Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges

The Holy Mountain that seemed to be dying in the early 1970s is today renewed — its monastic population risen well above two thousand, its houses full of young and often educated monks, its spiritual and liturgical life visibly serious. But the renewal has brought its own pressures: a great and growing tide of pilgrims and visitors that strains the balance between pilgrimage and tourism; the demands of the state, the European Union, and the modern world; and the questions of wealth, publicity, and access that success brings. This file measures the renewal and treats its challenges, presenting the contested points from both sides (§4).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

The Renewal in Numbers

The recovery of Athos from its mid-century nadir is, first of all, measurable. From a low point of roughly one thousand to twelve hundred monks in the early 1970s — an ageing population in decaying houses (see The Twentieth-Century Revival) — the monastic population began a sustained rise, so that by the turn of the twenty-first century it had roughly doubled, standing well above two thousand, with all twenty ruling monasteries repopulated and returned to the coenobitic life (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 6 and conclusion, on the rising numbers; see Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic). The renewal is not only quantitative. The character of the new monasticism — drawing the young, the educated, and the serious, and reviving the hesychast and coenobitic disciplines rather than merely maintaining a survival — is what most struck observers, and it is what Speake’s title, Renewal in Paradise, names (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, conclusion). By any measure, the confident mid-century prediction of the Mountain’s extinction was decisively falsified.

Pilgrimage and Tourism

The most visible modern challenge is the tide of visitors. Access to the Mountain is restricted — men only (see The Avaton and the Monastic Republic in Brief), and only with a permit, the diamonitirion, issued through the monastic authorities, with a daily quota on the number admitted — but within these limits the number of visitors has grown greatly, drawn both by the religious revival and by the Mountain’s fame as a place of cultural, historical, and natural interest (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on access, the diamonitirion, and the pressure of visitors). This raises a genuine tension.

[Disputed: whether the growing tide of visitors to Athos is best understood, and best managed, as pilgrimage or as tourism, and how far the Mountain should accommodate visitors at all. (a) One view stresses that the Mountain exists for prayer and withdrawal, that large numbers of visitors — many of them drawn by cultural curiosity rather than devotion — strain the hospitality, the resources, and above all the silence and seclusion that are the point of the place, and that the monks' first duty is to guard the monastic vocation, not to serve as custodians of a heritage site or a destination for religious tourism. (b) Another view stresses the ancient Athonite tradition of *philoxenia* (hospitality to the stranger and the pilgrim), the spiritual good done to the many who come and are changed by the encounter, and the reality that the Mountain has always received visitors and drawn its renewal partly from them; on this view a regulated openness is part of the Mountain's mission, not a betrayal of it. Both concerns are real and are held, in different measures, within the community itself; the guide reports the tension rather than resolving it (Speake, *Renewal in Paradise*, 2002, ch. 12, on the pilgrimage-versus-tourism question and the range of monastic attitudes to it).]

The distinction between the pilgrim and the tourist is not merely one of motive but of conduct: the Mountain asks of all who enter a minimum of reverence — appropriate dress, participation in or respect for the services, observance of the rule of the house — and the tension is sharpest where visitors treat a living monastery as a museum or a curiosity (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12).

The State, the Union, and the Modern World

Beyond the visitors lie the pressures of the modern state and the wider world, several of which are treated in Section 03 (see Sovereignty and the Modern State). The Mountain’s relations with the Greek State and the European Union carry recurrent frictions — over the avaton and equality law, over customs and tax, over the terms of the autonomy — and over the funding of conservation, where EU and Greek money for the preservation of the monasteries’ fragile heritage brings with it questions of oversight, transparency, and access that sit uneasily with the monasteries’ independence (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; on the heritage see The Libraries and the Art). Modern technology and communications, the intrusion of roads and vehicles into a peninsula long crossed only by mule-track and boat, and the general acceleration of the outside world all press upon a way of life built around stillness and withdrawal, and the monasteries differ among themselves about how far to admit them (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12).

Wealth and publicity are a subtler challenge. The very success of the renewal — the influx of monks, pilgrims, patrons, and funds, and the fame of the great elders — brings the dangers that have always attended monastic prosperity: the temptation of comfort, the distraction of administration and building, the burden of celebrity, and the intrusion of the world’s attention into a life meant to be hidden (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12; on the tradition’s own suspicion of monastic wealth see the idiorrhythmic history in Coenobitic and Idiorrhythmic). The tradition is acutely aware that spiritual decline has historically followed material success as often as material hardship, and the honest observer notes the risk without either alarmism or complacency. Reports of financial controversies involving individual monasteries in the modern period — a matter of Greek public discussion — belong to this general question of the relation of a renewed and resourced monasticism to the temptations of wealth and worldly entanglement, and are noted here soberly as part of the challenge rather than sensationalised (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 12, on the pressures of wealth and worldly involvement).

An Honest Balance

The balance, then, is genuinely double. On one side stands a real and remarkable renewal — a Mountain raised from apparent death, full again of serious monks, its ancient forms restored, its hesychast tradition alive (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, conclusion; see The Twentieth-Century Revival). On the other stand real pressures — the tide of visitors, the demands of the state and the age, the temptations of success — any of which could, over time, erode the very thing that has been renewed. The tradition’s own view is that the Mountain has survived far greater threats than these, and that its vocation is secure so long as its prayer continues; the sober observer notes that the outcome is not guaranteed, and that the challenges of success are, in their way, as searching as the challenges of decline. Which way the balance tips is not for this guide to predict; it is enough to report both the renewal and its perils honestly, and to weigh the Mountain’s enduring meaning in the file that follows (see The Meaning of the Mountain).

References

Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Ch. 6 and conclusion on the renewal and the rising numbers; ch. 12 on access and the diamonitirion, the pilgrimage-versus-tourism tension, the pressures of the state and the EU, conservation and access, and the challenges of wealth and worldly involvement.)
Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The twentieth-century monastic revival and its place in contemporary Orthodoxy.)