’ Death is usually connected to the notions of crisis and disorder. It is considered an event that threatens the coherence of a community through the loss of one of its members.2 This event is always related to the individual’s feeling of the uncanny, and surprise, and different cultures have addressed this combination since ancient times. The organisation of relevant myths communicated through the performance of different rituals aims to create an embodied realisation of this disorder.3 Funerary rituals, cemeteries, memorial services and burial and cremation processes are parts of this language, narrating a reciprocal movement between the known and the unknown.4 Being directly connected to movement and temporality, the archetype of the journey includes the notions of both memory and anticipation. Its tripartite division into departure, stay at the destination and return can be used as a model to express future projections and past recollections. Repetition is a key characteristic of these processes, expressed in religious embodied topography through rituals and other habitual movements. The relationship between death and the archetype of the journey originates in antiquity and is a common element of different religious traditions. In ancient Greece, death was connected to the journey of the soul from the earth to the underworld, which was believed to be located either at the margins of the ocean or in the depths of the earth. The shades of the dead were guided by Hermes to the shore of the Akherousian river, received by the ferryman Charon and taken to the land of the dead on the other side of the river. Moreover, entering the underworld in the depths  Loring M. Danforth and Alexander Tsiaras, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 31. 3  Ibid., p. 32. 4  Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998), p. 293. 2

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

135

of the earth was achieved through caves that were considered thresholds to the internal, subterranean landscape.5 Either natural or artificial, these cavities embodied the idea of a liminal zone between life and death, also allowing for a return process.6 Similar associations can be traced in the underground crypts and catacombs of the early Christian era and the later opening of the grave.7 The Christian tradition that Adam was made from dust and returned to dust through his burial and decomposition is recollected in every funeral to highlight the importance of the closing of the lifecycle, leading to a future regeneration. Moreover Christ, the New Adam, was also buried after his death in the Holy Sepulchre, a rock-cut tomb, and his resurrection was realised by his disciples through the absence of his corpse in it. The opening of each grave and the rituals that accompany the burial are connected to this idea of death-and-­resurrection. Thus death has been related to the three temporal dimensions of the past, present and future since ancient times. The dead person has already left the present, in which rituals for their death (funeral, burial, memorial services) are being held. These processes always admit the future possibility of life after death, something emphatically applied in the case of Christianity with the intense return qualities of the Second Coming. The anthropologist Loring M. Danforth uses Arnold van Gennep’s theory of the rites of passage to interpret death rituals in the framework of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.8 For Danforth, death rituals can be also divided into three different stages: separation, liminal period and return. From the moment of the actual event of death until the beginning of the funeral is the period of the departure. The funeral signals the beginning of the liminal period, which reaches its peak during the burial and ends with the exhumation of the bones at least three years after the date of death. During this process of decomposition the living mortals have the ability to realise in a material way the physical void that the body has  Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 232. 6  The Homeric Hymns, translated with an introduction, notes and glossary of names by Michael Crudden (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 16. 7  Michel Ragon, The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration and Urbanism, translated by Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), pp. 57–64. 8  Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 1960). 5

136 

C. Kakalis

left, usually connecting it to the soul’s journey to an invisible (divine) world. The silent corpse and the participation of the living in funerary and commemoration rituals narrate this movement. The uncovering of the bones therefore becomes a kind of a return (to the mundane world) stage of this rite of passage.9 The bones are placed in the ossuary to await the resurrection of the dead—that is going to be, according to Christian tradition, ‘embodied’ as in the case of Jesus Christ—fulfilling the return process of their life-journey.10 A similar realisation can be found in the Athonite approach to death, as it can also be divided into three different stages: departure from the mundane sphere, transition to an invisible one and the re-integration of the relics into the sensual experience of the monks through their placement in the ossuary. In this sense, the cemetery symbolises for them a threshold between the earth and the sky, silently inhabited by the dead body in the grave and communally performed through a number of different rituals by the living community. At the same time, the cemetery is also connected to the whole life of the monastery through the notion of the ‘memory of death’, an integral part of the hesychast practice. Hence, in hesychasm, the monk also has to practise the ‘memory of death’—that is, to try to always remember that he is going to die, or in the words of an Athonite monk: ‘[T]o live every day as the last of his life’.11 ‘Memory of death’ is of vital importance in asceticism, aiming to remind the monk of the temporary status of his presence in mundane life. It is taught daily to novices by the elder monks and practised through reading it and repeating the thought in the mind. Some monks also use other embodied techniques to support this process. For example, they might have in their cell or hermitage a skull. Through interaction with this object they consider the idea of death, seeking to incorporate it into their lives. Moreover, some monks (mainly hermits) open their graves before they die and take care of them or even lie in them.  Danforth and Tsiaras, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, pp. 35–38; Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p. 294. 10  Nonna Verna Harrison, ‘The Human Person as Image and Likeness of God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 78–92. 11  Monk L. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2013. 9

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

137

Memory of death pervades the ascetic practice of the Athonites. We recollect the end of this life, preparing ourselves for the next one and the coming Resurrection. […] When a monk dies he is not ‘erased’. He remains an active member of the brotherhood and his prayerful memory is an integral part of its daily life.12

The memory of death therefore aims to invite the ascetic to think of the three temporal dimensions: the present, the past and the future. He seeks to recollect the past through ascetic life in the present, projecting to the possibility of his death and afterlife.13 He is invited to remember now his coming death. The common truth of death is embodied in the materiality of the dead monks’ departure: the movement of the corpse in the monastery during the funeral and the burial, the grave, the cemetery, the memorial services and the experience of the ossuary. In this way memory of death contributes to the ascetic life of the body-­ subject, aiming to harmoniously incorporate the ‘uncanny’ possibility of death into his life and interpret it as a passage towards the afterlife. This threefold (past–present–future) understanding of human temporality influences the formation and experience of Athonite architecture. In this sense, the cemetery becomes a place in which the relics of the monks are kept, and the living monks are invited to think of death, as one of these graves is going to become their own. The living and the dead are two stages of the lifecycle, materially co-existing in the monastery. Before and after are constant concepts, narrating a threefold present through different (death) rites of passage: the actual death and the relevant liturgical acts. Commemoration plays a very important role, as for the philosopher Edward S. Casey: The remembering-through which represents the core action of commemorating finds one of its most fortuitous occasions in ritualistic enactments [that follow the model of the rites of passage] containing a marked liminal phase. For in

 Conversation with Monk L. from Gregoriou monastery, fieldwork at Mount Athos, August– September 2012. 13  Jonathan L. Zecher, The Symbolics of Death and the Construction of Christian Asceticism: Greek Patristic Voices from the Fourth Through Seventh Centuries, doctoral thesis (Durham University, 2009), available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3247/, pp. 215–216. 12

138 

C. Kakalis

that phase the various commemorabilia […] most effectively conjoin the disparate spatial and temporal factors of which commemorating is composed.14

7.2 Ritual ‘Memory of the Death’: The Death, the Funeral and the Burial of the Athonite The dead body of a monk plays its own role in the monastic community. In this sense, when a monk from the Gregoriou monastery dies, a short ceremony of blessings of farewell (Trisagion) is held on the spot where he died. The cleaning and dressing of his corpse starts right afterwards, while all the monks have to pass from his cell to say goodbye to him, wishing to ‘have an undisturbed way to Paradise’.15 He is placed on the sagisma (a thin layer made of cloth or rattan) with a prayer rope in his crossed hands. He is also enfolded in his rason (monastic gown), the sleeves of which are torn to enable the body to be totally wrapped. Three embroidered white crosses are placed on his head, chest and hands. If the monk was a priest, a petrachili16 is placed over him. If he was an abbot, his face is left uncovered. He is taken on a special wooden stretcher to the narthex or to the Chapel of St Anastasia. He will stay there until the beginning of the funeral, the liminal stage of his final journey, twenty-four hours after the time of his death. During these twenty-four hours, monks alternately read the Psalms next to a lit oil lamp. For the period between his death and his burial the dead body is a material reminder of the possibility of death, and a tangible element of the liminal stage between the death and the Second Coming. For the architectural historian Michel Ragon, the coffin, and in this case the stretcher, is a metaphor for the travelling connotations of death, echoing Charon’s boat and the sailing of the souls across the Akherousian river.17 In the case of the Athonite monk the black cassock (rason) plays an even more important role, as the only material  Edward S.  Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1997). 15  Monk L. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2013. 16  The most important part of the priest’s uniform. 17  Ragon, The Space of Death, p. 68. 14

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

139

item accompanying the monk on this final journey. Imbued with the monk’s hesychast trials, the rason wraps the corpse and decomposes along with the body to almost erase all the material traces of his mundane ascesis. The funeral of the monk, held in the main church of the monastery, is therefore of major importance as it is a reminder of the undeniable possibility of death and has the characteristics of a farewell. The service is longer than the ordinary funeral and relates to a collection of prayers through the recitation of which the devotees ask God forgiveness for the dead monk and his entrance to Paradise. After the service the relic is transferred to the cemetery while a trisagion18 is also chanted and the bell rings with a slow, mourning, rhythm. The process is called exodus (exit) and is a ritual inscription of part of the monastery connected to the ­crossing of a very important immaterial boundary of the individual’s life. Monks with lit lanterns are followed by the psalters, the priests and the rest of the monks. During its course, the litany stops and prayers are read. The mourning sound of the bell along with the chanting of the monks forms the special soundscape for this occasion, also connected to the reading of the prayers and the sound of the censer’s bells. The dead body is carried along the north side of the main church of Gregoriou and reaches the cemetery, passing through the second small entrance of the monastery. During this procession three stops are made and prayers are read for the dead monks of the monastery. After the body is placed (without the sagisma) in the grave, the priest casts soil and pours olive oil taken from the oil lamp in front of the icon of Christ in the church, making the sign of the cross. Every monk then has to repeat thirty-three times the prayer: ‘Jesus Christ Son of God let the soul of your servant [name of the monk] be reposed’. After this, the body is covered with soil.19 This process is usually followed by the singing of the paschal hymn: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life’, signalling to the monks the material departure of the dead.  A set of prayers dedicated to the death of a devotee.  See also Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, translated by John Raffan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 191–194. 18 19

140 

C. Kakalis

These rituals are a reminder both of the death of the specific person and of the idea of death as an integral part of the community’s life. The processional exit of the dead body is a metaphor for the journey of his soul and body that has already started. It is a ritual performance of the monk’s departure in which what is said is actually acted. Rituals are, a priori, connected to body-memory, regarding repetitive, habitual movements conducted by the members of the community and encouraging practical knowledge of religious meanings and social relationships. They are something more than mere recollections of past events; they are collective re-actualisations of these events through the embodied experience of the participants.20 In this sense, the liturgical movement of the body-­ subjects influences the building of a space that has to provide a shelter for the gathering of the individuals according to certain symbolic and ­spiritual qualities. At the same time, the concrete formation of a locale affects participation in rituals by indicating different ways of (liturgical) inhabitation. Memory of death is ritually performed through the funeral and the burial. It is the memory of a journey, ritually narrated through the movement of the dead body in the monastery and also followed by the readings of the service that have an intense farewell character. The monks accompany the dead processionally, wishing them goodbye and expressing their hope to meet again in the future Second Coming. The coming return process also highlights the importance of memory in the ecstatic understanding of place, both at the material level, through the exhumation, and at the immaterial level, with the expectation of the Second Coming.

