The Rossikon on Mount Athos

The Monastery of St Panteleimon (Greek Moni Agiou Panteleimonos; Russian Свято-Пантелеимонов монастырь), on the south-western coast of the Athonite peninsula, is the great Russian house of the Holy Mountain — the “Rossikon” — and ranks nineteenth among the twenty ruling monasteries. This file traces its history: the medieval Russian monastic presence on Athos that gave the house its name; the dramatic nineteenth-century revival in which it became overwhelmingly Russian and one of the largest and wealthiest communities on the Mountain; the Greek–Russian tensions the revival provoked; the near-extinction of the brotherhood under Soviet pressure; and the post-Soviet recovery. Throughout, St Panteleimon is read as the patron under whose name Russian monasticism gathered on Athos, and the relic of his venerable head, preserved at the monastery, is noted with cross-reference to the relics section.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Unmercenary Healer)

A Russian House on the Holy Mountain

Mount Athos — the Hagion Oros, the “Holy Mountain” — is the self-governing monastic peninsula in northern Greece whose twenty ruling monasteries (kyriarchikai monai) have constituted, since the Byzantine period, the spiritual heart of Orthodox monasticism (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on the constitution of the Holy Mountain and the fixed number of twenty ruling houses; on the monastic tradition more broadly see Monasticism). Within that hierarchy the Monastery of St Panteleimon holds the nineteenth place in the order of precedence — a rank fixed by tradition and antiquity rather than by size or wealth, so that the house could at moments hold thousands of monks while still ranking nineteenth of twenty (Speake 2002; the Athonite order of precedence places St Panteleimon’s nineteenth, ahead of Konstamonitou and after Esphigmenou). It is the only one of the twenty that is, by long settlement, a Russian house, and it has carried for centuries the popular name Rossikon — “the Russian one” — a name older than the present buildings and older than the modern Russian state that came to patronise it.

The monastery’s dedication to St Panteleimon the Great Martyr and Healer is not incidental to its character but constitutive of it. The saint who heals freely in the name of Christ became, in the devotional logic of Russian Athonite monasticism, the patron under whose protection Slavic monks gathered on a Greek mountain — a healing martyr of the early Church whose cult bridged the Greek and Russian worlds (Speake 2002; on the saint as the healer of the whole Orthodox world see The Healer of the Orthodox World). To trace the history of the Rossikon is therefore also to trace one of the most consequential lines of Panteleimon’s cult: the line that runs through Russian monasticism and made his name one of the most beloved in the Slavic Orthodox world.

Medieval Origins: Xylourgou and the Move to the Thessaloniki Gate

A Russian monastic presence on Athos is attested from the earliest centuries of the organised Holy Mountain. The original Russian foundation was the monastery known as Xylourgou (“of the wood-worker”), whose existence is documented in an Athonite act of 1016, in which the hegoumenos of the Rus’ signed — among the earliest documentary traces of organised Russian monasticism anywhere, and contemporary with the very Christianisation of the Rus’ (Speake 2002, on Xylourgou and the 1016 act as the founding documentary witness to Russians on Athos; the date is among the firmest fixed points in the early history of the Russian house). Xylourgou was a modest establishment dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God, and it remained the home of the Russian community through the eleventh and into the twelfth century.

By the later twelfth century the growing community had outgrown Xylourgou, and in 1169 the Athonite authorities granted the Russians the larger, then-deserted house higher up the peninsula known as the monastery “of Thessalonica” or “of the Thessalonian,” dedicated to St Panteleimon and standing near the inland part of the peninsula (Speake 2002, on the 1169 transfer to the “old Rossikon” dedicated to Panteleimon). This house — later called the “Old Rossikon” (Palaiomonastiro) — was the cradle of the dedication: from this point the Russian community of Athos was a community of St Panteleimon, and the saint’s name and the Russian presence on the Mountain were bound together. Xylourgou survived as a dependency (it remains today the skete of the Mother of God, Bogoroditsa).

