Mount Athos
— a mountain that has belonged to monks for a thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“A self-governing monastic peninsula at the eastern edge of Halkidiki, where twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries hold the slopes beneath a 2,033-metre marble peak. Women have not been permitted to enter for over a thousand years, and male pilgrims still need a written permit. From the sea the cliffs read like a wall of stone the rest of Greece never quite touches.
Mount Athos, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Athos, in Greek Áthos or Ágion Óros (the Holy Mountain), occupies the easternmost of the three fingers of the Halkidiki peninsula in northern Greece, about a hundred and thirty kilometres southeast of Thessaloniki. The peninsula is roughly fifty kilometres long and reaches 2,033 metres at the summit. It has been an autonomous polity under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople since a chrysobull issued by Emperor Basil II in 972. Twenty monasteries are recognised on the holy mountain, with around 2,000 monks in residence.
The monasteries are stone fortresses built into cliffs and ridges, walls thick enough to outlast Ottoman raids and the centuries of pirate seasons that closed the Aegean. Megisti Lavra, the oldest, was founded by Saint Athanasios in 963 and still functions. Simonopetra clings to a sheer rock face above the western shore. The buildings have been added to, burned, rebuilt, and added to again. The present stones carry layers of nine and ten centuries of work without ever looking finished.
Access is restricted. Male visitors need a diamonitirion, a written entry permit issued by the Pilgrims' Bureau in Ouranoupoli, and arrive by ferry. Only about a hundred Orthodox pilgrims and ten non-Orthodox are admitted per day. Women have been excluded since the Byzantine imperial act of 1046, and the prohibition still holds in Greek law. The peninsula keeps Julian-calendar time and Byzantine hours, counted from sunset. Once inside, pilgrims walk between monasteries on stone footpaths; vehicles are uncommon and modern noise is largely absent.