7.3 ‘Memory of Death’ and Place: The Cemetery, the Grave and the Ossuary The cemetery is a silent part of the landscape in which a liturgy takes place every Saturday. It is a repository of death stories, something also related to the ability of a place to carry memories. According to Casey,  This process has a number of similarities with the ancient Greek funeral rites.

20

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

141

place is an eventful container of memories, ready to be retrieved through embodied experience.21 The ‘reservative’ character of a cemetery plays a key role in the Athonite monastic community: it is the place where the remnants of the dead are kept. As already discussed, the act of keeping them performs the memory of death through the ritual placement in the graves, the ritual unearthing and storage in the ossuary. The kemeterio of an Athonite monastery is usually found along its periphery. The word kemeterio stems from the Greek verb for ‘sleep’ (kèmame), reflecting the temporary state of the soul between the mundane death and the Second Coming.22 For the Athonites the grave is one of the three places (along with the cell and their stall) that ‘belong’ for a specific period of time to a monk. The kemeterio usually includes a small number of graves and a chapel connected to an ossuary oriented towards the east, where the Heavenly Jerusalem is traditionally located. The cemetery of Gregoriou monastery is situated six metres away from the eastern wall of the complex. Surrounded by the gardens of the monastery, it is a small piece of land containing six graves and a two-storey chapel. The graves of the monks lie in its eastern part; they are plain, pit-like graves covered with soil. A wooden cross at the side of the dead monk’s head and a vertically placed slab at the side of his feet demarcate each grave. The dead monk’s name and age are written on the wooden cross. The grave can be seen as the creation of a void, an artificial cave to accommodate a human body, echoing the sacred associations of earth since ancient times. The corpse is placed inside it with his eyes looking towards the sky, while his soul is believed to have departed. According to Christian theology, the body is already in a state of waiting. It carries his past destructible life and anticipates the Second Coming in which it will be resurrected along with the soul as an undivided hypostasis.23 The ‘planted’ crosses sprout out of the earth almost organically, pointing towards the sky and being associated with the anticipation of the resurrection of the whole person (body and soul). The inscriptions on them  Casey, Remembering, pp. 181–215.  Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, The Soul, the Body and Death (Dewdney: Synaxis Press, 2010), pp. 19–23. 23  Puhalo, The Soul, the Body and Death, pp. 5–13. 21 22

142 

C. Kakalis

remind the living monks of the specific dead person and ‘invite [them] […] to confront the ever-present possibility of their own death, attending in the face of that possibility to who they are and measuring what gives significance to their lives […]’.24 At the same time the small chapel that contains the ossuary is also interconnected with the monastic community as an integral part of its liturgical life. The kemeterio, therefore, is a threshold, the architectural formation of which relates to the materialisation of the individual’s movement from the mundane to the otherworldly and the partial return to the former. The dead body of the monk is temporarily buried on the edges of the monastic complex, being both inside and outside it. After three years, his skeleton is unearthed to re-join the community in a different way than previously. On entering the chapel, the skeleton is materially incorporated into the communal ritual life of the monastery by being placed in the ossuary. A liturgy is held in this chapel every Saturday, in which a memorial service commemorates the dead monks of the community. During this service a plate of kollyvo is offered and blessed—a sweet made of boiled wheat, sugar and nuts. The grains of wheat symbolise the desired resurrection of the departed souls, which is also connected to the repetitive seasonal regeneration of the planted seeds. The kollyvo is distributed to the monks and visitors during the meal, contributing to the performance of the memory of death (Fig. 7.1).25 These liminal dynamics of the cemetery and its chapel are also expressed on the frescoes of the latter. In its narthex the individual interacts with representations of the Louds and the Second Coming. The first relates to the three last psalms of David (148, 149 and 150) in which he calls on the whole universe to praise God. They are depicted on the dome, the southern half of the eastern wall and the southern half of the western wall. The Second Coming is represented on the north wall, the northern half of the western wall and the northern half of the eastern wall. In particular, the representation of the Louds gradually develops on the walls, always combined with the corresponding text. This synthesis  Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p. 296.  Memorial services are also held during the important feast in commemoration of the celebrated saint. 24 25

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

143

Fig. 7.1  An external view of the Gregoriou cemetery. (Photograph by the author)

also includes the depiction of a chorus of young men and women in eighteenth-century dress dancing circular folk dances. According to the archaeologist Ioannis Volanakis, this paradoxical depiction of the chorus connected to the Louds in the cemetery relates to a joyful approach to death, as the scope of the mundane hesychast struggles leads to the possibility of Heavenly Jerusalem.26 Circular dance can be also interpreted as a symbol of regeneration, as it has been incorporated into rituals accompanying the seasons’ changes and initiation ceremonies since ancient times.27 The representation of the Second Coming in the rest of the narthex supports this view. In this sense, the narthex—the passage from the  Ioannis Volanakis, The Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorios at Mount Athos: History–Art–Architecture (Mount Athos, 2003), p. 104. 27  J.W.  Fitton, ‘Greek Dance’, The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 23/2 (1973), pp.  254–274; Dagmar Motycka Weston, ‘Greek Theatre as an Embodiment of Cultural Meaning’ in The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Paul Emmons, John Hendrix and Jane Lomholt (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 7–11. 26

144 

C. Kakalis

outside to the main church—also symbolises the passage from the mundane life to the Second Coming. Directly related to the idea of the end of human life, the frescoes enhance the ‘memory of death’, adding to its liturgical performativity. Being something more than two-dimensional depictions, the icons contribute to the dramaturgy, enabling the ascetic to interact visually with the represented themes. The role of the painted walls as an instrument of recollection is also activated in the case of this building, which invites the mindful gaze of the participants in the Saturday liturgies.28 Under the chapel we find the ossuary. It resembles a built cave in which the relics of the dead monks are tightly placed. The space is overwhelming, and the only natural lighting comes from the opening of the entrance, while four low niches create the cross-like cavity. The ossuary is placed just under the central dome, supporting its axis mundi associations and the co-existence of the dead, the mortals and the divine. Darkness, humidity and the low vaults of the roof create an environment that is very different from the external one. This unique experience is also enhanced by the presence of the relics, representing the future. Their role is not a decorative one, and the way that they are displayed resembles a storage room. The names and the ages of the dead monks are written on their skulls, which are located in a different place from the rest of the bones. The ossuary, therefore, is an event of a ritual storage of the relics of the dead, inviting the embodied interpretation of the living, through either the communal rituals held in the chapel of the cemetery or the individual silent meditation in the space. The Athonite ossuary is not like the ones found in Greek cities, in which each skeleton is placed in a different numbered box, in an almost archival process. The grave is the last place that belongs to the monk for a specific period (three years). Traces of his previous individual hypostasis are written on his skull, testifying to the character of this space not only as a place of collective memory but also as a place of personal oblivion. The individual is almost absorbed into a communal waiting for the Second Coming and at the same time exists as an independent hypostasis  Maurice Merleau Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, translated by Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159–190. 28

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

145

Fig. 7.2  An internal view of the ossuary. (Photograph by the author)

in the belief of the non-existence of death and the afterlife.29 Every Saturday the priest of the cemetery’s chapel recites the names of the dead monks, testifying to this simultaneous individual presence and oblivion in the absorption into the narrative of the communal recollection (Fig. 7.2).30

 The name of the monk is not his baptismal one, as he is given a new name during his initiation as a monk of the lesser habit. The first letter of the Athonite’s monastic name is usually the same as in his baptismal name (e.g. the layman called Christos may be named Christophoros as a monk). His surname is also replaced according to the monastery to which he belongs (so the monk Christophoros who lives in Gregoriou monastery is now called ‘Gregoriatis’ or ‘one who comes from Gregoriou’). Therefore, even in his formal integration into the Athonite realm there is an obliteration of personal identity expressed through the name giving: the individual is gradually incorporated into the communal narrative. 30  Michael Herzfeld, ‘When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 38/3 (1982), pp. 292–294. 29

146 

C. Kakalis

Hence, as Ken Worpole says, ‘landscapes of the dead are always, simultaneously, landscapes of the living’31 as they deal with a discontinuity in life that the former have already experienced and the latter are going to experience. The placement of the silent remnants of the dead at the periphery of the monastic complex and their eastern orientation contributes dynamically to this. The buried dead and the relics remain silent, playing an important role in this process as the main inhabitants of this part of the landscape. Therefore, silence is intense in the cemetery as the monks go only to pray or to participate in the Saturday service. Silence and memory can be meaningfully interconnected, with the former allowing for the latter to be shared and perceived among the components of a place-event. The silencescape of the Athonite cemetery communicates the ‘memory of death’, carrying both the personal stories of the dead monks and the common perspective of the community. Past, present and future co-exist through the conduct of death rituals and the ‘reservative’ character of the cemetery of an Athonite monastic community. The funerary and burial services facilitate the exit of the individual from the mundane community, leading to his future return. The latter is partially fulfilled through the exhumation process and the placement of the relics in the ossuary. Memory is an integral part of these processes too: the rituals recollect the death of the specific monk and at the same time invite the participant to anticipate their future end. In the case of the ‘memory of death’, the term ‘memory’ is intertwined with a future projection through the materiality of death’s common truth. The cemetery also plays an important role in the whole process, as an embodiment of the liminal stage of the journey of the dead, silently inhabited by the buried bodies and the relics in the ossuary. These relics are tangible testimonies of the departed monks, who are believed to be closer to the final return of the Second Coming. The cemetery and the ossuary, therefore, become places of personal oblivion and communal memory at the same time, as the independent personal hypostasis of the monks is  Ken Worpole, Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 20. 31

7  The Cemetery and the Grave 

147

incorporated in the communal narrative. The weekly services in the chapel also contribute to the repetitive embodied recollection and oblivion. The building’s orientation and iconographic programme are integral parts of its liturgical performance. Moreover, the mnemonic dynamics of silence play an important role in the cemetery, also opening up an interesting area of investigation. At the same time the ritual storage of the relics in the ossuary is also included in the practices of the ‘memory of death’.

