When you start your Athos pilgrimage with a stay in Thessaloniki, it is a good idea to visit the Mount Athos Center.
The Mount Athos Center runs a website called: Agioritiki Estia (which means: Holy House). Not only does it show all current, future and past exhibitions (and much more), but it is also an online shop. The website provides information about the visit and pilgrimage to Athos and it is also were you emails will arrive when you make a reservation via the email adress athosreservation@gmail.com. The building, that lies on the famous ancient Roman road, Via (Odos) Egnatia (nr 109), houses a bookshop and you can buy Athos products (link to the e-shop).
A visit to the exhibitions on the second floor is free. Currently there is a group exhibition of photographs and sacred treasures entitled ‘Easter on Mount Athos’. When we visited the Center last time, on September 22, 2023, it was the last day of the exhibition ‘No Women’s Land’. From Princeton to Mount Athos and the Meteora in 1929′. I have taken some photos of the photographs shown in this exhibition that have been preserved from the 1929 trip. The entire collection consists of 336 glass plate photographs and a 33-minute film. This film is a rare and early cinematic documentation of Mount Athos. They were discovered in late 2017 in a large barrel at Princeton University.
The group of travellers consisted of the Russian émigré, painter, explorer and exceptionally gifted communicator Vladimir ‘Vovo’ Perfilieff, the photographer, talented cinematographer and later Oscar-winner Floyd Crosby, and the architect Gordon McCormick, a Princeton University graduate. The three travellers were accompanied by the young Anastasios Chatzimitsos, an interpreter from Thessaloniki.
This last photo of monks in the trapeza of Panteleimonos ends the photographic survey of the 1929 Athos-expedition of Princeton university. For more information have a look at the Princeton website. The film made by Crosby was shown during the exposition in Thessaloniki, but unfortunately not avaliable on YouTube.
What follows some well-intentioned advice for my friends from the Mount Athos Center for a future exhibition. Do contact the Dutch Photo Museum in Rotterdam, because they keep a large collection of black and white photographs a the Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys, who visited Athos in 1957. Just have a look in the following photos of the trapeza of Panteleimonos and the links and see how beautiful these pictures are (posts 2184, 2185, 2186 and 2187).
Wim Voogd, 22-5-2024