The medieval and early-modern centuries were not uniformly prosperous. The Russian community shared in the general impoverishment of Athos under Ottoman rule and suffered the additional blow of the Mongol devastation of Rus’, which cut off support from the homeland for generations. By the early seventeenth century the inland “Old Rossikon” had fallen into ruin, and at some point in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries the community relocated to a coastal site on the south-western shore — the location of the present monastery, near the harbour, which is why the modern Rossikon stands by the sea rather than at the old inland site (Speake 2002). Through the eighteenth century the house was small and at times its brotherhood was predominantly Greek, not Russian — a fact of considerable importance for the later disputes, since it meant that the nineteenth-century influx of Russians came into a house that had only recently been Greek-led (Gerd, Russian Policy in the Orthodox East, 2014, on the mixed and at times Greek character of the brotherhood before the Russian revival).

The Nineteenth-Century Russian Efflorescence

The transformation of the Rossikon into the overwhelmingly Russian house it became is a nineteenth-century story, and it is inseparable from the broader expansion of Imperial Russian influence in the Orthodox East. From the 1830s and especially the 1840s onward, Russian monks began arriving on Athos in growing numbers, drawn by the spiritual prestige of the Holy Mountain and supported — increasingly and deliberately — by funds, pilgrims, and political backing from the Russian Empire (Gerd 2014, on the Russian Athonite influx and its entanglement with Russian policy in the Orthodox East between the 1830s and 1914; Speake 2002). The brotherhood of St Panteleimon’s swelled; the monastery was rebuilt and vastly enlarged, its great barrack-like wings and its churches raised in the second half of the century; and by the latter decades of the nineteenth century the Russians had become the dominant element in the house and were spreading far beyond it.

For the Russian presence on Athos was never confined to the ruling monastery alone. The characteristic form of the Russian Athonite efflorescence was the proliferation of sketes and kellia — dependent settlements, hermitages, and cells, often large and populous, scattered across the peninsula and canonically dependent on one or another of the twenty ruling houses (Gerd 2014; Speake 2002, on the Russian sketes and kellia and their rapid growth). The two great Russian sketes — St Andrew’s (the Serai) and the Prophet Elijah’s (Profitis Ilias) — grew into enormous establishments rivalling the ruling monasteries in size, and around them clustered a dense network of smaller Russian cells. The Rossikon itself, together with this surrounding Russian world of sketes and kellia, made the Russian element by the eve of the First World War the single largest national presence on the Holy Mountain — a Russian Athos within the Greek one (Gerd 2014; Speake 2002).

This was the high tide of the Russian Athonite presence: a period of immense building, of crowded churches, of a constant traffic of Russian pilgrims, and of a wealth that flowed in from across the Empire and made St Panteleimon’s one of the richest as well as one of the most populous communities on the Mountain (Speake 2002, on the wealth and scale of the Russian houses before 1914; Gerd 2014). The very abundance, however, carried within it the conflicts and the fragility that the following decades would expose.

[Disputed: The scale of the Russian Athonite population at its early-twentieth-century peak is given variously in the sources, and a single figure should not be trusted; the honest statement is a range. Speake (Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, 2002) reports that the Russians had come to outnumber all the other nationalities on the Mountain combined, with St Panteleimon's monastery alone housing on the order of one to two thousand monks, and the total Russian population of Athos — counting the great sketes of St Andrew and the Prophet Elijah and the dense network of kellia and cells — commonly estimated in the range of roughly 3,000 to 5,000 on the eve of the First World War; some older and Russian-nationalist sources push the total higher still (toward 5,000 or more), while critical scholarship treats the larger round numbers with caution because the dependent settlements were counted inconsistently and the figures were not infrequently inflated for political effect (Gerd, Russian Policy in the Orthodox East, 2014; Speake 2002). What is secure is the relative fact — that the Russians had become the most numerous national group on Athos before 1914 — rather than any precise census; per METHODOLOGY §3, the contested statistic is given here as a named scholarly range, not a single number.]

Greek–Russian Tensions over the House

The Russian efflorescence did not unfold peaceably. It generated a sustained and sometimes bitter conflict — partly within the brotherhood of St Panteleimon’s itself, partly between the Russian houses and the Greek monasteries and the Athonite central administration, and always against the backdrop of Greek anxiety at the swelling Russian presence on a peninsula that was understood, despite its pan-Orthodox character, as essentially Greek (Gerd 2014, on the Greek–Russian tensions on Athos and their political dimension; Speake 2002).

