The Holy Community and Karyes

Athos governs itself. Its internal constitution centres on the Holy Community (Iera Koinotita), an assembly of twenty representatives — one from each ruling monastery — that sits at the capital, Karyes, together with a four-member executive committee, the Holy Epistasia (Iera Epistasia), and its own written Charter. The administrative church of the whole Mountain, the Protaton at Karyes, and the office historically associated with its presiding elder anchor this order, which descends in unbroken line from the imperial typika. This file describes the monastic republic’s internal government.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

A Self-Governing Republic

The government of the Holy Mountain is monastic self-government: within the framework of Greek sovereignty and the spiritual jurisdiction of Constantinople (see Sovereignty and the Modern State), the internal administration of Athos is conducted entirely by the monks themselves, through institutions of their own that descend from the Byzantine typika (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 12, on the government of the Mountain; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924). This is what is meant by calling Athos a “monastic republic”: it is a self-administering polity whose citizens are all monks, whose constituent bodies are the twenty ruling monasteries, and whose common affairs are managed by representative institutions seated at a single small capital.

The structure is essentially federal. Sovereignty within the Mountain rests with the twenty ruling monasteries, each of which is autonomous in its own internal life and property (see The Ruling Monasteries); and the monasteries, through their representatives, together constitute and govern the common institutions of the whole. No new monastery can be founded and the number is fixed at twenty; all other monastic settlements — sketes, kellia, and the rest — are dependencies of one or another of the twenty, and are represented through their ruling house (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924; see Sketes, Kellia, and the Desert of Athos).

The Holy Community (Iera Koinotita)

The central organ of government is the Holy Community (Iera Koinotita), the assembly of the Mountain. It is composed of twenty members — the antiprosopoi or representatives, one deputed by each of the twenty ruling monasteries — who reside at Karyes and together constitute the standing legislative and administrative authority of the Holy Mountain (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924). The Community deliberates and decides the common affairs of the Mountain — its relations with the Greek State and the Patriarchate, matters affecting more than one monastery, questions of discipline and property that rise above the level of a single house, and the general order of Athonite life. Certain grave matters are reserved to an Extraordinary Double Synaxis, in which each monastery is represented by two members (the abbot or his deputy and the representative), convened for weightier decisions (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on the ordinary and extraordinary assemblies; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924).

The precedence of the twenty monasteries within the Community is fixed and hierarchical, the Great Lavra ranking first and the others following in the traditional order (see The Ruling Monasteries); this order determines seating, signing, and the rotation of offices, but not the substantive equality of the houses in decision, each of which has one vote in the ordinary Community (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12).

The Holy Epistasia (Iera Epistasia)

The executive of the Mountain is the Holy Epistasia (Iera Epistasia), a small committee that conducts the day-to-day administration and gives effect to the decisions of the Community. The Epistasia is composed of four members drawn from the monasteries on a rotating basis: the twenty houses are grouped into five tetrads (groups of four), and each year one tetrad supplies the Epistasia, so that every monastery takes its turn in the executive over a five-year cycle (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on the Epistasia and the tetrad system; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924). The senior member of the annual Epistasia — drawn from the higher-ranking of the four monasteries in the tetrad — presides as the Protepistates (the “first overseer”), a role that carries the ceremonial precedence of the Mountain. The Epistasia sees to public order, the oversight of Karyes, the reception of official business, and the execution of the Community’s decisions; its seals — the four pieces of which are held by the four members, so that no act is valid without all four — are the symbol of its collegial character (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924).

This structure descends, with modifications, from the Byzantine constitution of the Mountain. In the middle-Byzantine period the presiding figure was the protos (“first”), the elected head of the Synaxis of the whole Mountain who resided at Karyes; over the centuries, as the great monasteries came to dominate and the office of the protos declined, the collegial arrangement of the Community and the rotating Epistasia took its place, so that the presidency became a shared and rotating function rather than a single lifelong office (Papachryssanthou, Actes du Prôtaton, Paris, 1975, on the office of the protos; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on the evolution from the protos to the modern Epistasia).

Karyes and the Protaton

The seat of all these institutions is Karyes, the small capital in the interior of the peninsula. Karyes is not a town in the ordinary sense — it has no lay population living the ordinary life of a town — but the administrative centre of the Mountain, where the Holy Community and the Epistasia sit, where each monastery maintains a representation (a konaki, the residence of its representative), and where the Greek civil governor also has his seat (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on Karyes; see Sovereignty and the Modern State).

At the heart of Karyes stands the Protaton, the administrative and mother-church of the whole Mountain — dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos — which belongs not to any single monastery but to the community of the Mountain as such, and which houses the assembly and the archive from which the central documents of Athonite history (the Tragos and the succession of typika) come (Papachryssanthou, Actes du Prôtaton, 1975, on the Protaton and its archive; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; on the archive see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries). The Protaton is also the home of the Mountain’s own wonderworking icon, the Axion Estin, and of the great early-fourteenth-century frescoes associated with the Macedonian school of Manuel Panselinos — so that the mother-church of the republic is at once its constitutional, its devotional, and its artistic centre (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002; see Relics and Wonderworking Icons and The Libraries and the Art).

The Charter and the Constitutional Order

The written constitution of the Mountain is the Charter of the Holy Mountain (the Katastatikos Chartis), drawn up by the monastic authorities in 1924 and ratified by the Greek State by legislative decree in 1926, under the cover of the constitutional article that guarantees the Mountain’s autonomy (the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924, ratified 1926; Constitution of Greece, Article 105; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12). The Charter codifies the whole order described above: the twenty ruling monasteries and their precedence, the Holy Community and its double synaxis, the Epistasia and the tetrad system, the avaton (see The Avaton and the Monastic Republic in Brief), the status of the dependent settlements, and the relations of the Mountain with the Greek State and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. It is thus the hinge between the internal self-government treated in this file and the external status treated in the next: an instrument drawn up by the monks, given legal force by the state, and standing under both the Greek Constitution and the canonical authority of Constantinople (see Sovereignty and the Modern State).

See Also

References

  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Ch. 12 on the government of the Mountain: the Holy Community, the Epistasia and the tetrad system, Karyes and the Protaton, and the Charter.)
  • Papachryssanthou, Dionysia. Actes du Prôtaton. Archives de l’Athos 7. Paris: Lethielleux, 1975. (The Protaton, its archive, and the Byzantine office of the protos.)
  • Charter of the Holy Mountain (Katastatikos Chartis), 1924, ratified by Greek legislative decree, 1926. (The written constitution of Athos.)
  • Constitution of Greece, Article 105. (The constitutional guarantee of the Mountain’s self-governing status.)