Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08873631.2012.750435
ISSN1940-6320
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeological Research and Protection
ResumoImagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II, by Veronica della Dora, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 312 pp., US$35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9780813930855 Mount Athos, the 6,670-foot-high pyramid that crowns a peninsula jutting from Greece into the Aegean Sea, is the Holy Mountain of the Eastern Orthodox religion. Even so, few people ever visit this monastic community due to its isolation by a rugged coastline and five-mile wall that separates the peninsula from the mainland. Furthermore, it is accessible only to males with a permit-pilgrims, monks, and workers-who arrive by ferry. This distinctive geography creates one of the more intriguing challenges in cultural geography scholarship: How is it possible for the author to write a deeply informed, sensitive monograph about an earthly place without probing in person the ancient secrets that transform the mountain into an iconic landscape for millions of people? Della Dora magnificently conquers this conundrum by augmenting her study of the accounts of visitors over thousands of years with the help of monks who provided first-hand descriptions, photographs, and archival materials. David Lowenthal's brief yet enthusiastic foreword precedes an introduction that is a tour de force in succinctly combining the author's personal stake in the story well leavened with the literatures of place, landscape, and geographical imagination. Following are six thematic chapters, arranged in loose chronological order, each with a keyword for the narrative: Mythical, Utopian, Iconic, Erudite, Geopolitical, and Scientific. Mount Athos turns out to be far more than a place of remote monasteries; della Dora adeptly characterizes it as a landscape of mythic desire. The epilogue includes material about the entry ban on women that is more up-to-date than suggested by the book's subtitle and also returns to the theme of writing from beyond Mount Athos, where throughout history, distancing does not necessarily equal exclusion, and conversely, physical presence does not necessarily mean participation (p. 239). This is an eloquent, insightful text, whether it is describing the many representations of the Persian King Xerxes's mythical canal, or how monastic gardening is like mapping a spiritual landscape on a physical one, or how Western travelers layered their biased yet picturesque findings upon the wood, water, and rock of Athos. …
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