Online Zoom Forum: Mount Athos: Spiritual, Ecological, and Community Perspectives.
Date: Wednesday 5 November 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be four talks, each of 15 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Simon Barrow:
Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. His book Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour's Challenge, co-edited with Gerry Hassan, was published by Biteback in November 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, January 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, September 2025).
Speakers:
Prof Kyriacos C. Markides:
Title: How I discovered Mount Athos: Its meaning for Christianity and the Wider World.
Description: It has been said that Christianity as we have known it in the West "is anemic and wasting away." In this discussion I would like to share my many years of exploration, as a "participant observer", the culture and spiritual tradition of the Holy Mountain of Athos and suggest that it may have the potential to inject Christianity with a new vitality that it desperately needs. My spiritual mentor in this exploration has been "Fr. Maximos", a charismatic Athonite Elder.
Bio: Kyriacos C. Markides, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Maine and author of ten books published by leading publishers in the United States and the UK. Six of his books, including “THE MOUNTAIN OF SILENCE,” “GIFTS OF THE DESERT” and “INNER RIVER” are on Christian mystics, spiritual guides and elders of Eastern Christianity and are published by Random House / Image Books. His books have been translated and published in thirteen other countries and languages. Professor Markides is the recipient in 2002 of the best professor award in Arts and Sciences at the University of Maine and the 2006 Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award of the same university. His latest book “THE ACCIDENTAL IMMIGRANT: A Quest for Spirit in a Skeptical Age” (Hamilton Books, 2021) is his capstone work. He lives in Stillwater Maine with his wife Emily J. Markides, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Peace and Reconciliation Studies at the University of Maine.
Prof Christos Tsironis:
Title: The Holy Mount Athos Today: Pilgrimage and Cultural Heritage Destination.
Description: The Holy Mount Athos is one of the most important monastic communities in the Orthodox world, a pilgrimage site for thousands of visitors, one of the most renowned religious destinations in the world, and a place where elements of tangible and intangible heritage are preserved and continue their journey through time. Visitors to Mount Athos seek to experience pilgrimage and to participate in the monasteries’ liturgical life, to take part in the Divine Liturgy, to the monks' prayers and their daily activities. In other words, pilgrims live an experience that is defined not by the conditions of their daily lives, but by the tradition of the pre-modern world, as preserved in Mount Athos for more than one thousand years. Its monastic life, strictly organized according to centuries-old rules and principles, continues to embody practices of profound spiritual, cultural, and historical significance. At the same time, they encounter the richness of Christian culture: psalms, relics, manuscripts, and artefacts of priceless value and cultural importance. Mount Athos is revered for its spiritual heritage, for the legacy of its saints, and its ascetic way of life.
At the same time, H. Mount Athos attracts also people who, without necessarily being pilgrims or believers, want to discover its cultural treasures and artefacts, to hear the ancient language of hymns, to admire the old icons, and to engage with what they understand as cultural resources. There are also people who want to get in contact with a natural landscape, which remains untouched by modern interventions. Within this context, the present analysis approaches H. Mount Athos as a contemporary pilgrimage and cultural heritage site, drawing on recent research findings into visitor motivations and perceptions. The findings indicate that while pilgrims are primarily faith-motivated, there are also visitors who seek tranquility and others who value the unspoiled nature or those who want to explore artistic and architectural masterpieces. The presentation of H. Mount Athos in this context will concentrate on the way contemporary pilgrims and visitors bestow meaning to their experience: it will therefore focus both on the theological significance of the monastic community (for Orthodoxy and Christianity in general) and on the understanding of the site as an "ark" that embodies religious traditions, unique elements of cultural heritage and unparalleled natural beauty.
Bio: Dr Christos Tsironis is a Professor (Social Theory of Contemporary Culture and Christianity) at the School of Theology, dep. of Ethics and Sociology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He teaches in Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees (Contemporary Social Theory, Sociology, Sociology of AI, and Sociology of Tourism, Religious Tourism, Sociology of Christianity).
He is a Fellow of CHS-CCS, Harvard University 2018-19 in Comparative Cultural Studies in Greece.
Ηe is in charge of the practicum in the Dep. of Theology. Member of various scientific Associations, coordinator and board member of research projects, and member of a variety of expert groups: Board member of the European Research Centre of Silk Road, Board Member of the Post Graduate Prog. Tourism and Local Development (Aristotle University Of Thessaloniki, school of Economics) etc. Director and founding member of the “Social Research Center for Religion and Culture”. Member of the “Laboratory of Bioethics” at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Dir. of the KEDIVIM SEMINAR at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, “Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Dilemmas and Social Challenges”. He has published on Contemporary Social Theory, Sociology of AI and Techno-Ethics, Cultural, Religious and Polymorphic Tourism, Sociology of Christianity, Ethics and Sustainable Development etc in national and international scientific journals.
Dr Christos Kakalis:
Title: Caring Silence Heritages: Silence and the Ascetic Landscape of Mount Athos.
