New Athos Monastery

The monastery at New Athos is laid out like a small walled town at the foot of a mountain: long residential ranges enclosing a courtyard, a tall bell tower at the centre of the western range, and in the middle the five domes of the cathedral of St Panteleimon rising above everything. It was founded in 1875 by monks from the Russian St Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, with the support of the Russian crown, on the lower slopes of Mount Athos of Abkhazia near the old church of the Apostle Simon the Canaanite.

Building it was a feat of earthmoving: to create a level platform, part of the mountainside had to be cut away and tens of thousands of tonnes of rock and earth removed. The half-built monastery was looted during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, and the work resumed in 1880 and lasted two decades; the monastery was consecrated in 1900. According to Russian sources, the chiming clock in the bell tower was a gift of Emperor Alexander III. Before 1917 the house was one of the main spiritual centres of the Caucasus. It was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1924, served as storage and, later, as a hospital, and was returned to the church in 1994.

The cathedral of St Panteleimon, built between 1888 and 1900, is the largest church in Abkhazia: about 53 metres long and 34 wide, with a central dome 40 metres high, in the Neo-Byzantine manner of late imperial Russian church building. Its interior was painted between 1911 and 1914 by icon painters from Palekh and a group of Moscow artists. The former refectory beneath the bell tower is frescoed too. Nearby is the grotto where tradition holds that Simon the Canaanite lived and prayed, and the Anacopia fortress, from which there is a view down onto the monastery, stands on the hill above.

Getting there

The monastery stands in the town of New Athos, about 1.6 km from New Athos railway station. Long-distance trains to Sukhumi stop at New Athos after crossing the Psou border near Adler (Sochi); from Adler the journey takes about five hours. The nearest airport by distance is Sukhumi (SUI), about 36 km away.