With the help of our Greek fellow blogger Giannis – who I personally met in Maroudá on our first day of our pilgrimage, more about this meeting will follow later – we spend a night in the beautiful monastery Simonopetras. The monks explained to me that they deliberately keep the amount of pilgrims as low as possible, because they want to give pilgrims who sleep in their archondariki as much attention as possible. So quality instead of quantity.

Because the guesthouse is outside the gate, that closes at 19.30 h, I was able to take some pictures of the monastery just after sunset. As you can see their are building another building near the guesthouse: this new part will also be used as a guesthouse.  The guesthouse where we slept.To compare the situation of 2015 and 2008/09, have a look at the picture below from Nationa Geographic: some of the scaffoldings has disappeared.Travis Dove – National Geographic.

Wim, 7/10