Great Lavra

At the far south-eastern end of the Athos peninsula, where the marble pyramid of the Holy Mountain drops towards the Aegean, stands the monastery with which organised monastic life on Athos began. Great Lavra was founded in 963 and is still a living community today; it is the oldest of the twenty ruling monasteries and stands first in their hierarchy. Behind its fortress walls lies a crowded courtyard of churches, chapels, cells, fountains and ancient cypresses, a whole Byzantine town that grew up around a single founder's vision more than a thousand years ago.

That founder was the monk Athanasius, later venerated as Athanasius the Athonite, a friend of the general who became Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas. The emperor paid for the first buildings and had promised to retire here as a monk, a plan cut short by his murder in 969; his successor John Tzimiskes doubled the imperial grant. Work began with the defensive wall and moved on to the church and the cells. Athanasius himself died on the building site, killed with several workmen when a dome under construction collapsed, and his tomb lies in a chapel beside the main church. The plan of that church, with large apses on either side for the choirs, became the model for the other monastery churches of Athos. Its interior was painted in 1535 by the Cretan master Theophanes, one of the leading painters of the post-Byzantine world, and the vast cross-shaped refectory, the largest on the mountain, is lined with frescoes from the same era. By the eleventh century the community is said to have numbered several hundred monks.

The monastery is also a storehouse of the written past. Its library holds more than two thousand Greek manuscripts, including early uncial copies of the New Testament, and its archive is the most complete of any house on Athos, preserving imperial charters from the founding era onward. Among its treasures is a gospel book with a golden cover traditionally held to be a gift of Nikephoros Phokas. In the courtyard, a huge cypress beside the main church is traditionally said to have been planted by Athanasius himself. With the rest of Mount Athos, Great Lavra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988.

Getting there

Great Lavra stands near the tip of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece, which has no road link with the mainland. Travellers come by ferry from Ouranoupoli to the port of Dafni and continue by road over the ridge through Karyes and down the eastern coast to the monastery. Kavala, about 85 km away in a straight line across the sea, and its airport (KVA, about 85 km) are the nearest by distance, but the practical gateway is Thessaloniki Airport Makedonia (SKG), roughly 130 km by road from Ouranoupoli.