The Road to the Holy Mountain

Even though he never thought of conversion, Fermor found on Athos what he had hoped to find in Constantinople: the heart of Byzantine Christianity. And he found it pretty much unchanged. This is perhaps the ultimate secret of Athos, that it is close to being frozen in time. Byron could read Curzon and find the place unchanged, just as Fermor and Chatwin could read Byron, and I, Fermor, and come away with the same impression. “Time has stood still here,” Fermor notes.7 While the first two volumes of his travel writings derived their appeal from a foot-journey across a Middle Europe that had disappeared forever, the last one culminates on an island intent on never changing at all. It is a strange destination for travel writers, the opposite of what these itinerant spirits represent. Where they cannot get enough of the world, Athos has turned its back on it; where they record change, Athos has its sights set on eternity. But perhaps this is what they were looking for all along, a place where their wanderings might finally come to rest.

Martin Puchner sobre The Road to the Holy Mountain, de Patrick Leigh Fermor.