| The object of analysis of this dissertation is Mount Athos, the easternmost finger of the Chalcidic Peninsula in northern Greece and the only example of monastic republic in our contemporary world. The most prominent landmark in the Aegean, Mount Athos has been a place of myth since classical antiquity. A paradise for Orthodox pilgrims, Byzantine art historians and Classical archaeologists, but also for botanists and natural scientists, Mount Athos has long represented a place of rare cultural stratification, as well as a unique crossroad of discourses and narratives. This research focuses on visual and written representations of Mount Athos from the early eighteenth century to the Second World Conflict. It seeks to shift the traditional focus from Mount Athos as a unique and yet a-priori 'fixed' object to the contexts in which it has been constructed as such. It does so through the critical exploration and cultural contextualization of different narratives, embodied practices, and alternative 'gazes'---the 'sacred', the 'mythical', the 'scholarly', the 'geopolitical', and the 'scientific'. But rather than a mere point of convergence between different discourses, Mount Athos here is revaluated as a physical 'geographical object' inspiring them and continuously interacting with them thanks to its dramatic physical geography of rock, water and vegetation. One of the most narrated places in the eastern Mediterranean and yet highly regulated in term of accessibility, Athos is also considered as a 'landscape of myth', know in the Orthodox world and in western Europe more from representation than from direct experience. Athos thus becomes a 'mirror' reflecting broader geographical imaginations, but also a 'circulating icon', moving across the complex circuits of western culture through various forms of representation. |