Description: The paper studies the importance of silence in the ascetic life of Mount Athos, suggesting a caring approach to its preservation as an organic and inherent element of the topography there. Mount Athos, a mountainous peninsula in northern Greece, is a valuable case study of sacred topography as it is one of the world’s largest monastic communities and an important pilgrimage destination. Its phenomenological examination in this paper highlights the importance of embodiment in the experience of religious places, and questions current, established, preservation attitudes to their heritage, in which tangible and intangible components are interconnected. Combining insights of different disciplines (architectural, theory, philosophy, theology, anthropology, heritage management) with archival and ethnographic materials the paper contributes to the understanding of heritage in a unique way, using silence as a thread materiality between human, non-human, built and unbuilt components of place. Mount Athos (a UNESCO heritage monument since 1986) has always been connected to a movement to another space and time, a perception enhanced by its status as a self-governed political entity and by the formal processes that be followed to enter. Byzantine monastic architecture and the quite untouched natural environment open a field of ascetic life (only for male monastics) in which silent prayer and communal rituals are dynamically combined. Either human or atmospheric silence is an important constituent of Athonite topography. On the one hand, silent prayer is the heart of hesychasm (‘hesychia’ meaning silence and tranquility), an ascetic way of life with intense meditational qualities practiced there that influences liturgical life, art and architecture. On the other hand, atmospheric silence either intentionally preserved by the monks or as a key aural component of natural landscape is interrelated with human, adding to the religious character of the peninsula. Through a closer and holistic analysis of the role of silence and its interconnection with communal rituals, built and natural materialities of the landscape, the paper discusses caring and more thoughtful ways of heritage preservation, in an period that the examined case study has started suffering the results of different preservation strategies, that while following national or international policies, they disturb (or sometimes ever interrupt) the organic development of a living topography.
Bio: Christos Kakalis is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and the Co-director of the Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC) of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. He is a registered architect (Greece), has obtained the interdisciplinary MSc ‘Design, Space, Culture’ (NTUA, Athens, Greece), holds a PhD in Architecture (University of Edinburgh), and has also held theological studies (IOCS, Cambridge). He has been practising for more than 15 years now and has conducted research and taught at different universities (in Greece, UK and Canada). His work focuses on the conditions of embodied experience of architecture and natural landscape with special emphasis on religious landscapes. Parts of this research have been published in the co-edited volumes: (with Mark Dorrian) The Place of Silence: Architecture / Media / Philosophy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), (with Emily Goetsch) Mountains, Movements, Mobilities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and (with David Boyd), Embodied Awareness and Space: Body, Agency and Current Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), his monographs Architecture and Silence (Routledge, 2020) and Place Experience of the Sacred: Silence and the Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). His current research involves the closer examination of place and identity in transnational religious communities in the UK and the US as well as issues of resilience and sustainability in the interchange between local and moving communities in Scotland.
Bruce Clark:
Title: On Earth as it is in Heaven: The Emergence of Bartholomew I as the Green Patriarch.
Description: When Patriarch Bartholomew was enthroned in 1991 in the ancient see of Constantinople, nobody could have imagined the moral stature that he would gain as a passionate believer in care for the Creation. While presiding over a tiny and embattled minority in his home city, he has made a brilliant re-interpretation of his title as Ecumenical Patriarchate, which literally implies concern for the entire Oikoumeni, the whole inhabited world. Without purporting to be a scientist or a policy-maker, he made clear his passion for the planet by presiding, and listening attentively, at a series of symposia in ecologically sensitive stretches of water: from the Danube to the Baltic to Amazonia to Greenland to New Orleans. It was my privilege to follow him round the world on these journeys and hear his messages.
Bio: I write, broadcast and speak on a wide range of subjects including religion and geopolitics, the history of south eastern Europe and the story of textiles. For many years I was the online religion editor of The Economist, and I still contribute to that publication and many others. I have a strong interest in the local history of my home region of mid Ulster, especially its linen heritage and its early American connections. I have been an active participant in global debates organised by the Ecumenical Patriarch on the subject of faith and the environment. The early Christian history of Ireland and Scotland is another strong personal interest.
What Bruce did before:
Since 1998 I have worked mainly for The Economist, covering everything from conflict in the Balkans to transatlantic relations and comparative religion. Between 2002 and early 2004 I took a sabbatical to research the history of forced migration between Greece and Turkey. In 2006, I launched the international pages of The Economist’s foreign news section, a new editorial feature devoted to broad global topics from disarmament to development.
Bruce and Yeltsin: Before joining The Economist, I served as diplomatic correspondent for the Financial Times, working in London, Brussels and then Washington DC. From 1990-1993, I was a correspondent for The Times in Moscow, covering the fall of communism and Russia’s post-Soviet transition. In an earlier stint at the Financial Times, I was editor of the European news section. My first jobs as a journalist were with Reuters, as a junior correspondent in Paris and as the agency’s main correspondent in Athens. Thanks to these jobs, I have a good working knowledge of French, modern Greek and Russian and I can get along in Italian, Dutch, German and Spanish.
At Saint John’s College, Cambridge, I studied Philosophy and then Social and Political Sciences, graduating with a BA in 1979. Before that I was educated at Maghera Primary School, Brook House School in Dublin and Shrewsbury School.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
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