ABSTRACT
Sir John Masterman tells the story of how he was once working in his study at Worcester College, Oxford, when an American child looked in at the window and ran back to his parents shouting, 'Gee, these ruins are inhabited!'. What follows is not intended as a learned discourse, but simply as an account of what it feels like to be an inhabitant, if only briefly, of 'these ruins' of the Byzantine world, of what it is like to live as an ordinary monk in one of the great Athonite koinobia. I hope such an account, personal and unscientific though it is, has a place even in such a learned assembly as this one.
