The ethos of the holy mount of Athos

By LINDA HERRICK Arts editor

No women, no unbearded men, no female domestic animals. Since 1060, that has been the strict law governing the Holy Mount of Athos, on the eastern promontory of Greece's three-fingered Chalcidice Peninsula jutting into the Aegean Sea.

The law has relaxed, slightly, in recent times. Men can shave, and some sources believe female animals surely must have infiltrated the autonomous region which is home to 20 of the world's most ancient, hallowed monasteries.

But when a group of Auckland University School of Architecture undergraduate students was given permission to visit Athos' extraordinary 800-year-old Hilandar Monastery, the females in the group were left behind.

Despite some pressure from outside, Hilandar, a Serbian Orthodox monastery whose faith reflects the region's shifting political allegiances over the past millennium, is unwavering on the men-only issue.

And so the women students were diverted to Istanbul during that stage of the 2001 Balkan study tour while their male counterparts, led by lecturer Michael Milojevic and photographer Brian Donovan, were allowed access to Hilandar's complex of ancient Byzantine buildings, which contribute to Athos' status as a World Heritage Site.

All was not lost to the women, however, explains Milojevic. From the drawings and photographs taken by the group during their 10-day stay at Hilandar, the females were later able to use those primary sources to create their own architectural studies of the site, "so in terms of a teaching method, it is a great benefit to our women students".

Says Donovan, "One of the points Michael made about the project was that it was the only way female students of architecture would ever be able to get a decent sense of what the place was like."

Aside from being given access to the monastery and discreet assistance by the monks, the group was also granted an unprecedented 10-day permit. The normal length of stay on Mt Athos is three days maximum, with no more than 10 people allowed each day.

Tourism is regarded as abhorrent, and the procedure to gain permission to visit is labyrinthine, requiring a series of pre-reservations, confirmations and permits at the Pilgrim's Office at Thessaloniki on the mainland.

But because of Milojevic's association with the monastery's conservation architect, Professor Mirko Kovacevic of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Belgrade University architecture department, who initiated the idea of the student visit, Hilandar's head monk invited them to stay for 10 days. "When we got to the Pilgrim's Office, the official there said he had never known Hilandar give a foreign group a permit like this," says Milojevic.

A Canadian-born Serb who has lived in New Zealand for 10 years, Milojevic first visited Hilandar with his father when he was 18 and just beginning his architectural studies. Donovan, who is a photographer for the university's educational media centre, had never heard of Hilandar, although "in 1999 I was flying to Turkey and the aircraft flew over that part of the Aegean".

Donovan, who has previously worked on ancient sites such as Pompeii, Herculaneum, Rome and Troy, specialises in 360 degree Apple QuickTime VR (virtual reality) panoramas which are developed into interactive CD-Roms. His shots of Hilandar will eventually become such a project. Incidentally, Athos forbids the use of moving image technology so no movie or video images of the region exist.

Carrying a Seitz Roundshot Super 220 camera (the camera body rotates during exposure), plus all the photographic and architectural drawing paraphernalia from the ferry, which landed on Athos' west coast, to the monastery, on the east side, presented a small dilemma: the region is car-less.

Fortunately, Hilandar's monks have a practical side, and picked most of the group up in a truck. Others had to walk 18km in searing heat - in full trousers. "At the checkpoint what amused me was that some official told the students they had to change out of shorts into trousers," recalls Donovan.

Once installed at Hilandar, work began and adaptations to the ascetic lifestyle made. For instance, says Milojevic, not only were there just two plain meals a day, there was a trick to actually eating them. "The first meal is after the morning service which starts at 3am and goes on for about four or five hours but every service is different because the Orthodox calendar is so complicated. Unless the students were there, they wouldn't be able to eat and if they missed out on the breakfast, the next meal was not until 6pm.

"You only begin to eat after the prayer and only after the head monk. Everyone's looking at each other, bearing down on propriety and protocol, and the moment the head monk has had his fill, that's it. If you haven't finished it doesn't matter, he's up, he says his prayer and he's out and you must follow. The first meal, it was all over in about seven minutes and the students asked if it was going to be like this every day. Well, yeah, this isn't a cafe! They became very hungry sometimes. Eventually the monk who ran the door, as it were, helped them, woke them up at the crack of dawn to warn them to get ready."

While Milojevic, and the students, did not meet many of Hilandar's 21 monks (one monk is so elderly he apparently hasn't left his quarters for many years), he did share some anecdotes one evening. "Hilandar is not neutral, you can't be neutral in the Balkans," he says. "The monk was telling me about the time when [former Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic wanted to visit Hilandar but they didn't want him, they hated his politics. They heard he was coming by helicopter, so they put the youngest, newest monk at the gate and locked the gates and they all went up to the hermitage and waited for a number of days. Milosevic did come - of course, he wasn't invited - but the young monk said they were all away in the hermitage; he waited, got hungry and left after three hours. So they do play the game."

Hilandar has been a research subject for 200 years, "a scholastic industry", as Milojevic describes it, with screeds of books, articles and research papers devoted to its rich collections of paintings, sculpture, embroidery, ceramics, scriptural documents, monastic seals, libraries, music manuscripts and, of course, its architecture.

But the Auckland group has taken the study of Hilandar to a new dimension.

Since returning, many students have contributed fine detailed architectural drawings and lithographs to the project; Adrianna Toader's panoramic circular explains the context of Donovan's photographs, while Shaylan Maharaj and Richard Andrews took sections through building elements where they've never been taken before.

"The church has been studied a lot," says Milojevic. "I thought what needed doing was the surrounding buildings. One of my goals was to take Brian to do the panoramic images; essentially Hilandar is a hemispherical space which is perfect for the medium and especially the interiors which are vast. We worked to take the images up from the seashore, to the gates, then through the spaces, like a virtual visit.

"A number of students did huge drawings and plans. We took sections through the buildings where they've never been taken before and cut through in the drawings. Jessica Lai has created what we call 'jellyfish' axonometric drawings where you can see through the structure.

"One has created an architectural plan which stretches out 1.5m. I think the Byzantists are very pleased in Belgrade with what we've done, and we are expecting to publish the CDRom through the Institute of the Protection of Cultural Monuments in the Republic of Serbia.

"Books can't accommodate the scale of what we have done but the new media allows us to have these scrolling drawings. This is the first time anything like this has been attempted."

Many of the works - photos, drawings, a site map, plans, sections and the jellyfish drawings - achieved during and after the Hilandar visit go on display at Old Government House through the next month, before going on to the Universities of Calgary and Toronto, and at the end of the year to Belgrade's Cultural Centre gallery.

Remember: this is the only chance for most people, regardless of sex, to "visit" this extraordinary place.

Meanwhile, Milojevic, who has worked on ancient sites in Iraq, Carthage and Yugoslavia, is preparing himself for a new project next year: documenting the 14th-century Decani monastery in an equally difficult-to-access United Nations Protected Force guarded pocket of south-western Kosovo.

* Hilandar Panoramas, Old Government House, Waterloo Quadrant, from tomorrow until March 2; weekdays noon-5pm, Saturdays 10am-3pm.