8 Athonite Embodied Topography

8.1 Topos Place is the happening of the mutual interrelationship between the individual and other individuals, the architecture, natural landscape and objects.1 In this phenomenal framework of the interaction between man and the world, the previously Cartesian distinctive entities of psychic and physiological are unified through a holistic engagement of the human being to an intentional experiencing of a ‘there’. They are always an active agent who experiences space and time as interdependent parts of the whole of which they are part. At the same, time past memories and future expectations co-exist in the present. Through my actions I am in a state of waiting during which, according to Yi Fu Tuan, ‘the expected event appears to move towards [me] … and the co-ordinate spatial feeling is one of contraction’.2 I am also able to recollect past events, uniting the three temporal dimensions (past, present, future) into one.  Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2006), p. 219; Edward S. Casey, ‘Jeff Malpas’ Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography’, p. 226. 2  Yi Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective”, in S. Gate and G. Olsson (eds), Philosophy of Geography, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), p. 400. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3_8

149

150 

C. Kakalis

As Christian Norberg-Schulz says, place is ‘a qualitative “total” phenomenon which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight’.3 Being an event and not something static, place is a vibrating synthesis of the individual’s embodied relationship to locales.4 It is therefore conditioned by the notions of familiarity and participation, as the person is invited to be engaged in its constitution: the happening of its organisation and dwelling, both as an individual and as a member of a community. People today tend to distance themselves from such an understanding of place, dealing with space and time in a more superficial and abstract way.5 Nevertheless, through human experience of mathematically defined spaces, the individual is open to the possibility of their active participation in the happening of places. This openness to the world relates to a corporeal intentionality: their ability and potential to be engaged in an intentional sensual interrelationship to the context in which they are.6 Intentionality implies a motivating power that opens the subject to the possibility of a dynamic interaction with the environment. The individual thus participates in the event of place through the intercommunication of their senses, making the whole process a project towards movement.7 The body evidently plays an important role in the liturgical life of a religious place through the conduct of daily rituals. Rituals are participatory performances of the reciprocal  Christian Norberg-Schulz, “The phenomenon of place”, in Designing Cities. Critical Readings in Urban Design, Alexander R. Cuthbert (ed), (Oxford, Melbourne, Berlin: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 122. 4  Arnold Berleant, Aesthetic Experience of Environment, translated from English to Greek by Murto Antonopoulou and Nicolaos Gogas, edited by Georgia Apostolopoulou (Athens: Foundation of Panagiotis and Efi Micheli, 2004, first edition in English 1992), pp. 40–63. 5  Edward S. Casey, ‘How to Get from Space to Place’ in Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996); see also: Edward S.  Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 29 and 38. 6  Edward S.  Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013), pp. 231–232; see also: David Seamon’s approach to embodied ‘lifeworld’ in David Seamon, ‘A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology and Environment-Behaviour Research’, in Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research, edited by S.  Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto and H. Minami (New York: Plenum, 2000), through K-State Research Exchange (http://krex.kstate.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1697), p. 159. 7  Maurice Merleau Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, translated by Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 104. 3

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

151

relationship between man and the divine. Movement and counter-­ movement contribute to the liturgical dramas in which the active man is bodily worshipping God.8 In this way, rituals are something more than mere recollections of past events. They are the re-actualisations of these events through the embodied experience of the participants.9 According to Nick Crossley, rituals involve physical activity through the combination of patterned movements, whose meaning may be different from their accurate mechanical conduct.10 In this framework, the importance of ritual is illuminated by Merleau Ponty’s ‘habitual’ way of relating to the world: ‘[rituals] manifest a practical grasp upon our embodied understanding of our incarnate, subjective or psychological state of potentialities […] of both our own subjectivity in an embodied way of being-in-the-world and those of social world […]’.11 In this sense, religious space and time are experienced through the ritual movement of the body-subjects aspiring to a spiritual knowledge, the achievement of which relates to a corporeal realisation of the world. Ritual becomes a means of liturgical experience. Its performance influences the building of a space that provides a field for the gathering of the individuals, according to certain symbolic and spiritual qualities. At the same time, the concrete formation of a locale affects the participation in rituals by indicating different ways of (liturgical) inhabitation. The Athonite landscape is a field of ritual actions in which repetitive conduct supports the organisation of an ascetic experience of the space-­ between the profane and the divine. At the same time, the moving body-­ subject of the outsider is allowed to attend these liturgical activities and actively participate in them, if involved in a process of familiarisation and more holistic engagement. As Lindsay Jones argues, during the course of these ritual-architectural events, the ‘actual built form’, the ‘human  Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, translated by J.E. Turner (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 339. 9  For Hans Georg Gadamer’s approach to ritual play and ritual field, see: Flemming Lebech, ‘The Concept of the Subject in the Philosophical Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14/2, p. 230. 10  Nick Crossley, ‘Ritual, Body Technique and (Inter)subjectivity’, in Kevin Schilbrack (ed), Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 33. 11  Crossley, ‘Ritual, Body Technique and (Inter)subjectivity’, pp. 40 and 47. 8

152 

C. Kakalis

beings’ and ‘the ceremonial occasion’ are dynamically interconnected.12 Through the ‘juxtaposition and interplay’ between tradition and ‘variation’, the individuals find themselves interrelated with their context through a process that is connected to an active religious tradition and the possibility of an inner transformation.13 The life of the Athonite coenobitic monastery thus follows a specific daily programme of work and prayer based on the first foundational documents of the tenth century. Individual and collective prayer play a key role in this programme. The typical day has at least three common ceremonies (morning, afternoon and evening). Meals are related to them and are performed in a ritualistic way. Moreover, the monks must conduct their canon, their personal silent prayer, in their cells. Rituals relevant to the services are also held in the courtyard of the monastery, as we have seen (the talanton procession), and these reaffirm the sacredness of the monastic complex.14 The constant focus on the meaning of the Jesus Prayer (even during manual work) forms a ritual connection between all aspects of life there. The individual interacts with an environment in which the divine may be manifested. Therefore, according to Mircea Eliade, a sacred place is a ‘centre’, an axis mundi, where hierophanies and theophanies may occur, allowing the possibility of connection between the levels of earth and heaven.15 The dichotomy between the sacred and the profane is expressed in a dialectical way, as different (built and natural) things can be active receptacles of the sacred while still forming part of their more profane environment.16 Eliade includes Athonite monastic life in the paradoxical ways of encountering the divine ‘unknown’ that are different from the

 Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (Cambridge: Mass distributed by Harvard University Press for Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000) pp. 214–215. 13  Ibid., p. 219. 14  Always playing an active role, the individual in the coenobitic monastery passes through the following stages: newcomer, novice, monk, lesser habit, greater habit. The latter three are different stages of the monk’s identity that correspond to his spiritual progress. 15  Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958), p. 373. 16  Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) pp. 84 and 178. 12

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

153

‘Western rationalist tradition’.17 The Eastern Christian Church is based on the combination of ‘positive theology’ and ‘apophatic theology’, in the framework of which God can simultaneously be known and unknown. Communal rituals and silent prayer are reciprocally combined to serve this model of life, also influencing the way art and architecture are formed and experienced. The buildings and the natural landscape of the Athonite peninsula together form the active context of the liturgical movement of individuals. The mountain of Athos that characterizes the peninsula geomorphologically is actively associated with the sacred through traditions, the lives of monks and outsiders and annual celebrations of the event of the Transfiguration of Christ (6 August). Even though it is not centrally located, this mountain is still an axis mundi, ‘a region impregnated with the sacred, a spot where one can pass from one cosmic zone to another’. This mountainous landscape has now been the shelter of the ascetic practice of hermits for more than a 1000 years. The aforementioned organisation of the Athonte coenobitic monastery around the central main church is also included in this phenomenal exploration. These different sacred places are experienced through a liturgical way of life, where liturgy relates to the service(s) held in a church. In Eastern Christian theology, liturgy is also extended to every aspect of everyday life, trying to unite its material and immaterial components into a religious event of human experience.

8.2 Topography Mount Athos could be seen as a landscape in which different locales of sacred/ascetic character are combined through a network of footpaths and roads mapped in the best way through walking, ritual, journey and individual worship. According to Casey, etymologically, ‘topography’ combines the Greek word for place (τόπος–topos) with the one for writing (γράφειν–graphein), relating lived spatiality to the notion of inscription. In the traditional use 17

 Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, section: ‘Palamas and the Light of Tabor’, pp. 61–64.

154 

C. Kakalis

of the term, topos is connected to a specific mathematically defined location and graphein relates to ‘the model of a [two-dimensional] flat surface on which are inscribed images as well as words’.18 Thus, traditionally, topography is ‘the science or practice of describing a particular place, city, town, manor, parish or tract of land; the accurate and detailed description or delineation of locality’.19 But if a place (topos) is the embodied event discussed above, then this book investigates the widening of the traditional definition of topography to include even the expression of an experiential approach to the interaction between the individual and the world.20 This possibly follows Edward S. Casey’s concept of an embodied mapping of place: ‘Being in the centre of things my body can always move here or there, up or down, this way or that. […] A spontaneous corporeal mapping or somatography arises in which, as on an actual map, meaningful alternative directions are available at each important juncture’.21 Human geographers (such as Edward Relph, Yi Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer and David Seamon) have been working on such an understanding of topography since the 1970s. Their approach involves the illumination of the aforementioned ‘gathering’ character of place, trying to understand how this event can be described (space) and narrated (time) at the same time.22 In this sense, the topography of the Athonite landscape is the expression of its experiential spatiality. Historical documents, maps, paintings, monks’ biographies, travel testimonies or even elements from internet 18  Edward S.  Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 160. 19  Ibid., p. 153. 20  Ruth Webb, ‘The Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor and Motion in “Ekphraseis” of Church Buildings’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 53 (1999), pp. 59–74. Ruth Webb examines the ‘rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis’, a type of Byzantine literal representation of ritual architecture, in the framework of which the interaction between a ‘static’ building and a moving visitor is narrated ‘in a progression not just from the exterior to the interior of the church, but from the evidence of the senses to the final mysteries and secret places’. 21  Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. 48. The bold is my emphasis. 22  Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (eds), The Human Experience of Space and Place (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1980); Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Edward Relph, Place and Placeness (London: Sage, 2008); see also: Casey, Representing Place, p. 163.