The most acute internal episode came in the 1870s, in the struggle over the leadership of St Panteleimon’s between the older Greek element and the rising Russian majority. The dispute — fought over the abbacy and the national character of the house — was contested before the Athonite authorities and the Ecumenical Patriarchate and was resolved, after considerable conflict, in favour of the Russians, who secured the predominance in the monastery that their numbers and their wealth had made all but inevitable (Speake 2002, on the contest for control of St Panteleimon’s and its resolution in the Russian favour; Gerd 2014). Beyond the walls of the Rossikon, the broader friction concerned the status of the great Russian sketes, which strained against their canonical subordination to the Greek ruling monasteries and aspired, in some cases, to independent status — aspirations the Greek houses resisted as a threat to the constitutional order of the Holy Mountain (Gerd 2014).

These tensions had an unmistakable political dimension. The Russian Athonite presence was, by the later nineteenth century, an instrument as well as an expression of Russian influence in the Orthodox East, and the Greek monasteries and the Patriarchate read the swelling of the Russian houses in part as the ecclesiastical face of Russian imperial ambition in the Balkans and the Aegean (Gerd 2014, on the entanglement of the Athonite question with great-power politics and the Eastern Question). The conflict over the Rossikon was thus never merely a matter of monastic discipline; it was a local theatre of the larger contest over the Orthodox East. A further and theologically charged episode of these years was the imiaslavie (“name-glorifying”) controversy of 1912–1913, which convulsed the Russian houses and led, in 1913, to the forcible removal of hundreds of Russian monks from St Andrew’s skete and the Rossikon’s orbit by Russian authorities — an internal Russian crisis that nonetheless further unsettled the Russian Athonite world on the very eve of the war (Speake 2002, noting the imiaslavie affair as a disruption within the Russian Athonite community before 1914).

Decline under Soviet Pressure

The catastrophe came not from the Greek monasteries but from the homeland. The First World War, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the establishment of the Soviet state severed the Rossikon from Russia at a stroke. The flow of money, of pilgrims, and — decisively — of novices stopped. The atheist Soviet government had no interest in sustaining a monastery abroad, and the new Greek state, which had acquired sovereignty over Athos after 1912, was in no hurry to admit Russian recruits to a house it regarded with suspicion (Speake 2002, on the post-1917 collapse of support for the Russian houses and the consequences for St Panteleimon’s; Gerd 2014, on the rupture of 1917).

The mechanism of decline was demographic and was, for decades, irreversible. With the homeland closed and the admission of new Russian monks effectively blocked — by Soviet refusal to permit emigration for monastic life and by Greek reluctance to grant entry and citizenship to Russian novices — the great brotherhood of St Panteleimon’s simply aged and died without replacement (Speake 2002, on the long demographic dying of the Russian houses through the middle of the twentieth century: a community deprived of novices shrinks toward extinction as its existing members die). Through the middle decades of the century the once-crowded monastery emptied. The vast wings stood largely empty; whole ranges fell into ruin; a disastrous fire in 1968 destroyed a large part of the monastery’s buildings, compounding the desolation (Speake 2002, on the 1968 fire and the physical ruin of the house). By the 1960s and 1970s the brotherhood had dwindled to a handful of elderly monks, and the survival of a Russian presence on Athos at all hung by a thread — the house that had numbered its monks in the thousands now numbered them in the tens, and faced, within a foreseeable span, simple extinction (Speake 2002).

This near-extinction was the common fate of the non-Greek and indeed of all the Athonite houses in the middle of the twentieth century — the whole Mountain reached its demographic nadir in the late 1960s and early 1970s — but it fell hardest on the Russians, for whom the source of renewal had been not merely diminished but politically sealed off (Speake 2002, on the general Athonite decline to its low point around 1971 and the particular severity of the Russian case). The patron of healing presided, in these decades, over a community that seemed itself beyond cure.

