Sketes, Kellia, and the Desert of Athos

Beyond the twenty ruling monasteries, Athos shelters a whole graded range of smaller, dependent settlements, from the village-like skete down to the solitary hut. All of them are dependencies of one of the twenty houses, but they preserve the semi-eremitic and eremitic ways that are older than the great coenobia. At the wild south-eastern tip of the peninsula lies the “desert” of Athos — the rocky, almost inaccessible districts of Katounakia and Karoulia, where the strictest hermits live in caves and hanging huts on the cliffs above the sea. This file maps the dependent settlements and the eremitic desert.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

A Graded Range of Settlements

The twenty ruling monasteries are only the largest and most visible form of Athonite monastic life. Around and below them exists a whole hierarchy of smaller settlements, each dependent on one of the twenty and each representing a particular scale and mode of the ascetic life (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 9, on the dependencies and the forms of settlement; the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924, on the status of the dependencies). Descending in size, the principal types are the skete, the kellion, the kalyve, the kathisma, and the hesychasterion or hermitage. These are not merely smaller monasteries but, in general, expressions of the semi-eremitic and eremitic ways — the forms of the life that stand between and beyond the fully communal coenobium (see Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic), and that reach back, through the whole Athonite tradition, to the semi-eremitic settlements of the Egyptian desert (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9; on the Egyptian roots see The Desert Fathers).

The Sketes

A skete (skete, from the Egyptian Scetis) is the largest of the dependent settlements: a village-like community of monks who live in a cluster of separate houses (kalyves) grouped around a central church (the kyriakon, “the Lord’s house”) to which they come together on Sundays and feasts, while pursuing a more solitary or family-sized life in their own houses on the other days (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9, on the sketes; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015). This is the classic semi-eremitic pattern — neither full community nor pure solitude, but small households of a few monks each, loosely gathered around a common centre. Sketes are of two kinds: the coenobitic skete, organised much like a small coenobium under a superior (the dikaios), and the idiorrhythmic skete, a looser village of independent kalyve-households whose monks work, pray, and provide for themselves individually while sharing the central church (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9). Among the best-known sketes are the Romanian skete of Prodromou and the skete of St. Anne (Agia Anna), and it is in the sketes above all that the Mountain’s non-Greek populations — Romanians, Moldavians, and others — have traditionally lived (see The Pan-Orthodox Mountain).

Kellia, Kalyves, and Kathismata

Below the skete are the smaller cells. A kellion (kellion, “cell”) is a substantial dependent house — typically a farmstead-like establishment with its own small church, worked by a family-sized group of a few monks (an elder and one or two disciples), holding a plot of land from the ruling monastery on which it depends, and largely self-supporting (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9, on the kellia). The kellion is the classic setting of the small elder-and-disciple household — the gerontas and his spiritual sons — that has been so important to the transmission of Athonite spirituality (see The Athonite Spiritual Fathers). A kalyve (kalyve, “hut”) is smaller still — a cottage with a chapel or oratory, home to one or a very few monks — and a kathisma (kathisma, “seat”) smaller again, a single dwelling near the ruling monastery, often for a single monk (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9). All of these are held from and dependent on one of the twenty ruling houses, which grants the settlement its site and to which the monks of the settlement ultimately answer (the Charter of the Holy Mountain, 1924; Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9).

The Hermits and the “Desert” of Athos

At the far end of the range stands the pure hermit, the anchorite or hesychast, who lives alone in a hesychasterion — a hermitage, often a cave or a rude hut — given wholly to solitude and prayer (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9, on the hermits; on the prayer see The Home of Hesychasm). The stronghold of this eremitic life is the wild, precipitous south-eastern tip of the peninsula, below the peak of Athos itself, which the tradition calls the “desert” (erimos) of the Holy Mountain — the Athonite equivalent of the Egyptian desert, a place of extreme austerity where the strictest ascetics withdraw (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9, on the desert of Athos).

Two districts of this desert are especially famous. Katounakia is a steep, rocky region of scattered kalyves and hermitages high above the sea. Karoulia (the name is connected with the pulleys — karoulia — by which the hermits haul up supplies and lower baskets to the boats far below) is the most extreme: a near-vertical cliff-face where hermits live in caves and huts clinging to the rock, reached by chains and ladders, in conditions of deliberate hardship and near-total isolation (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9, on Karoulia and Katounakia; Cavarnos, The Holy Mountain, Belmont, 1973, on the hermits of the desert). Here the oldest Athonite way of all — the solitary life of the hermit that antedates the great coenobia and reaches back to St. Peter the Athonite and the first solitaries (see The Early Hermits and Saint Athanasius) — has been continuously preserved.

It was in and around this desert of Athos that some of the most important figures of the twentieth-century hesychast revival lived and taught, above all St. Joseph the Hesychast, who with his small brotherhood lived the strictest eremitic and hesychast life in caves at Katounakia and the New Skete before his lineage repopulated many of the great monasteries (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 6; see The Twentieth-Century Revival and, for the elder himself, St. Joseph the Hesychast). The desert of Athos is thus not a picturesque survival but a living and generative form of the ascetic life — the eremitic root from which, again and again, the renewal of the whole Mountain has sprung.

The Whole Range as One Body

The importance of this graded range is that Athos preserves, within a single small territory and under a single law, the entire spectrum of the monastic life that the Christian East has known — the fully communal coenobium, the semi-eremitic skete and kellion, and the pure eremitic solitude of the desert — the same three-fold range that the Egyptian desert first developed (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9; on the three forms in the desert see The Desert Fathers). A monk may move, over a lifetime, from the coenobium into a kellion and thence into the desert as his capacity for solitude grows; and the coexistence of all the forms, each answering to a different vocation and a different stage, is one of the things that makes the Holy Mountain a complete monastic world in miniature (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 9; see The Meaning of the Mountain).

References

Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Ch. 9 on the dependent settlements — sketes, kellia, kalyves, kathismata, and hermitages — and the desert of Athos, Katounakia and Karoulia; ch. 6 on St. Joseph the Hesychast and the desert.)
Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The semi-eremitic skete and the forms of the Athonite life.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. The Holy Mountain. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1973. (The hermits of the desert of Athos.)
Charter of the Holy Mountain (Katastatikos Chartis), 1924. (The dependent status of the sketes, kellia, and other settlements on the ruling monasteries.)