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

155

sources can demonstrate a variety of aspects of the environment’s meaningful character. All combined would resemble a palimpsest of different co-present layers of its expression that still cannot be as genuine as an embodied inscription. Mapping the Athonite landscape deals with the expression of different kinds of embodied experience. On the one hand, as mentioned above, the embodied experience of monks is conditioned by the notion of ritual and silent prayer, on which life in the ascetic structures is based. On the other hand, the journey of outsiders and the freer movement along the footpaths of the peninsula is also an important aspect of life there, through which the different religious locales are connected. In this sense, outsiders conduct a circular journey, passing through the general periphery of the peninsula twice, signalling the beginning and the end of their temporal interaction with the topography there. Moreover, the system of paths that connects the different places of monastic activity (monasteries, sketes, cells, desert, natural cavities) of the Athonite landscape is difficult to map in a traditional cartographic way, as it is mostly organised in quite a dense natural environment, and it changes according to the frequency of use and the climatic fluctuations. As Christopher Tilley suggests, an analogy between the walking process and writing arises through the inscription and preservation of the path or the track. The path preserves previous repetitive passages and is open to the possibility of future ones.23 In this sense, embodied topography implies a narrative understanding of landscape through the interconnection of different places, past and present experiences, and spatial and textual stories of personal and collective identity.24 This meaningful synthesis of experiences is directly related to the spatio-temporal event of place. Narrative is a self-contained element and, at the same time, it is involved in the situation of interdependence of the different elements of place. Thus, it shares with place the notions of horizon, pathways and things.25 As place, narrative is situated  Christopher Tilley, pp. 29–30.  Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, p. 184. 25  See: Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 203–205. The writer explains how place and memory share these three elements: the ‘horizon’, the ‘pathways’ and the ‘things’. 23 24

156 

C. Kakalis

in the framework of an external horizon (encompassing places, regions and things),26 expressed through the coherence of its ‘emplotment’ (seen as ‘the episodic-temporal equivalent of a landscape’),27 in which a number of different spatio-temporal events are interrelated through a number of pathways of entry (‘access’, ‘retrieval’) or egress (moving from one to another, or reaching their end).28 As Tilley says: Narrative is a means of understanding and describing the world in relation to agency. It is a means of linking locales, landscapes, actions, events and experiences together providing a synthesis of heterogeneous phenomena. […] In its mimetic or phenomenological form narrative seeks to capture action not just through description but as a form of re-description.29

As we have seen, ritual movement, silent prayer, walking along the paths, the journey of the outsider but even the flowing of light, sound and gas can become different movements-narratives that penetrate a number of boundaries (spatial, temporal, sonic, imaginary), combining the different places of the peninsula into a whole.

8.3 Moving Through the Topography Every locale of the peninsula becomes an ‘event’, either in the life of the monk or the journey of the outsider. Athonite topography is open to interpretation through a number of different (embodied or not) narratives; therefore, the character of every sacred locale is based on the conditions of its foundation, its building and ritual dwelling, its connection to a tradition and its openness to visitors. The interpretation of the topography by both permanent and temporary dwellers is being inscribed on the concrete environment through their embodied movement, which creatively interacts with the architecture, at the same time, activating a communicative environment.  Ibid., p. 204.  Ibid. 28  For an approach to the ‘pathway’, see: Casey, Remembering, pp. 204–205. 29  Christopher Tilley, p. 32. 26 27

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

157

In this way hesychasm is theologically based on the paradoxical combination of positive and negative, or apophatic, theology—according to which God is simultaneously known and unknown, experienced and not-experienced.30 The final stage of a hesychast experience (theosis) is believed to be an embodied realisation of this paradox. This philosophical framework was gradually introduced by Christian writers such as St Dionysius the Areopagite, St John Climacus and St Symeon the New Theologian, and was established as the main ascetic practice of Eastern Christianity during the fourteenth century through the life and writings of St Gregory Palamas.31 According to Eastern Christian theology, God is a ‘mystery’ for which humans should eternally search, a mystery that cannot be fully disclosed and fully hidden at the same time.32 For hesychasm, this transfiguration is also fulfilled through xeniteia. Xeniteia derives from the Greek word for stranger (xenos) and relates to the detachment from the mundane sphere, and is also connected to the ancient Greek notion of amerimnia (lack of worries) and the Latin concept of peregrination, and therefore to pilgrimage.33 The gradual movement from the familiar self to the unfamiliar Other, searching for a divine homeland, is also found in the Scriptures. In particular, in the Old  After the schism, during the eleventh century, the Christian Catholic Church rejected hesychasm as focusing more on the communal experiences of the divine. 31  Andrew Louth, Denys, the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 2001); John Chryssavgis, John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (New York: Routledge, 1999); John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, translated by Adele Fiske (Crestwood: St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press, 1998). 32  Paul Evdokimof, Orthodoxy (Athens: Rigopoulos Editions, 1965), p.  17; see also: Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Ltd., 1991, first publication 1957), pp. 36 and 38. 33  A peregrinus was a ‘man wandering far away from his home and relatives, in strange countries’. Its origin is the word peregre, which means ‘faraway, beyond lands’. This word is a compound of the word per, which means ‘through’ and the word ager, which means ‘field, country, land’. Hence, a peregrinus was a stranger coming from his homeland and passing through a foreign land. The notion of pilgrimage derives etymologically from the word peregrination. In this sense, during pilgrimage the individual moves through foreign landscapes trying to fulfil an existential search for the sacred. While conducting a pilgrimage they redefine their relationship to the past through participation in processes that have been held for a long period of time and are usually based on the reactualisation of past religious events. On this see: Bertalan Pustzai, Religious Tourists: Constructing Authentic Experiences in Late Modern Hungarian Catholicism (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2004), p. 27. 30

158 

C. Kakalis

Testament Abraham followed God’s commandment and left his country and his relatives, going to an unknown land.34 Moreover, in the New Testament, Jesus connects peregrination to the eschatological aim of Christian life: ‘And everyone who has left houses of brothers or sisters or father or mother, or wife, or children or lands, for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life’ (Matthew 19:29).35 In this hesychast peregrination embodied movement and stability are interconnected, as detachment from everyday life is believed to be a continuous roaming with the intention of finding stability in God.36 Repetitive (individual or communal) rituals and silent prayer express the above co-­ existence of polarities, and are open to interpretation by the visitor. This is expressed in the way the coenobitic monastery is organised to allow both the conduct of circular, repetitive communal rituals and the more static silent prayer of the monks. These bodily actions and gestures are always in a reciprocal relationship, depicting the spiritual qualities of the ascetic life. Therefore, on entering the context of a monastic structure, a novice or a visitor must interact with a different environment from his every-day one. Monastic habits, based on the rules of the foundational documents, form the basis of a general framework of life that relates to a kind of initiation. Programmed life and obligatory participation in communal actions (obedience to the abbot’s will, rituals and manual work) create an environment that does not remind the individual of the freer ‘outside world’. Whereas in our everyday life, even if we have a number of daily habits (often called ‘rituals’ by contemporary scholars), we usually find a way to break this repetition of acts and incorporate moments of entertainment into our lives. In the context of a monastery, the monks should live according to the writings of the fathers and the foundational documents. Whereas some of them (usually older monks) feel that the role of the boundaries indicated in them is threatened as a result of opening up the peninsula to the outside world, younger monks tend to feel that the  Marco Toti, ‘The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage’ in René Gothóni and Graham Speake (eds), The Monastic Magnet: Roads to and from Mount Athos (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 110–111. 35  As quoted in Toti, ‘The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage’, p. 111. 36  Ibid., p. 116. 34

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

159

Athonite topography is still very different from the mundane sphere they left behind. This controversy is to be expected, as the changes in the peninsula since the 1980s are dramatic in terms of visitation rights and technological advances. Even during the three years of my research, differences were observed in the numbers and kinds of visitors received, the experience of the main church and the way in which silence was experienced in the open spaces.37 Athonite topography is an eventful territory that, besides visual interaction, also involves our other senses: hearing, smell and touch. On the one hand, it is a field of communal interaction in which different temporal limits organise a programmed communal life of repetitive rituals. On the other hand, stillness, solitude and silence are active components of the topography, as their materiality is directly connected to the conduct of silent prayer. Silent moments in the topography are not considered to be voids, but find their meaning through their religious connotations. Communal rituals synthesise different parts of the landscape. The Christian Orthodox word for sacraments is ‘mystery’. Whereas a sacrament derives from the Latin word sacramentum, meaning ‘a holy thing or act’, and relates to the distinction between the sacred and the profane, mystery derives from the Greek word for ‘initiate’: myein, referring to ‘a secret rite; secret worship; a secret thing’, or a processional way to achieve participation in the knowledge of the ineffable. And whereas the only organised communal ritual held in the natural landscape of Athos is the annual ascent to the peak of Mount Athos on 6 August, communal rituals are mainly held in the hermitages (huts) and the kellia that have a chapel, in the kyriakon (the communal core) of the skete and in the wider territory of the coenobitic monasteries. Following the archetype of journey, these cyclical movements combine the built and the unbuilt into a whole, recollecting a desired movement from earth to heaven. This is directly related to the way the buildings were conceived and organised in the territory of the monastery, and the way in which liturgy impregnates all the levels of daily monastic life. For the Eastern Orthodox Church, liturgy is not only connected to the

37

 Third field trip to Mount Athos, August 2012.

160 

C. Kakalis

church services, it extends to all the different levels of personal and communal Orthodox Christian life: The dynamics of the Liturgy go beyond the boundaries of the Eucharistic assembly to serve the community at large. The Eucharistic liturgy is not an escape into an inner realm of prayer, a pious turning away from social realities; rather it calls and sends the faithful to celebrate the sacrament of the brother outside the temple in the public marketplace […]).38

The predefined programme of monastic life guides the monks to move in a specific ritual way that emphasises the union with God, re-actualised through the Holy Communion and also recollected bodily through other rituals. Starting from the morning service, all the different aspects of liturgical life are considered connected to the Eucharist, and the achievement of the physical-spiritual communion with God.39 For example, the meals follow the services and they are performed in a ritual way through the combination of processional movements, scriptural readings and sometimes even chanting. Moreover, the courtyard is also connected to these processes, through the circular hammering of wooden instruments or the ringing of the bell, the sonic signals of the services. Deviations from this model—such as the increasing number of visitors in the main church, which might be disturbing for the monks—change the reality of this choreographed performance. Therefore, Athonite topography today also includes qualities of ‘contesting discourses’, as re-­ interpreted through the body-movements of different groups of people. On the other hand, as a necessary means of prayer, silence is a key component of the aural environment, contributing to the definition of the spatial, temporal and sonic boundaries. Starting from the elimination of external noise, therefore, the hesychast aims to achieve an internal silence, as this is considered to be the threshold towards communion with  Ion Bria, p. 20.  In the case of the Eucharist, the processional approach to the main entrance and the actual communal eating from the same chalice and spoon is an embodied movement that narrates in a characteristic way the pilgrimage of the monk (and the devotee) from earth (from narthex to iconostasis passing under or around the dome) to God (Holy Communion) and then back to earth (going back to the stasidi). 38 39