Post-Soviet Revival

The recovery, when it came, followed the general Athonite revival of the last quarter of the twentieth century and was completed by the fall of the Soviet Union. From the 1970s a renewal of monastic vocations began to refill the Holy Mountain as a whole, reversing the long decline; and for St Panteleimon’s specifically the decisive change was the loosening and then the collapse of Soviet power, which at last reopened the flow of Russian novices that had been dammed since 1917 (Speake 2002, on the Athonite revival from the 1970s and the reopening of Russian recruitment to St Panteleimon’s with the easing of Soviet restrictions). After 1991 the monastery, supported anew by a post-Soviet Russia eager to reclaim its Athonite patrimony, was repopulated and its ruined buildings progressively restored; the brotherhood grew again from its near-extinct remnant into a living community (Speake 2002).

The revival of the Rossikon has carried its own controversies — over the pace and scale of Russian state involvement in the monastery’s restoration, and over the perennial question of the national character of the house and its place within a Greek-sovereign and pan-Orthodox Holy Mountain — controversies that are, in their structure, recognisable descendants of the nineteenth-century tensions (Gerd 2014; Speake 2002). But the bare fact of survival and recovery is itself remarkable: a community that in living memory stood at the edge of disappearance is again a functioning monastery of St Panteleimon, and the Russian presence on Athos, all but extinguished in the Soviet century, persists into the present.

The Saint as Patron of Russian Athonite Monasticism

What the long history of the Rossikon establishes, beneath its vicissitudes, is the standing of St Panteleimon as the patron of Russian monasticism on the Holy Mountain. The dedication that began with the twelfth-century transfer to the house “of the Thessalonian” became, through the centuries and supremely in the nineteenth, the banner under which Russian monks made their home on Athos. The most beloved healing martyr of the early Church — a saint of the Greek East, venerated alike by Greeks and Slavs — was the figure in whose name the great Slavic monastic presence on the Greek Mountain was gathered, and his cult flowed back from Athos into Russia, carried by pilgrims and by the immense devotional and publishing activity of the nineteenth-century Rossikon, to make Panteleimon one of the most universally invoked saints of the Russian Orthodox world (Speake 2002; Gerd 2014; on the saint’s place across the whole Orthodox world see The Healer of the Orthodox World). The bond is reciprocal: Russian monasticism gave the Rossikon its scale and its fame, and the Rossikon gave Russian piety one of its most cherished healing saints.

Among the monastery’s treasures, and central to its identity as the house of the healer, is the relic of St Panteleimon’s venerable head, preserved at the Rossikon and venerated by the pilgrims who come to the Holy Mountain — the chief relic of the saint and the physical anchor of his Athonite cult (Speake 2002, noting the relic of the head among the monastery’s possessions; the relic and its place in the wider dispersal of Panteleimon’s relics are treated at The Relics and Their Dispersal). That the head of the unmercenary healer should rest in the great Russian house of Athos is fitting beyond the accident of history: it makes the Rossikon a centre not only of Russian monasticism but of the cult of healing that the saint embodies, where the patron of physicians and the sick (treated at Patron of Physicians and the Sick) is venerated at the place that bears his name.

References

Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The constitution of the Holy Mountain and the order of precedence of the twenty ruling monasteries, with St Panteleimon’s nineteenth; Xylourgou and the 1016 act; the 1169 transfer to the house “of the Thessalonian” dedicated to Panteleimon and the “Old Rossikon”; the move to the coastal site; the nineteenth-century Russian efflorescence, the sketes of St Andrew and the Prophet Elijah, and the scale and wealth of the Russian houses; the 1870s contest for control of the monastery; the imiaslavie affair of 1912–1913; the post-1917 collapse, the demographic decline to the Athonite nadir around 1971, the 1968 fire, and the post-1970s and post-Soviet revival; the relic of the head.)
Gerd, Lora. Russian Policy in the Orthodox East: The Patriarchate of Constantinople (1878–1914). Warsaw/Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2014. (The Russian Athonite presence and its entanglement with Russian imperial policy in the Orthodox East; the mixed and at times Greek character of the brotherhood before the revival; the growth of the Russian sketes and kellia; the Greek–Russian tensions and the political dimension of the Athonite question; the rupture of 1917.)