The Mount Athos Diet Plan

There is a certain absurdity at the heart of my mission to Mount Athos. I am visiting this unique and bizarre self-governing monastic community to discover the secrets of the monks’ longevity and remarkably low levels of cancer. I want to know how they live so long; yet what preoccupies the inhabitants of this large, unspoiled and beautiful peninsula in northern Greece is their own transience. They wear black to remind themselves of their own mortality. Death is my mortal enemy; to them it is a welcome friend, a true beginning.

So no doubt they will dislike the idea of a “Mount Athos Diet and Detox Plan”, born of surveys which have shown how healthy their lifestyle is. When I tell Father Theonas, gatekeeper at the monastery of Vatopedi what my mission is, he is, in a friendly way, dismissive: “That’s only part of it. The essence is the life of the spirit, the fact that we are living close to God.”

Father Philotheous, an English-born monk at the Skete of St Andrew near Athos’s tiny capital Karyes, just laughs. “We’re not here to live for a long time,” he says. “The people who want to take something of the Athonite culture so they can live for a long time, why do they want to live for a long time?” “Because they want to continue enjoying themselves and continue sinning,” says his fellow Englishman Father Ephraim, an earnest thirtysomething who converted to Orthodoxy from Catholicism because “Catholics don’t believe anything any more.”

Yet despite this warm embrace of death and their certainty that eternal life awaits them, the monks of Athos have conjured up a lifestyle that is conducive to good health and a long life. At the monastery of Iviron, the Australian-born Father Jeremiah gives me a tour of the cemetery, with its collection of simple wooden crosses. Most of those buried here have made it into their mid- or late eighties. I also meet Father Bartholomew, still going strong at 87, dunking home-made cake in his herbal tea while enjoying an evening’s conversation with the monk who cares for him, the monastery’s librarian and a pet parrot called Stelios.

So what is their secret? It can be summed up in one word – simplicity. The monks of Mount Athos strive to live as the saints they revere did at the dawn of Christianity. They eat enough to live, no more; they grow as much of their own food as they can; they fish, make their own bread, wine and olive oil; sleep no more than six hours a day; fast three days a week – more before Easter and Christmas; have no personal possessions; avoid new technology as much as possible; show no pride or desire for self-advancement; and have a rigid, ritualised pattern to their lives. It seems to work.

The peninsula, which is 50km long and 10km wide, is not accessible from mainland Greece by road, and the combination of isolation and government by monks have locked it, give or take the odd Toyota Land Cruiser, somewhere in the Middle Ages. The 2,500 rugged, heavily bearded monks who live here are living a 14th-century existence, but with access to 21st-century health care on the mainland if they need it – another reason for their longevity.

The other bizarre aspect of Athos is that no women are allowed – they would, say the monks, be a distraction and a source of sexual tension. There’s a story that in 49AD the Virgin Mary was sailing across the Aegean en route to Cyprus when she was shipwrecked on Athos, which she immediately fell in love with, shouting “This mountain is holy ground. Let it now be my portion. Here let me remain.” Athos now styles itself “the garden of the mother of God”, and, by some logic I didn’t quite follow, no other female is allowed to set foot there. Even female animals are banned, though an exception is made for cats – they are everywhere and valued for keeping the rats at bay.

I visited Athos in mid-January – or at least I thought I did. When I got to Iviron, where I was to stay for two nights, I discovered it was New Year’s Day. Athos uses the Julian calendar, which is 13 days behind the rest of us. I was disappointed to find that I had missed the New Year’s Eve festivities, until I was told they had taken the form of a seven-hour-long vigil. The other time difference is that the day is deemed to start at sunset rather than midnight.

In winter the monks make a late start – their first service, called Midnight Office, is at 2.30am. It runs into Matins between 3 and 4am and the Liturgy from 4.30 to 6am, forming what is, in effect, an unbroken three and a half hour service through the night. I am encouraged to attend the Liturgy. The monks assume Midnight Office will be beyond me. The monks are proved correct.

