Hilandar

Behind a ring of battlemented walls and stone towers, set a little way back from the shore on the north-eastern side of the Athos peninsula, Hilandar has been the spiritual home of the Serbian Church for more than eight hundred years. It is one of the twenty ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain, fourth in their order of precedence, and the only one traditionally run by Serbian monks. For the Serbs it is the place where their medieval faith, writing and learning took root, and the cradle of their national Church.

The story begins with a royal abdication. Stefan Nemanja, Grand Prince of Serbia, gave up his throne in 1196, became the monk Simeon and joined his youngest son Rastko, who had already fled to Athos and taken the name Sava. In 1198 the Byzantine emperor Alexios III granted them the ruins of an older Greek monastery, laid waste by pirates, to be rebuilt as a house for Serbian monks. Simeon died here in 1200; Sava went on to become the first archbishop of an independent Serbian Church and wrote the rule by which Hilandar lived. Later Serbian kings endowed it with lands across the Balkans and raised fortifications against the raiders and mercenaries who ravaged Athos after the Fourth Crusade, and the house was among the few communities on the peninsula to come through the Catalan Company's raids of the early 14th century.

The centrepiece of the courtyard is the main church, rebuilt by King Stefan Milutin around the turn of the 14th century in the Byzantine manner, with frescoes painted around 1320 and renewed in the early 1800s. The monastery's most revered treasure is the icon of the Three-Handed Mother of God, which tradition says Sava brought from the Holy Land and which the brotherhood regards as its true abbess. Its library keeps around a thousand Slavonic manuscripts, a priceless record of medieval Serbian and South Slavic literature. In later centuries Bulgarian monks were prominent here, among them Paisius, whose name 'of Hilendar' recalls the house. On the night of 3–4 March 2004 a great fire destroyed more than half of the walled complex, including some of its oldest monks' quarters, though the main church, the icons and the library survived. Hilandar is part of Mount Athos, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.

Getting there

Mount Athos has no road connection with the rest of Greece: the peninsula is reached by boat, chiefly from the small port of Ouranoupoli at the neck of the peninsula, with paths and tracks linking the coast to the monasteries. The town of Kavala lies about 71 km away across the sea, and Kavala Alexander the Great International Airport (KVA) is some 76 km distant in a straight line, but in practice the usual gateway is Thessaloniki Airport (SKG), well over 100 km by road from Ouranoupoli.