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

161

God. This is an embodied process based on the ceaseless repetition of the Jesus Prayer. According to the theorist of linguistics Kris Acheson, silence is an embodied gesture, an ‘active human performance’ through which we can realise both space and time. Either human or atmospheric, silence can be a space ready to be filled or a substance filling a specific space in a meaningful way. Its meaning is connected to the way in which it is performed (rhythmic, melodic, intervention), and to the context in which it takes place. Moreover, silence is by definition a temporal phenomenon, connected to both an objective and a subjective sense of temporality.40 This is also enhanced in the case of hesychasm by a sense of rhythm produced by the recitation of the same phrase. Silence is therefore another way of understanding our embodied interaction with the world, as through its experience we can connect with the surrounding context and communicate with other individuals in the dynamic framework of ‘the texture of communicative praxis’.41 Connecting the silence to religious worship, in his seminal work The World of Silence, the theologian Max Picard also underlines the ability of the embodied phenomenon of silence to transmit messages of holiness, memory and anticipation.42 According to the writer, silence manifests itself through different aspects of the topography, such as the silent presence of nature, the silence of the night and the silence of the emptiness of the cathedrals and museums.43 Written in 1948, Picard’s piece highlights also the danger that silent phenomena faced during that period from an always-progressing modern technology that ‘contaminated’ the world with noise (idle sounds), such as the one produced by the uncritical use of radio.44 Today, that post-modern era leaves its traces in the area of ‘telesthetic’ interaction in a powerful way, and examination of the hesychast qualities of Mount Athos contributes  Kris Acheson, ‘Silence as Gesture: Rethinking the Nature of Communicative Silences’, Communication Theory, 18 (2008), p. 546. 41  Ibid., p. 548. 42  Max Picard, The World of Silence, translated by Stanley Godman (London: Harvard Press, first published in German in 1948); see also: Robert Wood, ‘Silence, Being and the Between: Picard, Heidegger and Buber’, Man and World, 27, pp. 121–134. 43  Picard, The World of Silence, pp. 108, 141 and 169. 44  Ibid., p. 198. 40

162 

C. Kakalis

to the relevant academic discourses, reintroducing the importance of silence in the experience of embodied topography. In her book, Silence in the Land of Logos, Silvia Montiglio underlines the difference between the role of silence in ancient Greek religion and the Christian tradition. For the writer, in Ancient Greece vocal prayer was more important than moments of silence.45 The latter was mainly used as a preparation for vocal prayer or a process of purification of the unfit members of the ancient Greek community.46 A similar passive approach is also found in the Old Testament, in which silence is connected to powerlessness and human defeat by death, as Yahweh was ‘a communicator who usually expressed himself through emphatic noise’.47 This attitude changed in the New Testament, in which silence is described as both a method of prayer and spiritual preparation, and also as a way for Jesus to convey to men messages about himself. In this sense, Zechariah was struck dumb by the Archangel when he reacted with uncertainty when hearing of the future birth of his child, asking for a sign of confirmation. This dumbness ended unexpectedly when he wrote on a table the name of his newborn son, John, on the eighth day after his birth. (Luke, 1:5–79) Moreover, in the stories of his Passion, Jesus kept silent several times, revealing his holiness. Therefore, in front of Pontius Pilate he answered the priests’ accusations through a ‘patient silence’, and in the Garden of Gethsemane he silently prayed to God, preparing himself for the coming Passion. Furthermore, his forty-day silence at the peak of a mountain was interrupted by a dialogue with Satan, a ‘battle with his thoughts’.48 Hence, moving from the Old Testament to the New, silence gradually became a positive gesture of Christian worship and was socially accessible during the fourth century, as its fruitful practice by the Desert Fathers confirmed its dynamic contribution to worship. Noise and speech always played an important role in the practice of faith, either through community worship or through the interaction between the ascetics and

 Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 11.  Ibid. pp. 17–23. 47  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (London: Penguin Books, 2013), pp. 11–29. 48  Ibid. 45 46

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

163

the inhabitants of the villages near which they practised solitude. Weeping and groaning were also included in their embodied prayer.49 Montiglio also introduces the notion of the ‘silence of the sight’ when describing the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which silence had a double character connected to both sound and sight as part of a process of initiation.50 According to her, the Greek word for initiation, muesis (μύησις), is connected both to the closing of the mouth and to the closing of the eyes, as the mustes were the lower initiates who did not have sensual access to the final mysteries.51 While the argument that the ineffable qualities of Christian rituals are directly connected to Eleusinian rites is questionable, there is a definite bond between them in hesychasm, where we also find this double silence with the emphasis on the visual aspect and the physical-spiritual experience of uncreated light.52 According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, this relates to the way icons were connected to a ‘contemplative silence’ after the iconoclastic defeat of 843, allowing the Eastern Christian Church to offer different routes towards theosis along with the communal liturgy. Silence, therefore, became a way of multi-sensual individual ascetic experience that is open to all the members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and also to laypeople. The origins of hesychast silent prayer, therefore, go back to the fourth century, but were mainly developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This is the period when the relevant psychosomatic techniques also evolved. For hesychast writers of this period, such as Nikiphoros the  Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Catholic Christianity and the Arrival of Asceticism’, 100–400, Gifford Lectures 2012, University of Edinburgh, Lecture Two. 50  Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos, paragraph: ‘Closing one’s lips, closing one’s eyes: silence in the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries’, pp. 23–32. 51  Ibid., p. 26. 52  Ibid., p. 29. Many ancient sources stress the dominance of sight also when they allude to the ceremony as a whole. So do the late rhetoricians, as well as Clement of Alexandria: transplanting the experience of the mysteries into the religious life of a Christian, Clement retains the vision of a pure light as the strongest emotion that the initiates supposedly felt. Certainly, the evidence that these late sources provide is not unquestionable, owing to the generalised preference for sight over hearing in these late periods. Furthermore, in the case of Clement, we may suspect that he emphasises the visual aspect of the mysteries because light effects can be salvaged by Christianity much more easily than verbal formulas. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that already in the classical period, the Eleusinian experience was commonly epitomised by the phrase ‘To seem the mysteries’. 49

164 

C. Kakalis

Hesychast, St Gregory of Sinai, St Kallistos and St Ignatios Xanthopoulos, this technique has three main components: body posture, control of breathing and inner exploration. Therefore, the ascetic should sit on a low stool in an almost foetal position, while controlling his breathing either as a preparatory exercise or connected to the recitation of the prayer. Moreover, concentration on the physical heart (region and beating) embodies the possibility of a deeper relationship to God, leading to a communion with Him (theosis).53 This posture is related to the Old Testament’s descriptions of the life of the Prophet Elijah, who is said to have prayed with his face lowered between his knees. The aim is the ‘constant supervision of the whole psychosomatic man’, and his transformation. The scope of the hesychasts lies in the addiction to constant prayer even while their body is carrying out everyday tasks.54 While traces of this technique still exist on Mount Athos, it is not compulsory, and there have been different attitudes to it in the history of hesychasm.55 Nevertheless, it underlines the importance of the body in hesychast life. Silence is also part of this physical-spiritual understanding of ascetic life. A characteristic definition of hesychia that describes this journey of the individual from the exterior to the interior, and his heart, is given by Hierotheos Vlachos: [Hesychia is] the peace of the heart, the undisturbed state of the mind (nous), the liberation of the heart from the thoughts (logismoi), from the passions and the influence of the environment; it is the dwelling in God. Hesychia is the only way for humans to attain theosis. External quietness is helpful so that humans can reach the noetic hesychia.56

The theologian Kallistos Ware, trying to approach the meaning of hesychia, talks about an experienced silence working at different levels,  Bishop Kallistos Ware, ‘Identity and Reference in the Spiritual Life. Yogi and Sufis’, Athens Dialogues E-Journal: http://athensdialogues.chs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/athensdialogues. woa/wa/dist?dis=71 (date of access: 18 December 2014). 54  St Gregory Palamas, Triads, Ι (§2, §12) and ΙΙ (§22). 55  Ware, ‘Identity and Reference in the Spiritual Life’. 56  Hierotheos Vlachos, A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain: Discussion with a Hermit on the Jesus Prayer (Levadia: Birth of Theotokos Monastery, 1991), p. 168 as translated and quoted in Father Joseph Wong, pp. 36–37. 53

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

165

from the more external to the more inward. In particular, the hesychast or hermit has to define his spatial relationship with other human beings and seclude himself in places of solitude, such as the caves in the Athos desert (First Level: hesychia and solitude). The monk who is a member of a coenobitic community has the ability to depart from it and practises silent prayer in his cell (Second Level: hesychia and the spirituality of the cell). Having demarcated the outward framework of their spiritual struggles, both hermits and monks seek to ‘confine their incorporeal within their bodily house’, striving to discover ‘the ladder that leads to the Kingdom of God’ (Third Level: hesychia and the ‘return into oneself ’).57 As we have seen in the previous chapters, silence demarcates the personal sphere of the monks, who prefer quiet places such as the desert or their cells. They try neither to speak nor to hear more words than necessary. Silence is not perceived in the same way in all the parts of the peninsula.58 Whereas silence in the desert is intense and mainly atmospheric (mostly connected to ‘natural’ phenomena, and for some outsiders even ‘unbearable’), in the case of a coenobitic monastery, silent prayer is mixed with the different phenomena found within it, suggesting a different aural-scape in which human and atmospheric silences are dynamically incorporated. Silent prayer is shared between different individuals who seek to practise it constantly. Communal rituals and the spaces in which they take place are also arranged to allow for this shared invocation to continue. In the case of the monastery, the monk is simultaneously alone and an active member of the community, something that leads to a dynamic interpenetration between personal and communal understandings of silent prayer, as we have seen. The regulations of entrance to the peninsula and the long Athonite monastic tradition have led to the preservation of a quite untouched natural environment. Although recently it has been damaged by uncritically executed infrastructural and building developments, it is still experienced by visitors as something different from our contemporary cities; something from the past that even forces some of the visitors to reconsider  Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom, Volume 1 of the Collected Works (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), pp. 89–98. 58  See also: Philip Sherrard, Athos: The Mountain of Silence (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 92. 57

166 

C. Kakalis

qualities of place and experience that are now lost from their lives. One of these is silence, the atmospheric experience of which enhances their explorations. A long walk in a forest, a climb to the peak of the mountain, walking along the seashore or a journey through the desert are situations during which we can feel involved in the happening of silence. The silence of the natural landscape is directly linked with its tangible components and soundscape. The sound of the birds, the rustling of the leaves on the trees and the sound of water may contribute to an eventful silent interaction with nature. Natural phenomena such as wind, rain, snow and changes in temperature also play a part. Changes can lead either to the enhancement of solitude or the sudden intrusion of noise. Light, darkness and shadows can be also part of a meaningful silencescape. Walking and direct interaction with the natural landscape enhance our reading of the embodied traces of silence. It is usually through walking that visitors to Athos read the silence of the landscape as an integral component of the peninsula. Depending on their motivation, they may interpret it as a sacred/hesychast quality (usually pilgrims) or even a phenomenon with intense existential qualities (‘existential’ visitors). Moreover, the deserted parts of the peninsula become the ideal environment for the Athonites to practise silent prayer. Cave dwelling and wandering on the steep slopes of the mountain (or simply standing in a relatively protected corner of it) become, therefore, ways of practising silent prayer. The monk’s cell and the stall play a vital role in the experience of silence in the coenobitic monastery. Having a direct or indirect relationship to the church, the sacred centre of the monastic city, the cells are considered to be part of the monk’s necessary physical-spiritual introversion,59 symbolising the possibility of him turning into himself in seeking a personal encounter with God, while at the same time being an active member of a living community. One could say that their structural diversity is an architectural inscription of this process. It is included in the evolution of the general Athonite model through the ages, being combined with the

