Mount Athos and Russia ― 1016-2016

This book is about the Russian contribution to monasticism on Mount Athos and the Athonite contribution to Russian spirituality and marks the millennium of the Russian presence on Mount Athos. Athos has been the spiritual heart of the Orthodox world for even longer and Russian pilgrims have congregated there throughout its history. Russian monks visiting Athos have returned to their homeland with the treasures of Athonite spirituality such as the practice of hesychasm in the sixteenth century, the Patristic anthology known as the Philokalia in the eighteenth century, and the spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the Russian monastic population fluctuated wildly, but still they produced influential elders such as St Silouan and Fr Sophrony, and Athonite elders continue to exercise enormous influence on the revived Russian Orthodox Church to this day. The papers collected in this volume, first delivered as contributions to a conference held by the Friends of Mount Athos in February 2017 at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, span the breadth of the millennium.

Nicholas Fennell is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Senior Scholar. He taught at Winchester College for forty years before devoting himself to research into the Russian presence on Athos, and into Greek-Russian ecclesiastical relations. His publications, in Russian and English, include The Russians on Athos (2001) and Il’insky skit na Afone (2011).

Graham Speake is a writer and publisher with degrees in classics from Cambridge and Oxford. He is founder and Chairman of the Friends of Mount Athos and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is author of Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise (2nd edn. 2014), which won the 2002 Criticos Prize, and of A History of the Athonite Commonwealth: The Spiritual and Cultural Diaspora of Mount Athos (2018).