Father Jeremiah, a kindly 52-year-old who came to Athos in 1981, is my guide at Iviron. He tells me he usually sleeps from 11pm to 2am, attends the night-time service, then rests again before the morning meal at 9.30am. That is followed by four hours of work (each monk has a specific “obedience”, such as cooking, carpentry or agricultural work), Vespers at 3pm, and the evening meal and Compline, the post-meal service, at 5pm. I attend Vespers soon after arriving and, while the chanting has a certain hypnotic quality, I find it tough going. The man in the neighbouring choir seat – a middle-aged pilgrim in a leather jacket – tells me off for crossing my legs during the service.

After Vespers it is time for the evening meal – 4.30pm counts as evening. The monks and lay pilgrims, who number around 20, eat together in the refectory but at separate tables. The meals – strictly two a day – are treated as part of the service, with monks processing back and forth from church to refectory. No talking is permitted during the meal; instead a monk reads from The Lives of the Saints. The abbot, at the head of the table, keeps an eye on how the diners are progressing, and when he reckons the pace of eating is slowing he dings a little bell, the reading ends, grace is said and everyone files out. You have to eat relatively quickly, as the bell can sound unexpectedly. It was four meals before I’d worked out the correct pace.

This first supper comprises a lukewarm but not unpleasant fish and rice soup, brown bed (no butter – dairy is the devil!), a small piece of pasta bake, a small piece of fish, a small piece of feta, a small glass of monastery-produced wine (thin-bodied, slightly sour but perfectly serviceable), an anaemic-looking apple and a piece of cake. I’ve only just started on the cake and haven’t even been tempted by the apple when the abbot sounds time. I know I’ll be hungry later, yet I also know it is enough. The meal, Father Jeremiah tells me later, was made with leftovers from that morning’s special post-vigil New Year’s Day meal. The aim is that nothing should be wasted.

The monks fast on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, though because I am there at the tail-end of the Julian Christmas – a feast period – there is no fasting (thank God). The monks never eat meat, regardless of the day; but on fast days they also avoid fish, all dairy products, eggs, olive oil and wine. That leaves them with rice, pasta, bread, fruit, vegetables and lentils; I sense they eat a lot of lentils. They also fast for 40 days before Easter and Christmas and for the first fortnight in August, leading up to the dormition (passage into heaven) of the Virgin Mary on 15 August. That means that for half of the year the monks are fasting. They are convinced this is good for them, expelling impurities from their bodies.

There is not much to do in the evening – no monkish Scrabble or charades. In Vatopedi, the second monastery I stayed in, an American-born monk called Father Matthew tells me the monks are expected to be in their cells for private prayer from 6.30pm. On that first night at Iviron, I sleep for a while between 9 and 11pm, wake up and read for an hour or so, then fall asleep again before rising for the service at 4am. These sleeping patterns would take some getting used to.

During the early-morning Liturgy, I am overwhelmed by a sense of my own mortality and start to calculate how many hours the average person can expect to live. I am horrified to find that, even if you live as long as an Athonian monk, this number is well short of a million. The brevity makes me wonder about these two hours I’m spending listening to the Liturgy in Greek. In reality, it’s not quite two hours because halfway through I feel faint – a combination of lack of sleep and the smell of incense – and slump forward in my seat. I feel I’m going to be sick, and wonder how the monks would react. I go and sit outside for a while, and eventually revive.

The morning meal is a delight: lentil soup, served in a shallow aluminium dish; a piece of oily fish; a green salad with olive oil; a piece of feta; brown bread; a glass of wine; a delicious oat cake; an orange, and a handful of crushed almonds – served to mark some special saint’s day. I have only just started the orange when the bell goes. I think about smuggling out some extra oat cakes, but decide not to risk it.

It is the most glorious morning. My incense-induced headache vanishes while I’m soaking myself in cold water in the communal bathroom. The meal leaves me feeling satisfied but not over-full, and where else would I get to drink red wine at 9 in the morning and be told it was good for me?

Father Jeremiah suggests I pay a call on Father Moses, an expert on the Athonian diet, who lives near Karyes. I take the mini-bus into town, then walk a couple of miles to Father Moses’s house (around half the monks on Athos live outside monasteries). Despite having slept in three bursts, I feel terrific: the combination of low-calorie diet, fresh air and pleasant walk already seems to be working. Athos is like Switzerland, but without the cows, and there are so few cars that when one does chug into view, struggling along the rough, winding roads, you are startled.

