Russian Monks on Mount Athos: (Fennell - 2021)

The Holy Mountain of Athos is a self-governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Standing on the shores of the Aegean Sea is one of the twenty ruling monasteries that comprise the republic, that of St Panteleimon, known in Greek as the Rossikon. Its building, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century and prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the monastery has experienced a strong revival and is now among the most numerous of the twenty. But the vast buildings that can be seen today are a reflection of only the past two centuries. That the Russian presence on Athos goes back more than one thousand years is much less well known. This book is the first comprehensive account in the English language of this millennium of history. The author has been able to draw from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering