The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews
© 2004
Miracle on the
Monastery Mountain. By
Douglas Demetrios Lyttle. New York: Douglas Lyttle with the Greenleaf Book
Group, 2002. 405 pages, 655 photographs. ISBN 0 9747446-0-3. Price h/b $100.00;
£69.95. Available from the author (http://www.athosmonasteries.com)
or from Orthodox Christian Books Ltd (orthbook@aol.com).
In the nearly 2000-year history of the writing of pilgrimsÕ journals (proskynetaria in Greek) the world has never seen one
like this. Douglas Lyttle – a professional photographer and professor
emeritus of photographic arts at the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences
of the Rochester Institute of Technology – has capped his rich career
with an even richer magnum opus. With genuine Athonite humility, he calls it his coffee-table book. It
is, indeed, oversized and full of wondrously beautiful photographs of the Holy
Mountain of Athos, its monasteries, its architecture, its gardens, and
especially its people. But it is really a modern proskynetarion. The earliest surviving one, by Egeria, an
intrepid Roman woman whose extended pilgrimage took her to the Holy Land and
all over the Near East in the fourth century, was written for her sisters back
home, to share with them the sights and sounds and acquaintances she made on
her tour. It has been, ever since, an invaluable historical source for the
state of Christianity in her time, its liturgies, and the local customs of
pilgrimage. Like Egeria, Douglas Lyttle writes to share his experiences with
the world back home. Like her proskynetarion, this one, the record of twenty-two extended trips to
Mount Athos between 1972 and 1998, will be a rich source for the history of the
remarkable quarter-century which witnessed the total reversal of the long,
gradual decline of monastic life on Mount Athos.
What makes this volume outstanding? First, and most
obviously, LyttleÕs amazing photography, a distillation from over 50,000
photographs, almost none of them doctored in the darkroom. (He tells us,
somewhat apologetically, when he had to resort to such tactics!) If a picture
is worth a thousand words, this is the richest proskynetarion ever written. His perspective as a
photographer is a major theme of the drama that pervades his text. He shares
with us the challenges he faced as a photographer – from manoeuvring his
subjects into good light, to efforts to capture the Ôinner strength, purpose
and peaceÕ that he saw expressed in their faces. One of the great treasures in
this book is LyttleÕs aboslutely superb portraits of both the great and the
less great – from bishops and abbots to simple monks and lay workers.
Readers will also appreciate how his photographs capture the mystery and drama
of the festal, all-night panegyri, while his accompanying personal accounts enable us
to share with him in his moments of discovery of the beauty and solemnity of
the services.
It might, indeed, have been a coffee-table book, if
photography had been its only contribution. Equally valuable is its rich
documentation of recent history, especially in its portrayal of the people who
made this history. Professor Lyttle introduces us, in accounts of meetings and
transcripts of discussions and interviews from his journals, to the remarkable
abbots and gerontes
(spiritual fathers), and their vibrant brotherhoods, that turned Mount Athos
around and guided it into what may be the most brilliant in its long history of
renaissances. With him, we learn about the histories of these brotherhoods,
where they came from, who inspired them, how they happened to come to the
monasteries that they revived. With him, we gain a real feel for the
communities that make up the life of the Holy Mountain today. His comments and
personal recollections are informed by a profound appreciation for the
transition he witnessed in the course of his travels there. This is the
ÔmiracleÕ referred to in his title.
Lyttle tells a wonderful story. He sees and remembers
the drama in small incidents, from the challenges of travel in the days before
mobile telephones and minivans – learning how to deal with mules; trying
to disembark from a caique into a small fishing boat without having his cameras
swallowed up by an angry sea – to
discovering the differences of lifestyle, regimen, and ritual between
monasteries and sketes, or idiorrhythmic and cenobitic houses. He recreates for
us the wonder he felt while exploring the abandoned St AndrewÕs skete, haunted
by echoes of its former glory and traces of the last monks who lived and died there.
We share in the drama he faced daily as he requested permission to photograph,
never knowing whether he would be received coolly as a Lutheran in the Orthodox
holy land, rejected as an American in the era of Kissinger and Nixon, when
Americans lost favour with many Greeks for not supporting them on the Cyprus
issue, or welcomed with open arms, appreciated for his growing love for
Orthodoxy and its monastic tradition.
Finally, viewed as a modern proskynetarion, the book is outstanding for the special
quality of LyttleÕs treatment of his subject. Egeria and the authors of proskyneteria over the last 1700 years wrote
descriptions of what they saw – fascinating and valuable, yet strangely
uncommunicative, for they did not, for the most part, offer analysis,
reflection, or interpretation of what they described: just the facts,
selectively reported. This book, in the excerpts reprinted from the authorÕs
actual journal, reveals him as a meditative and perceptive pilgrim. But it is
much more than a thoughtful journal; it is a product of years of reflection
upon his experiences, and upon the memories, revived by these very photographs,
spanning his many trips to the Holy Mountain. The layout of photographs and
text reveals the hours of thought and care that were, for Douglas Lyttle, a
labour of love. With the wisdom of hindsight, he has recreated, in wonderfully
evocative prose enriched by photographs of extraordinary beauty, the
innumerable special moments that make pilgrimage meaningful and memorable.