The walk takes about 45 minutes, with the odd wrong turn and a couple of near-falls on wet flagstones. Father Moses lives with one other monk in a house that commands the most glorious view down the wooded slopes of a valley and out to the sea. He is happy to explain the secrets of the Athonian good life, but unfortunately speaks only the most rudimentary English and prefers to answer my somewhat banal questions mainly in Greek. The only words I catch are “fruit”, “potatoes” and “natural life”, but maybe that’s enough. It strikes me as ironic that, as I listen to his largely impenetrable lecture, I am eating a chocolate marshmallow given to me by Father Moses’s cellmate when I arrived.

The following day I move up the coast to Vatopedi, the largest monastery on Athos. Almost as soon as I arrive, it’s time for Vespers, which is more formal than at Iviron. It may be the sheer number of monks, who fill the church – 100 compared with just 30 at Iviron. Whereas at the latter there were just a handful chanting the offices, here there are groups of half a dozen or more for each part, producing a wonderfully lyrical effect. Near the end of the service, in a glorious coup de theatre, the abbot and four priest-monks enter in glittering red robes. Again I am chastised: a visitor from Serbia with a bushy brown beard – the laymen are often more punctilious than the monks – tells me to take my hands out of my pockets as we’re leaving the church.

We eat at 4.30pm: broad beans, spinach, monastery-baked bread, home-grown kiwi fruits and oranges, and delicious oatcakes (the sad-looking, stubbly man next to me scoffs three), but no cheese and, worse, no wine (though I am told later there should have been a flask on the table). After Compline, the post-meal service, Father Matthew and I talk for three-quarters of an hour. Then a bell tolls and he says he has to dash – the Brotherhood meets on Wednesdays. It sounds superbly sinister.

It is just after 6pm and the evening stretches ahead of me. Perhaps 700,000 hours is enough after all. I go to sleep at 11pm after a marathon read; I like the fact there is no TV, radio or internet, and that you have to fall back on books and self-interrogation. A monk thoughtfully calls at 3am to tell me the service is starting. I’m not sure whether attendance is obligatory and go back to bed, but I can’t sleep, so wash, shave and head across the pitch-black courtyard to the church. I’m there just before 4am, ahead of most of the other pilgrims. My bushy-bearded Serbian tormentor doesn’t show until just after 5. I give him a smug look when he eventually arrives.

I assume the service will end, as at Iviron, around 6am and look forward to going back to bed. It does, indeed, appear to be winding down around then, and I prepare to leave. But it is only evolving to some other, more exalted phase, and it doesn’t finish until 9am – an hour longer than usual because today the monks are venerating 13 of their predecessors at Vatopedi, martyred in the 13th century.

The morning meal is also more elaborate than usual because of the martyred 13. Spaghetti, roasted parsnips in olive oil, broccoli, feta, tomato, kiwi fruit, an orange, cake with a hint of chocolate on top and a sizeable helping of crushed almonds. I still can’t find the jug of wine, though.

Five hours in church is a long haul, and I hide the following morning when I get the 2.30am call. I have to leave on the 9.30am bus, and need some sleep. I’ve enjoyed the food and the tranquillity, but getting up at 2.30 every morning and spending eight hours a day in church would be too much for me. The monks have somehow learned to transcend boredom; with God on your side anything is possible.

I head back to Karyes, where a knot of rugged-looking monks are milling round in the town square, and on to the port of Dafni. With an hour to wait for the boat back to the Greek mainland and the influence of the Holy Mountain perhaps receding, I have a Nescafé and a pastry filled with spinach – a kind of Greek Cornish pasty. I feel a touch guilty about this until I spot a young monk at a nearby table eating a pastry and drinking a large bottle of Amstel beer. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

Simplicity

This is really the key to monkish life. Eat enough to live; don’t overcomplicate personal relationships; don’t worry what other people think of you; don’t show excessive pride; don’t commute; walk rather than travel by car if you can; don’t worry about money; concentrate on being a good human being.

Father Isidore, a monk who works in the kitchen at the monastery of Iviron, told me it was this simplicity that first attracted him to monastic life when he met a group of monks in the US. “They were living very simply,” he says. “They didn’t have electricity or central heating. They were living in the woods, devoted to their Christian life, their monastic life. They were genuine people – that’s what fascinated me. They were living a different life to everyone else in the world. They had a goal, but also love between each other. You could feel it. It was an inspiring community.”

