Mount Athos. The Mountain I Can Only Photograph.

2010. Chalkidiki. A photograph I didn't fully understand until much later.

Mount Athos at Sunset, Greece

I was standing by the shore with my camera when I took this picture. The sun was setting over the Aegean and the silhouette of Mount Athos was right there in front of me, across the water. I took the shot. I moved on.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I was two years into falling in love with Greece, and I was photographing everything.

Άγιον Όρος

Mount Athos - Άγιον Όρος, the Holy Mountain, is the third peninsula of Chalkidiki, the one that points straight down into the Aegean. It has been a monastic community for over a thousand years. Twenty monasteries. Monks who have chosen, completely, to be elsewhere from the rest of the world.

It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It operates under its own governance, separate from the Greek state in many ways. Time there runs on the Julian calendar, still thirteen days behind the rest of us.

The Avaton

Women cannot enter. Not as tourists, not as researchers, not with special permission. The rule, the Avaton, has been in place since the 10th century and it applies without exception.

So I have photographed it from the shore.

I've wondered if the distance is part of why it stays with me. You can study a place, read about it, look at it through a long lens. But you can't walk on it. There's something about that specific kind of limit.

Men can visit with a special permit, the diamonitirion, issued in limited numbers each day. If you go, you'll need to plan well in advance and be prepared for a place that runs on a completely different rhythm from anywhere else you've been.

What it looks like

The peninsula is 50 kilometres long. The peak of Mount Athos itself reaches 2,033 metres and drops almost straight into the sea. From a boat, you can see the monasteries built into the cliffs, some of them dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, some hanging in places that make no structural sense even now.

The forests on Athos are among the oldest and least disturbed in Greece. Because the peninsula has been closed to development for a thousand years, the ecosystem is intact in a way almost nothing else in the Mediterranean is.

2010 and now

I took that photograph fifteen years ago, early in a relationship with Greece I didn't yet understand the scale of. I'm about to move to Greece permanently. The mountain is still there across the water, unchanged.