 It is inside this rectangular room that he is going to practise the aforementioned psycho-spiritual technique of hesychasm. 59

8  Athonite Embodied Topography 

167

movement of different hypostases towards the future (eschatological aspect) through the practice of silence.60 In addition, sitting in their stalls while participating in the liturgy, monks remain silent. Keeping their heads down (in order not to be disturbed by what they see) and focusing on the repetition of the prayer, usually maintaining its rhythm through playing with the prayer rope, becomes the way that they experience their stall, which some of them call the ‘earthly grave’. In this case, the spatial boundary of the stasidi coincides with the one created by the silent aura of the monk, making his personal sphere more visible and even tangible. During this process, the readings and chanting of the liturgy dynamically contribute to the aural environment, which is not something void, but also becomes an in-­ between zone. Embodied movement in hesychasm carries intense religious qualities expressed through the reciprocal interaction between communal rituals and silent meditation. This is also depicted in the way art and architecture are formed and experienced. Focusing on how these movements influence the topography, we also realise the importance of the aural environment in Eastern Christian ascetic practice. This liturgical context has been connected with the possibility of the outsider’s participation in it. The visitor adds elements of his own sphere to the qualities of the topography, which is definitely not only about a hesychast seclusion. Hesychasm involves praying and liturgical communication between different people, which informs the character of the peninsula. Depending on their motivation, the visitors change the dynamics between the inside and the outside, suggesting that Mount Athos is a dynamic sacred embodied topography in which diverse processes of interpretation happen in parallel.

 See also: Patrick J. Quinn, ‘Drawing on Mount Athos: The Thousand Year Lesson’, Places, 2/1 (1985): ‘The monks’ cells illustrate the possibility of personalization of one’s own space/world within the larger world of an impersonal, communal life-style’. (p. 40); see also: Svetlana Popovič, ‘Dividing the Indivisible: The Monastery Space – Secular and Sacred’, Recueil des Travaux d’Etudes Byzantines, XLIV (2007): ‘… individual cells may become a path to Heaven and thus acquire a higher status in the hierarchy of sacredness …’ (p. 47); see also: Chryssavgis, John Climacus, p.159. 60

Afterword

“The rest is silence”, Hamlet’s last words in Shakespeare’s play, often came to mind unbidden in the aftermath of my reporting on the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia, which led me to make a series of pilgrimages to Athos, the Virgin Mother’s Holy Mountain in northeastern Greece. I followed the overgrown footpaths to coenobitic monasteries and sketes, surveying what Christos Kakalis calls “a sacred topography”, hoping to map the contours of my relationship to the mystical heart of Orthodox monasticism. Mine was a spiritual journey, which included immersion in the Divine Liturgy, Byzantine hymns and Patristic readings; enlightening and, occasionally, exasperating conversations with monks and pilgrims; and lessons in learning to hear the music of silence, which came to govern my thinking and my faith. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”, Hamlet declares at the beginning of his violent final scene, “Rough-hew them how we will” – and in his recognition of the limitations of human agency, we may glimpse a truth central to the monastic calling: the rest is indeed silence. If the waste and carnage of the Balkan wars had darkened my outlook, Mount Athos was where I might begin to heal.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3

169

170 Afterword

Hesychastic prayer was integral to the discipline I adopted on my peregrinations around the peninsula, since I was in considerable pain, physical and spiritual. For the repetition of the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—not only focused my attention on the central truth of Christianity but helped to alleviate some of my anxiety about the nature of my walk in the sun—and the stabbing pain in my shoulder and neck. Place Experience of the Sacred can also play a restorative role in the lives of its readers. The beauty of this book is that Kakalis eloquently combines his architectural training, study of the Church Fathers, and exploration of Mount Athos to interrogate this charged topography, which for more than a millennium has inspired spiritual adepts to seek a deeper understanding of their faith. “Monks and visitors are engaged in a dynamic process”, he writes, “during which physical and psychical, material and immaterial, built and unbuilt are not experienced as different qualities, but rather as equal components in the same procedure”. Think of his book, then, as a meditation on ritual and sacred space, a study of an ancient tradition and a way of being, and the record of a brilliant pilgrim-scholar who has found his spiritual home on the Holy Mountain. On my first pilgrimage to Athos, I made a note in my journal about the difficulty of following one footpath by the sea, because it seemed to keep disappearing in a tangle of foliage. But whenever I stopped to look back I could clearly see the path—a kind of double vision that in my mind grew into a metaphor for my pilgrimage, which was rooted in my own uncertain relationship to the divine and shaped by my walks from one monastery to the next, praying for guidance, relief from pain, and answers of a sort to the existential questions that have haunted humankind from time immemorial—questions that Paul Gaugin inscribed in his famous painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Kakalis provides a framework for understanding such questions through his exploration of some of the ways in which pilgrims draw meaning and strength from the Holy Mountain’s natural and built worlds: Thus walking along the path becomes a way of experiencing the paradoxical interaction between the mapped and the unmapped. In following the

 Afterword 

171

path the walker becomes an active part of the topography as he is trying to find his way in the landscape. The more he walks, the better he knows the path. The way he has to harmonize his pace with the changes in relief, the constant fear of disorientation and the mental alertness needed to reconcile the abstract information on a map that he may carry with an ever-changing route create an adventurous experience.

Kakalis treats Athonite architecture with the same exacting eye, invoking the wisdom of the Church Fathers to explore the spiritual associations between the design of a monastic complex and the promise of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The icons adorning the walls of each church, like the earthly liturgy, which St. John Climacus regarded as “a mimetic representation of the heavenly one, embodying the devotees’ anticipation of the return to Paradise”, are intended to deepen the faith of monks and pilgrims alike. Likewise, the organization of a typical Athonite day, each part of which “is dedicated to either work or prayer”; and the cyclical aspects of Orthodox monastic life, liturgical and seasonal; and the vigils and feasts that mark the calendar; and the silence and ritual of the communal meals—all performed for the glory of God, and all eloquently described in this book. The Holy Mountain is what the American poet W. S. Merwin called “a place apart”. What good fortune it is for readers to have Christos Kakalis show them around. The University of Iowa Iowa City, United States

Christopher Merrill

Index1

A

A.I.B., 25, 50 Aimilianos, Archimandrite, 11n7 Anatolios, Khaled, 102n25 Andriotis, Konstantinos, 51 Ascetic, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 20–27, 29, 31, 41, 44, 46, 48–50, 62, 63, 67, 78, 82, 109, 124, 133, 137, 144, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 162–164, 167 Athonite, viii, ix, 1–6, 8, 8n17, 10, 14, 15, 19, 22–25, 29, 30, 33–57, 56n36, 59–63, 65, 68, 71, 74, 78, 80, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 100, 102, 103, 107, 108, 113, 115, 117, 119, 119n2, 120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 127n25, 127n26, 129,

130, 133, 136–141, 144, 145n29, 146, 149–167, 171 Athos, vii–ix, 3, 4, 5n9, 10–16, 19, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33, 35, 38, 40n9, 49, 50, 53, 56, 60, 61, 67, 93, 110, 112, 114–116, 153, 159, 165, 166, 169, 170 Atmosphere, 2, 10, 12, 16, 17, 25, 31, 34n2, 50, 52, 59, 68, 69, 75, 78, 87, 89, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 130 Atmospheric, 4, 30, 31, 82, 83, 89, 91, 161, 165, 166 Aura/aural, 8, 8n17, 10, 12, 14, 16, 59, 60, 75, 87, 90, 102, 105, 107, 113, 117, 123, 130, 160, 167

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 C. Kakalis, Place Experience of the Sacred, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6214-3

173

174 Index B

Baldovin, John F., 70 Bauman, Zygmunt, 20 Bells, 73, 76, 79, 84–87, 104–106, 104n32, 122, 127, 130, 139, 160 Berleant, Arnold, 150n4 Body, ix, 4, 9, 13n9, 16, 18, 38, 40, 48, 56, 67, 69, 73, 80–83, 91–93, 96, 103, 123, 124, 133, 135, 136, 138–142, 146, 150, 154, 164 Bollnow, Otto, F., 54 Bria, Ion, 160n38 Brooks Hedstrom, Darlene L., 80n36 Brubaker, Leslie, 120n4 Bullfinch, Thomas, 70n28 Burkert, Walter, 21 C

Cabasilas, Nicholas, 103n28 Cairns, Scott, 7, 55, 113–115 Casey, Edward, S., 8, 67, 137, 140, 153, 154 Cave, ix, 9–12, 19–31, 48, 50, 54n31, 74, 135, 141, 144, 165, 166 Cell, 3, 9, 26, 27, 29n36, 50, 59–87, 93, 94, 105, 125, 136, 138, 141, 152, 155, 165, 166, 167n60 Cemetery, 133–147 Censing/censer, 16, 73n32, 76, 78, 90, 103–107, 104n32, 128, 139 Chant/chanting, viii, 7, 7n15, 8n16, 16, 60, 76, 78, 91, 100, 105, 107–110, 114, 122, 123, 127, 139, 160, 167

Chapel, 10, 15, 16, 16n11, 19, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 48, 63, 73, 91, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 159 Charkiolakis, Nikolaos, 37n5 Chatzinis, Giannis, 22 Christ, 13, 21, 73, 95, 103, 104, 127n25, 135, 139, 153 Christian, 11n3, 13, 20, 21n24, 25, 60–63, 66, 70, 73, 75, 90, 96, 98, 100–102, 104, 107, 117, 120, 122, 125, 127, 131, 135, 136, 141, 157, 158, 162, 163, 163n52 Chryssavgis, John, 13n9, 157n31, 167n60 Church, viii, ix, 5–7, 5n9, 7n15, 8n16, 15, 18, 19, 29, 52, 60, 62, 63, 71–73, 78, 83–87, 89–118, 122, 123, 126–131, 134, 139, 144, 153, 154n20, 159, 160, 166, 171 Co-existence, 93, 95, 109, 110, 118, 144, 158 Commemorate/commemoration, 10, 67, 71, 106, 133, 136, 137, 142, 142n25 Communication, 7, 10, 13, 17, 31, 34, 37, 46, 49, 69, 78, 83, 87, 95, 97, 102, 109, 112, 117, 130, 131, 167 Corbin, Alain, 87n50 Courtyard, 5, 16, 29, 52, 60, 68–87, 105, 116, 125, 128, 130, 134, 152, 160 Coyne, Richard, 51, 85, 113 Cunningham, Mary B., 110n42, 136n10

 Index  D

Danforth, Loring, M., 135 Dark, darkness, 79, 82, 98–102, 106, 113, 116, 144, 166 Dawkins, R.M., 84 De Certeau, Michel, 39n8 della Dora, Veronica, 20 Desert, viii, 9, 12, 16, 19–31, 50, 53, 54, 56, 61, 80, 92, 124, 155, 165, 166 E

Eade, John, 6n12 Eastern Orthodox, 7 Eat, 122–124, 127–129 Ekklisiastikos, 84, 84n46, 85, 104–106, 127, 128 Eliade, Mircea, 10, 152 Embodiment, 2, 3, 15, 95, 146 Entrance, 1, 6n12, 27, 41, 43, 48, 59, 60, 66, 69, 72, 74, 80, 83, 84, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 109, 113, 125, 126, 128, 139, 144, 160n39, 165 Environment built, 44 natural, 5, 17, 18, 22, 27, 31, 48, 50, 51, 54n31, 56n36, 63, 155, 165 Evdokimov, Paul, 96n12 Event, 3–5, 5n9, 7, 10, 13–15, 19, 52, 54n31, 55n34, 67, 70, 73, 74, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96–98, 100, 102, 103, 112–114, 123, 127n25, 129–131, 130n30, 133–135, 140, 144, 149–151, 153–156, 157n33

175

Exodus, 12, 92, 93, 104, 139 Experience, vii, viii, 1–6, 6n12, 8, 9, 13–19, 13n9, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46–51, 53–55, 55n34, 56n36, 57, 59, 65, 68, 69, 78, 79, 83–85, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 102, 104–106, 108, 110–117, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130n30, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 146, 149–151, 153, 155–157, 157n30, 159, 161–163, 163n52, 166, 167, 171 Experiential, 7, 8, 44, 154 F

Figure, 12, 29, 98, 100, 107 Fitton, J.W., 101n22, 143n27 Florensky, Pavel, 95n9 Fontana-Giusti, Gordana Korolija, 55n34 Fountoulis, I., 65 Frazer, James George, 70n28 G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 5n9 Georgios, Archimandrite, 67, 110, 111 Gikas, Giannis, 41 God, 4, 10–13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21–23, 25–27, 49, 51, 55, 59, 62, 70, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92, 93, 96–98, 100–102, 104, 108, 114, 116, 120, 121, 126, 127, 139, 142, 151, 153, 157, 158, 160–162, 160n39, 164–166, 170, 171

176 Index

Goehring, James, 20 Goetsch, Emily, 19n19 Golitzin, Alexander, 11 Gospel, Holy, 103 Gothóni, René, 5n9, 50, 65 Grave, 41, 73, 93, 133–147, 167 Gregoriou (monastery of ), 15, 29, 41, 43–45, 43n15, 47, 52, 56n36, 59, 64, 65, 67, 75, 77, 81–84, 86, 91–94, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 108, 110–112, 117, 125, 126, 131, 138, 141, 145n29 H

Harper, Ralph, 115, 117 Harries, Karsten, 134n4, 136n9, 142n24 Hasluck, Frederick, A, 60, 61 Hear/hearing, viii, 12, 18, 24, 34n2, 54, 68, 79, 80, 84–86, 101, 104, 110, 114, 117, 118, 159, 162, 163n52, 165, 169 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 54 Hendy, David, 108n39 Hermit, 3, 10, 20–24, 21n24, 26, 30, 31, 53, 124, 136, 153, 165 Herzfeld, Michael, 145n30 Hesychasm, viii, 1, 3, 9, 10, 24–27, 30, 53, 54n31, 80, 87, 92, 97, 109, 136, 157, 157n30, 161, 163, 164, 166n59, 167 Hesychast, 2–4, 8, 13, 16, 19, 23, 27, 29–31, 35, 49, 53, 56n36, 57, 59, 67, 69, 75, 78–80, 82, 85, 89, 91, 93, 97, 102, 106, 107, 110, 112, 124, 127n25,

129, 133, 136, 139, 143, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163–167 Hut, 3, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 29n36, 41, 48, 49, 159 I

Icon/iconography/iconic/iconostasis, 7, 7n15, 8n16, 14, 15, 47, 62, 63, 72, 74, 83, 89, 94–100, 103, 104, 107, 109, 114, 129, 139, 144, 160n39, 163, 171 Incense, 7, 8n16, 103–106, 118, 128, 130 Instrument, 84, 85, 100, 105, 106, 109, 144, 160 Intangible, 91–93, 118, 131 Interact/interacting/interaction, 1, 3–6, 16, 18, 24, 27, 29–31, 35, 37, 38, 47–49, 53–55, 57, 60, 63, 70n25, 76, 78, 82, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93–98, 100–102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112–114, 120, 129, 130, 136, 142, 144, 149, 150, 152, 154–156, 154n20, 158, 159, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170 Isar, Nicoletta, 8n16, 90 J

Jerusalem Heavenly, 59–63, 80, 87, 141, 143, 171 Jesus Prayer, 3, 18, 22, 27, 29, 53, 56, 57, 67, 80, 81, 85, 91, 109, 110, 114, 115, 152, 161, 170

 Index 

John, St., Climacus, 61, 157, 171 John, St., the Divine, 62 Johnson, Elsa, 97n18 Jones, Lindsay, 151 Joseph, Father, 27 Joseph, Monk, 26–29 K

Kakalis, Christos, vii–ix, 169–171 Katholikon, 60, 63, 67, 71, 73, 74, 78, 80, 84n46, 85, 86, 89–119, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129 Kellion, 35, 48, 56 Kenna, Margaret, 94n7 Kirou, Dimitris, 18n15 Koufos, Nikolaos, 114n55 Koumarianos, Pavlos, 102n26

177

Listen/listening, vii, 4, 12, 13, 54, 78, 79, 85, 107, 108, 110n41, 112, 115, 118, 119, 123, 124 Litany, 16, 19, 71–78, 139 Liturgical, 2, 5, 7, 7n15, 8n16, 16, 27, 48, 59, 60, 63, 65, 67, 70–73, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89–91, 93, 95–97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 112, 113, 117, 120, 122, 123, 125–128, 131, 133, 137, 140, 142, 144, 147, 150, 151, 153, 160, 167, 171 Lord, 12, 123 Louth, Andrew, 8n16, 100 Lupton, Deborah, 124n22, 124n23 Lynch, Kevin, 57n39 M

L

Landscape built, 23, 90, 133 natural, 1, 6, 17–19, 23, 47, 57, 63, 82, 87, 90, 133, 149, 153, 159, 166 Lehari, Kaia, 22 Lidov, Alexei, 63, 96 Light artificial, 89, 91, 98, 100 natural, 89, 91, 98, 99, 126 wax, 100 Liminal, ix, 102, 126, 133, 135, 137, 138, 142, 146 Liminality, 6n12, 128 Linardou, Kalliroe, 120n4 Lind, Tore Tvarnø, 109

Malpas, Jeff, 8 Map (mapping), 6, 8, 16n11, 17, 18, 20, 25, 28, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 40n9, 42–45, 47, 52–55, 57, 72, 74, 76, 86, 113, 154, 155, 169, 171 Meal, 15, 16, 29, 68, 69, 79, 86, 111, 119–131, 142, 152, 160, 171 Meaning, 2–5, 11, 14, 18, 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, 49, 51, 57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 70, 71, 81, 82, 87, 89, 91, 95, 99, 103, 107, 109, 117, 124–126, 128, 130n30, 131, 133, 140, 151, 152, 159, 161, 164, 170 Memory, 40, 52, 133–147, 149, 161 Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 151

178 Index

Merrill, Christopher, 7, 24, 41n13, 53, 56, 115, 123 Monastery, viii, ix, 1, 3, 5n9, 8n17, 21, 29, 35, 37–39, 40n9, 41–45, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59–87, 92, 98, 111, 112, 115–117, 116n60, 119, 119n2, 124–127, 127n25, 127n26, 128n28, 129, 133, 136, 137, 139–142, 145n29, 152, 152n14, 153, 155, 158, 159, 165, 166, 169, 170 Monastic, vii–ix, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 15, 19, 23, 33, 35, 40n9, 43n15, 48–52, 55, 60, 62, 63, 65–67, 71, 73, 75, 82, 83, 86, 93, 99, 110, 112, 116n60, 119, 122, 124, 129, 133, 138, 141, 142, 145n29, 146, 152, 155, 158–160, 165, 166, 169, 171 Monk, viii, ix, 1, 3, 4, 5n9, 8, 10, 14–16, 18, 21–23, 25–29, 31, 33, 38, 39, 41, 47–50, 53, 57, 59–63, 65–69, 69n22, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78–87, 84n46, 89–95, 97–99, 101–110, 110n41, 112–114, 118, 120, 122–131, 133, 136–142, 144–146, 145n29, 152–156, 152n14, 158, 160, 160n39, 165–167, 167n60, 169–171 Moody, Ivan, 107 Morinis, Alan, 6n12 Mount, 13, 61n4 Mountain, 9–31, 48, 50, 53, 153, 162, 166 Movement, 2–4, 5n9, 6, 8, 16, 24, 25, 28, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38,

40–42, 51, 55–57, 59, 65, 67, 73, 78, 80–82, 85, 87, 89–91, 93, 96, 97, 99–105, 104n32, 110, 111, 116, 116n60, 118, 120, 124, 126, 128–130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142, 150, 151, 153, 155–160, 160n39, 167 Mundi, axis, ix, 10, 11, 14, 21n24, 63, 144, 152, 153 Music/musical, vii, 60, 63, 96, 105, 107, 109, 110, 169 N

Narrative, 6, 7, 29, 34, 35, 55, 61, 78, 106, 118, 126, 127n25, 131, 145, 145n29, 147, 155, 156 Nydal, Anja-Karina, 19 O

Orchestration, 99, 112, 113 O’Rourke, Karen, 57 Orthodox, 21, 41, 65, 90, 95, 108, 111, 116, 127n25, 169, 171 P

Palmer, Gerard, 51 Panter, Pauline Schmitt, 70n25, 121n10 Papadopoulos, Stylianos, 60 Participation, 4, 5, 5n9, 18, 81, 90, 93, 100, 101, 105, 109, 115, 117, 130, 130n30, 136, 140, 150, 151, 157n33, 158, 159, 167