The goal, of course, is to get closer to God – something that non-believers, who will question the value of such withdrawal, may think invalidates their entire way of life. Monks start from the premise that everything in this life is really a preparation for the next. They take a holistic view that the body is looked after to make it more receptive to God’s grace, and they are resistant to the notion that outsiders can pick and choose – take the diet and detox plan without the spiritual dimension.

Father Ephraim, an English monk at the Skete of St Andrew near Karyes, is adamant on this point. “Diet is not the primary thing. We are not here to have a good lifestyle and good health. We are here to develop a relationship with God, and the diet is to help us. It’s designed to train and subdue the body. If we take the diet away from the relationship with God, then it becomes something arrogant and loses its context and its worth.”

So we have to steer a careful course here. The monks don’t want to be the authors of a lifestyle guide. They believe one word will do, uttered to me in both the monasteries in which I stayed: “Repent!” And non-believers will have their doubts about trying to learn anything from a way of life that starts from a belief that nothing matters more in this life than achieving a personal communion with God, which in turn means spending up to eight hours a day in church and much of the rest of the time in private prayer (indeed, monks would actually say they spend 24 hours a day in prayer – hence the fact their rosary seems never to be out of their hand).

But clearly there are things that atheists, agnostics and followers of less strict theologies can learn from these Orthodox monks’ way of life: a striving for self-sufficiency; a rejection of materialism, commercialism and over-consumption; a sense of community; a structuring of the life to allow time for introspection and contemplation; the realisation that in our brief lives we should endeavour to be a force for good. If you are an atheist, substitute love for God and you can live something close to a monkish life. Eat well, live well and try each day to do one act, no matter how small, that makes the world a better place.

Diet

Potentially, Mount Athos’s major contribution, and certainly the aspect that was the biggest eye-opener for me. I reached Ouranopolis, 150km from Thessaloniki and one of the two embarkation points for the “Holy Mountain”, a day earlier than I’d expected, so presented myself at the Holy Executive of the Holy Mount Athos – Pilgrims’ Bureau (long name, small office) early on Sunday morning in the hope they would let me take the ferry across a day early. Nothing doing: they’d been told to expect me Monday, and Monday it must be. Bureaucracy rules. Byzantine.

That meant a day in sleepy Ouranopolis (which, misleadingly, translates as “heavenly city”). It would not be possible to be debauched in Ouranopolis, but I did some of the things that mark me out as one of those decadent 21st-century men in need of the 14th-century Mount Athos treatment. I ate vastly, drank copiously, paid several visits to the town’s delightful cake shop, drank several strong coffees and watched live football on TV – the principal activity of the male inhabitants of Ouranopolis, who congregate round sets in smoky bars. Greece’s soccer obsession makes religious mania look pallid.

I was doing as I always do – eating till I was stuffed, drinking excessively, overdosing on caffeine and snacking every couple of hours. No wonder I’m lethargic and about four stone overweight. A portrait, suitably rounded, of western man. All that stopped within hours of arriving on Athos. You eat two meals a day, of roughly equal sizes, at 9.30am and 4.30pm. The portions are small – you can have top-ups from the containers on the table, but the monks rarely do. For a start, eating time is limited to about 20 minutes and once the abbot sounds the bell you have to stop. Also, with the exception of one or two tubby monks, they show great self-restraint: they know how much they need to get by and don’t eat a sliver of broccoli more. “Moderation in all things” – I heard that phrase again and again.

What they eat is also crucial. They consume no meat at all, believing meat rouses the passions and feeds carnality. Instead, they rely on fish, pasta, beans, lentils, large quantities of fruit and veg, eggs, olive oil, bread, cheese and wine. Pasta bakes, fish soup, vegetable stew, pieces of oily fish, small pieces of feta, bowls of veg, lots of fruit, a glass of wine, delicious home-made cakes – in various combinations these were the dishes that kept appearing.

The portions are small but the variety delightful: a fish soup, with a bowl of broccoli or cauliflower, a small piece of cheese, bread rolls (no butter – I saw none while I was on Athos), a kiwi fruit, an orange, a glass of acrid but welcome monastery-produced wine, a small cake (or two – or three, in the case of one middle-aged man I sat next to in Vatopedi, who I guessed was a long-term inmate and possibly trying out for the brotherhood; he took part in the chants in one service).

