Imagining Mount Athos

IMAGINING MOUNT ATHOS: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II. By VERONICA DELLA DORA. xvii and 312 pp.; maps, ills, bibliog., index. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780813930855; $19.50 (paper), ISBN 9780813932590. In Imagining Mount Athos Veronica della Dora weaves a highly original contribution to scholarship on the monastic republic and imaginaries of Mount Athos, on the Chalkidiki Peninsula, in northern Greece. She presents a theoretically informed and truly spirited treatise on a unique and its various meanings throughout its almost-2,000-year-long history. Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Christian Orthodoxy, takes shape through multiple layers of perceptions, desires, myths, and legends--variegated accounts, generously and painstakingly presented in this exceptional book. Each of the six chapters of the main body of the work represents a distinctive construction of Mount Athos imageries, through a different narrative perspective, all well researched, finely documented, and embellished with fascinating illustrations: mythical Athos, utopian Athos, iconic Athos, erudite Athos, geopolitical Athos, and scientific Athos. Thus emerges the incredible and breathtaking story of the most exotic and bizarre male celibate monastic community in Europe, as--in the words of David Lowenthal's inspired and inspiring foreword to the book--sequestered island, godlike giant, geological strata, botanical cornucopia, and epitome of picturesque perfection. The peninsula comes alive through pre-Christian myths of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, through carto-graphic and iconographic depictions, and through stories of Allied war refugees, botanists and sociologists, surveyors--and military strategists and even women. This unique book represents a rich and soulful cultural geography of Mount Athos: an immensely satisfactory reading of the part of the world under study, based on expert knowledge of its classical, contemporary, and symbolic/religious layers. As such, it stands alone in its genre and is an exemplary text that will stand apart in time to come, not only in various subfields of geography, such as religious and epiphanic landscapes, mountain geographies, histories of geographical and mapping imaginaries, but also in various subfields of other social sciences, such as cultural history, Hellenic studies, religious studies, and environmental history. Nonetheless, the narrative remains throughout a profuse and uplifting geography of this unique and its gorgeous all the while instructing in geographical lessons, such as the difference between place and landscape, the necessity for materialities, insider-outsider viewpoints, local versus global, positionality and situatedness, and so forth

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