F W Hasluck, an archaeologist who worked at the British School at Athens and published a book about Athos and its Monasteries in the 1920s, confronted this question of prejudice. ” I came to Athos first, he wrote, “with a strong prejudice against monasticism in general and Greek monasticism, as contemplative and non-productive, even parasitic, in particular; this prejudice was considerably modified before I left the Mountain. My quarrel with the individual monk was disarmed by the extreme simplicity and obvious honesty of the Athonite point of view”. I suspect that most prejudices are similarly modified by the actual experience of the Holy Mountain.
Text by Michael Llewellyn Smith.
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