ABSTRACT

It might seem odd to begin a discussion of the origins of Athos at the end of the eleventh century, but a document taken from the archives of the Monastery of Philotheou, dated to 1087, gives us an important glimpse of a process vital to the understanding of what Athos first represented in the monastic world of Byzantium and what it later became.1 In this document, a longstanding dispute over the property of an Athonite monastery, known as Chaldou or 'of the hesychasts', was settled. The details of the territorial settlement need not concern us, it is the apparently incongruous title of the monastery which is of interest. In the proiomion to the document we are given a potted history of the house. At the end of the tenth century, the monk Sabas, famous for his asceticism, had led the hesychastic life at Chaldou in the south of Athos. Such was his fame that many others joined him.2 But there came a point when, for reasons which were not clear to the drafter of the document, although he made vague references to satanic intervention, the Hesychasts decided to change their solitary way of life for a koinobion. They built kellia, planted a vineyard and began to live in a community.3 It was then that they asked the Protos Paul (who can be dated to 1001-9) for the grant of some land, which was to be the basis of the settlement some eighty years later.4