The combination may not be aesthetically all that appealing, and the food is generally cold – in Iviron I saw the cook, Father Philaretos, frying dozens of eggs at about 8am; I next saw them congealed on the table in the refectory an hour and a half later. But boy does this food do the job: I was barely hungry the whole time I was there, despite eating, at a rough estimate, a quarter of my normal calorific intake, and despite, too, walking for at least 10 miles on one day, when I had a splendid two-hour walk along deserted roads and in total silence from the little capital Karyes down to the monastery of Iviron on the north-eastern coast.

No talking is permitted during the meal; it is embarrassing even to whisper a request for the salt to be passed. Instead, you listen to a monk reading from The Lives of the Saints. The monks explain that the meal is an integral part of the service: the refectory faces the church across a courtyard and we, monks and lay congregation together, pass from one to the other. On one occasion at Vatopedi, a special day marking the deaths of 13 martyrs of the monastery, the monks entered the refectory chanting a hymn, making a glorious sound that was somehow more powerful because it was away from its usual context.

Is the food there to be enjoyed? Father Philaretos, the cook at Iviron, thinks not. “No it’s not there to be enjoyed,” he tells me. “With monks that’s the way it is. We take a more practical view. It’s like refuelling your car.” His fellow monk at Iviron, Father Jeremiah, takes a more worldly view. “It should taste nice,” he says, “but I don’t think you should go to the other extreme.” The other extreme being making a god of food, consumption, personal pleasure.

A layman called Christos, an air traffic controller in Thessaloniki and the nephew of the recently retired abbot at Iviron, had been listening to the conversation and wanted to join in. “I enjoy the food here because it is just the right amount,” he said. “Just two meals seems to work. They are the right portions, so you don’t feel overstuffed. The food is a bit cold, but actually I don’t care too much about this. I like the whole atmosphere when we’re eating – the order, people coming in all together, the prayer, listening to a monk giving a reading. And I don’t find I’m rushed: I’m not a fast eater, but I still have enough time to eat what I want.”

“Eat to live, don’t live to eat,” says Brother Ephraim at the Skete of St Andrew. “In today’s society people want to eat and eat and eat and eat. They’ve made a living of eating, whereas we should only eat what we need, which is about a tenth of what we eat anyway.” An exaggeration, no doubt – these monks take a severe view of our failings – but there is surely truth, too, in his view. We have made a fetish of consumption. You only have to look around you to see that.

What I didn’t do on Athos was experience monastic cooking on a fast day. I was there at the end of Christmas – calculated according to the Julian calendar, which is two weeks behind those of us who adopted the Gregorian version a couple of centuries ago. Usually, they fast on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and on those days they abjure fish, all dairy products, eggs, wine and olive oil (though, oddly, they are allowed to eat olives). That leaves fruit, veg, bread, and lots of lentils.

Instead of cooking in oil, the former cook at Iviron – a delightful, organically inclined monk called Father Euthymios – tells me that on fasting days they use sesame seed pulp, which they call tahini. I spent an evening with Father Euthymios and his pet parrot Stelios, and he made me one thing that told me all I needed to know about his approach to diet – a gorgeous cup of herbal tea sweetened with honey. And not just any honey – chestnut honey, which he said was especially healthy. He also showed me one of his favourite books – Wild Edible Plants of Crete. You could imagine Father Euthymios, with his wiry frame and commitment to plain, ecologically sound living, surviving perfectly happily five – or even 15 – centuries ago, at one with the natural world.

Sex

All the cynics I spoke to before setting off for my sojourn on Athos assumed that masturbation and homosexuality would be rife. Well, maybe I’m missing something, but I very much doubt it. These communities are so small and tightly controlled that any hint of sexual misconduct would quickly surface, and from talking to the monks you can sense their intensity and their overpowering will to make their personal communion with God the centre of their lives. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of that.