 Index 

Path (footpath), ix, 4, 5, 8n17, 15–17, 19, 24, 30, 31, 69, 74, 76, 99, 109, 110, 116n60, 124, 127n25, 133, 153, 155, 156, 167n60, 169–171 Payne, Paul, Daniel, 13n8 Pentcheva, Bissera, V., 8n16, 90 Perform/performance, 2, 30, 55n34, 63, 66, 70, 78, 87, 89–91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 107, 111, 113, 120, 129, 131, 134, 140–142, 147, 150, 151, 160, 161 Pilgrim, vii–ix, 3–5, 5n9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 35, 37, 38, 38n6, 44, 45, 49, 50, 54n31, 55, 56, 66, 67, 78, 85, 111–113, 115, 125, 130n30, 166, 169–171 Pilgrimage, 1, 2, 5, 6, 6n12, 9–11, 16, 16n11, 18, 19, 25, 30, 33, 35, 38n6, 40n9, 41, 50, 53, 55–57, 69, 71, 111, 114, 116n60, 117, 157, 157n33, 160n39, 169, 170 Place, vii–ix, 1–5, 3n7, 6n12, 7, 7n14, 8, 10–13, 15, 19, 20, 23–27, 29–31, 33–35, 37, 38, 38n6, 40, 40n11, 41, 49, 51–53, 56, 56n36, 67–69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 87, 89–91, 93, 100, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115n58, 116, 119, 123, 129, 131, 137, 140–147, 149, 150, 152–156, 154n20, 155n25, 161, 165, 166 Play/playing, 5, 5n9, 9–11, 11n3, 13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 30, 40, 41, 48, 49, 57, 62, 63, 67, 68, 84,

179

89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 99, 102, 107, 111, 115, 120, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 137, 138, 141, 146, 147, 150, 152, 152n14, 166, 167, 169, 170 Polarities, 110, 129, 158 Popovič, Svetlana, 61n4 Posture, 48, 81, 91–93, 164 Potamianos, Iakovos, 98 Practice(s), 3, 4, 8, 10, 19, 23, 27, 29, 31, 57, 59, 63, 65, 67–69, 79, 81, 82, 85, 89, 92, 97, 99, 106, 109, 110, 112, 124, 133, 136, 137, 147, 153, 154, 157, 162, 167 Prayer, viii, 1–5, 10, 16, 18, 23–26, 29, 30, 48, 50, 54n31, 59, 60, 63, 65–69, 73, 78–83, 85, 87, 89, 91–93, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109–112, 114, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 128, 129, 138, 139, 139n18, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158–160, 162–167, 170, 171 Presence, ix, 2, 6, 11, 12, 29, 41, 46–48, 51, 52, 55, 63, 66, 68, 83, 90, 91, 93, 96–98, 101, 105, 109, 111, 112, 116, 118, 129, 136, 144, 145, 161 Procession, 11, 16, 17, 31, 70–73, 73n32, 75, 76, 78, 87, 91, 105, 121, 125, 139, 152 Prokopiou, Giorgios, 90n1 Prosopon, 95 Q

Quinn, Patrick J., 61

180 Index R

S

Ragon, Michel, 138 Refectory, 5, 5n9, 60, 63, 84, 87, 117, 119, 120, 123, 125–131, 127n25, 128n28 Relation/relationship, 2, 6, 21, 22, 25, 27, 31, 43, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 60, 62n11, 63, 68, 80, 86, 95, 96, 99, 108, 109, 116n60, 120, 124, 125, 127n25, 128, 129, 134, 140, 150, 151, 156, 157n33, 158, 164–166, 169, 170 Religion/religious, 4, 127, 162 Remember(ing), 67, 98, 124, 133, 134, 136, 137 Repetition, 2, 3, 18, 22, 27, 57, 60, 67, 69, 80–82, 84, 86, 92, 93, 105, 107–110, 115, 134, 158, 161, 167, 170 Representation/representing, 6, 8n17, 34, 35, 44, 62, 94–96, 108, 126, 127, 127n25, 142–144, 154n20, 171 Rite, 71, 73, 76, 79–87, 90, 100, 133, 135–137, 140n20, 159, 163 Ritual, vii, viii, 1–5, 5n9, 7–9, 8n16, 15–19, 21, 22, 29–31, 53, 59, 60, 63, 66–80, 82, 84–87, 89–92, 94–96, 98–107, 101n22, 109–131, 133–136, 138–144, 146, 147, 150–153, 154n20, 155, 156, 158–160, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171

Sacred, 1–8, 10–12, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38n6, 53, 56n36, 60, 61n4, 62, 63, 70, 78, 85, 90, 96, 107, 116, 141, 152, 153, 156, 157n33, 159, 166, 167, 170 St Symeon the New Theologian, 62, 157 Sallnow, Michael, 6n12 Schafer, Murray, 107n34 Sense(s), ix, 4, 5, 18, 20, 22–24, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40–42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51–53, 55–57, 56n36, 61, 70, 78, 79, 82–85, 90, 93, 97, 99–101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 113, 115, 115n58, 117, 121, 123–125, 130, 136–138, 140, 143, 150, 151, 154, 154n20, 155, 157n33, 159, 161, 162 Service/services, 1, 15, 16, 18, 29, 62, 65–67, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 84–86, 89–95, 100, 101, 103, 103n27, 105, 106, 108, 110–117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 142n25, 146, 147, 152, 153, 160 Shadow(s), 13, 104, 105, 114, 166 Sherrard, Philip, viii, 49, 66 Silence, vii, 1, 2, 9, 17, 46, 48, 51, 59, 60, 68–87, 97, 99, 119–131, 146, 159, 160, 169 Simonopetra, ix, 41–47, 52, 55, 61, 92, 127n25, 127n26 Skete, 3, 9, 27, 155, 159, 169 Slavin, Sean, 38n6 Smell, 79, 103–105, 159

 Index 

Smith, Dennis, E., 122 Solitude, 2, 16, 22–24, 27, 30, 48, 79, 99, 113, 159, 163, 165, 166 Solnit, Rebecca, 19, 56 Sound/soundscape, viii, 2, 4, 8, 8n17, 12, 18, 24, 30, 42, 51, 52, 54, 57, 69, 75–77, 79, 81, 82, 85–87, 89, 91, 104–111, 113–115, 115n58, 118, 128, 130, 139, 156, 161, 163, 166 Space, viii, ix, 1, 3n7, 4, 6, 8, 8n16, 10, 11, 19, 20, 23, 29, 38, 40n9, 43, 52, 54, 59, 60, 61n4, 63, 68–70, 75, 78–80, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 95–97, 99–101, 104–107, 112–114, 117, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128–131, 140, 144, 149–151, 154, 159, 161, 165, 167n60, 170 Spatio-temporal, 3, 3n7, 4, 57, 60, 67, 90, 96, 98, 155, 156 Speake, Graham, 3n4, 3n6, 5n9, 11n7, 158n34 Stall(s), 82, 89, 91, 92, 98, 102, 104, 106, 112, 114, 115, 141, 166, 167 Stasidi, 91–93, 99, 101, 102, 105, 112, 160n39, 167 Stergioulis, Vasileios, 17 Still/stillness, viii, ix, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 30, 33, 35, 40, 47, 54, 56, 61, 65, 70, 71, 78, 80, 82, 89, 91–94, 97, 105, 109, 110, 114, 115n58, 118, 124, 129, 152, 153, 155, 159, 164, 165 Symbolic, 22, 61, 66, 80, 87, 93, 102, 105, 130n30, 140, 151

181

T

Talanton, 79–87, 105, 106, 113, 117, 130, 152 Talbot, Alice-Mary, 129 Tangible/tangibility, 8, 40n11, 89, 91, 93, 118, 131, 138, 146, 166, 167 Testament New, 11, 13, 21, 21n24, 104, 121, 158, 162 Old, 12, 21, 21n24, 104, 121, 158, 162, 164 Theoklitos, 21 Theokritoff, Elizabeth, 136n10 Threshold, viii, ix, 10, 14, 18, 31, 73, 83, 102, 109, 124, 125, 128, 131, 135, 136, 142, 160 Tilley, Christopher, 155, 156 Time, vii–ix, 1, 4, 7, 9–12, 18, 23, 27, 29, 34, 35, 38, 38n6, 39, 41–48, 52, 54, 57, 61n4, 63, 65–67, 69, 69n22, 71, 79, 80, 82–87, 90, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113–116, 118, 121, 123–125, 129, 130, 134–136, 138–144, 146, 147, 149–151, 154–157, 157n33, 161, 162, 166, 170 Topography, viii, ix, 1–6, 8, 10, 16, 19, 27, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 47, 49, 52, 53, 56, 57, 63, 78, 79, 84, 114, 134, 149–167, 170, 171 Topos, 63, 133, 149–154 Toti, Marco, 158n34, 158n35 Tourist, 5, 6, 38n6, 49, 53, 54, 78, 111, 115

182 Index

Transfiguration, 9, 10, 14–16, 18, 19, 25, 26, 30, 97, 153, 157 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 149, 154 Turner, Victor, 6n12 Typikon, 65, 112, 126, 128n28, 129 U

Ustinova, Yulia, 135n5 V

van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 120 van Gennep, Arnold, 135 Verna Harrison, Nonna, 136n10 Virtual, 35, 35n3, 37 Vision, 10, 12, 20, 79, 81, 163n52, 170 Visitors, ix, 1, 3–6, 5n9, 6n12, 8, 16n12, 17, 18, 24, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 41, 46, 48–55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 68, 69, 69n22, 77–79, 81, 83–87, 91, 98, 111–118, 122–124, 128–131, 130n30, 142, 154n20, 156, 158–160, 165–167, 170 Visual, 69, 89, 94, 97, 130, 159, 163, 163n52

Walking, 4, 9, 16, 16n12, 18, 19, 21, 30, 33–57, 38n6, 55n34, 56n36, 75, 78, 84, 102, 116n60, 133, 153, 155, 156, 166, 170 Wall, 14, 18, 23, 27, 45, 59–62, 61n4, 68, 80, 81, 85, 89, 92, 94, 97–100, 107, 109, 112, 114, 116, 125–127, 127n25, 131, 141, 142, 144, 171 Ware, Kallistos, 164 Wark, McKenzie, 37 Webb, Ruth, 154n20 Weston, Dagmar, Motycka, 101n22, 143n27 Williams, George H., 22n27 Wong, Father Joseph, 82n41, 164n56 Worpole, Ken, 146 Worship, 3, 10, 19, 21, 30, 66, 67, 70, 71, 80, 89, 94, 95, 98, 102, 110, 111, 114, 123, 153, 159, 161, 162 X

Xatzifotis, I.M., 41n14, 67n20

W

Z

Walk, 11, 18, 24, 25, 27, 33, 38, 38n6, 39, 41–45, 47–50, 55, 59, 68, 103, 116, 125, 166, 170, 171

Zaidman, Louise Bruit, 70n25, 121n10 Zecher, Jonathan L., 137n13 Zizioulas, John, 95n8