The monks are laconic when it comes to talking about sex. “Some people have a problem, some people have less of a problem or no problem at all,” says Father Isidore, an intense young US-born monk who work in the kitchen at Iviron. His friendly colleague in the kitchen, Father Leondios, who evidently knocked about the world a bit – went to sea, worked in a bar – before putting down roots at Iviron, is even more elliptical: “It depends what experience a monk has before he comes here. If it’s just memories…” A good-looking man, he never does explain how he deals with his memories. “It’s a personal thing,” is all the normally open Father Jeremiah will say. “It’s up to each monk how he deals with it.” You begin to understand the aversion to meat and the regular fasting.

Women

“I was wondering when you’d get round to asking about that,” Father Jeremiah says to me when I raise this thorny subject. Women are not allowed to enter Athos – a Greek female MP was leading a protest against the ban as I passed through Ouranopolis en route to the peninsula – and there is the story of a 19th-century foundling child who had lived all his life on Athos, had seen no woman other than the Virgin Mary, and was shocked late in life to discover that not all women had haloes.

“Someone who has decided to become a monk has decided he’s not really interested in being married or having a family,” says Father Jeremiah. “There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t see that as being inferior. Often, monks might see things in a more mature way. All these other things are just temporary. In the end we’re all going to die and what happens after we die is what’s important to us. That’s when the essential life begins.”

Father Isidore tells me to be less conventionally minded. “You might have a scientist who was very devoted to his work, and he might not have time for a family, and no one in the world would think it strange. That’s acceptable in society. Or someone in elite sport, who is devoting his life to what he does. Again no one would question that commitment. Physical separation helps us to concentrate – like a scientist who sits in his laboratory and doesn’t go to bars or discos, or like a sportsman who goes off to isolated training camps and renounces other things because he loves this stuff.”

Stress

Father Jeremiah at Iviron thinks the lack of stress among monks on Athos is the crucial reason why the incidence of cancer is low. They lead calm, ordered, well-regulated lives, treat the other members of their community as brothers, and in the abbot have someone who is both father figure and spiritual confessor.

“There’s not a lot of stress in our lives,” he says. “People in the world are concerned with making money, getting material things – they have to have something for the sake of their next-door neighbour – and worrying about what other people think of them. We have to do what we have to do as human beings; God will supply the rest, though that doesn’t mean just sitting back and doing nothing. It’s a holistic thing: it’s not just the diet and the food, but the whole programme of the life. A healthy spirit, a healthy body and a less stressful life.”

Father Matthew at Vatopedi agrees. “We deal with stress differently from people in the outside world. We get rid of it; we don’t carry it round. If we are really trying to live as monks, we should try to resolve our problems and not set up defences of positions we take, which can be stressful. We try to live without pride.”

Sleep

The monks have peculiar sleeping patterns. Generally, they sleep between about 10pm and 2am, attend services through the night, and have a short rest or nap during the day. Most seem to get by on five or six hours’ sleep a day, though those engaged in heavy work may need more. It is a relaxed schedule in which church attendance and private prayer absorb the majority of their time, making it possible to function on less sleep than would generally be thought necessary.

Father Ephraim at the Skete of St Andrew believes people in the outside world sleep too much because they eat too much. “When you eat and eat and eat, you are doing something which your body is not built for, so you sleep a great deal too. I try to have three or four hours’ continuous sleep at night, then supplement that with an hour or two during the day. It’s a question of getting used to it.”

Routine

This is where I would find it very difficult to follow the Mount Athos plan. For the monks, every day is rigidly, ritually planned: they attend church, pray, work, eat and rest at the same times. The monk who is 24 today will no doubt be doing exactly the same thing, living to exactly the same pattern, in 60 years’ time. His long life will be made up of myriad identical days.

Father Ephraim at the Skete of St Andrew explains this rigidity. “Here in the skete everything is the same day in day out, and that helps us to transcend the question of what are we going to do now, so we can have our minds and our hearts in God.” It is almost an abnegation of thought. His fellow English-born monk at the skete, Father Philotheous, talks about a “thought fast”. The aim is to clear your head of thought to allow the quasi-mystical communion with God which is at the heart of Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is not an intellectual pursuit. The Orthodox complain about Catholicism because of its over-intellectualism. All that matters is to be one with God. Much of what is good about the Orthodox monastic lifestyle – its modesty, simplicity and anti-commercialism – stems from this. Yet one must also be aware that at its heart lies a rejection of almost everything represented by the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. More or less everything since the early 16th century, they believe, has been a ghastly mistake. This, no doubt, is why Prince Charles, a regular visitor at the monastery of Vatopedi, finds Orthodoxy and the monastic life so attractive.

Work

Most of the work is undertaken between 10am and 2pm, though kitchen staff and fishermen will be working longer hours, and at some times of year – harvests, say – demands will be greater. The abbot decides which “obediences” the monks will undertake, and they have a changeover at the beginning of each year, though some monks will do the same job for a number of years.

At Iviron, the monk who did the cooking, Father Philaretos, had had some experience of cooking while at sea, though he said the dishes he served then were usually meat-based. One monk, a huge man with a jet-black beard called Father Ioannis, heroically manages to combine fishing, wine-making and bee-keeping. He was just about the strongest-looking person I’d ever seen, and usually had a bottle of ouzo in his hand. The librarian, Father Theologos, was immensely bookish, and I couldn’t imagine him being moved in the New Year shake-up.

Father Matthew, at Vatopedi, gentle and learned, surprised me by saying he was a handyman. So my guess was that the specific occupation didn’t matter; doing whatever chore you were allocated for the good of the collective was what counted. Also, since work only officially occupied four hours a day – there is a small army of labourers from Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe to do major jobs such as restoration and wood cutting – it was not the centre of monkish concerns. Church attendance and prayer are at the core of their lives.

Alcohol

Wine, usually made in the monastery, is allowed on non-fasting days, but just one smallish glass with each meal. The monastery-made wine is almost exclusively red and a little sour, but still extremely welcome, especially first thing in the morning after a six-hour church service. The monasteries also make ouzo, which has the kick of a donkey. Not quite sure how this squares with conquering your passions, vices and dependencies, but then what religion is truly consistent?

Smoking

Not allowed. An addiction – and all addictions are bad. The monk’s quest is to conquer his passions and create a cleansed body that makes him more spiritually receptive. Smoking is anathema.

Hygiene

Monks on Athos used to be noted for their lack of hygiene – they were drawn largely from peasant stock, and washing was an afterthought and perhaps a reflection of vanity. But as facilities have improved and more well-scrubbed city boys have become monks, so washing has become a daily occupation. In that respect, perhaps, the monks of the 21st century are moving away from their desert forebears. It’s not yet a preoccupation, though: in one monastery I dropped into the washrooms were filthy.

At Iviron there were no showers. Father Jeremiah said they had installed one for guests, but in the hots summers sweaty pilgrims had hogged it, used too much water – at a time when water was scarce – and broken the fittings, so it had been blocked off. Instead, you had to scrub yourself down in the communal bathroom with the wind whistling through the windows. In a masochistic way I rather enjoyed this – the perfect start to the day. “We say you have to look after the body, too, and do whatever is necessary,” said Father Jeremiah philosophically. “Not more and not less.”

Pollution

Non-existent on unspoiled Athos. Walking in the crisp fresh air beside the Aegean or up in the hills is glorious. But Athonians must beware: there are moves, sponsored by the autonomous monk-run government, to improve the roads – the monasteries are in a perpetual state of refurbishment and materials have to be transported to them by lorry – and some fear that better roads will mean more visitors, more tourists, more cars, more pollution. The day Karyes has its first traffic jam may be the day old Athos dies.

Money

Do monks get paid? It was a question that had been bugging me ever since my mini-bus ride from Karyes to Vatopedi, when I’d been sitting behind an elderly monk who’d dropped a little plastic bag with some euros in it. Naturally, I did the Christian thing and handed it to him, but it set me wondering where he’d got the cash. Father Matthew said there was no stipend; the monastery provided for all of their needs, and if they needed money – for a trip, say – they could apply for it out of monastic petty cash. Money is the root etc etc.

Coffee shops

There aren’t any on Athos. I was cursing this fact when I arrived in Karyes in the rain on the first day of my stay, but I came to realise it was for the best. You eat your two meals a day and, for the rest of the time, there is no chance of having large lattes in Starbuck’s or snacking in Pret a Manger. Your body gets used to having two meals a day, rather than six, amazingly quickly. Even the headaches I always suffer if I am denied caffeine were less bad than usual, perhaps because of the fresh air, vigorous walks and excellence of the rest of my diet.

Self-sufficiency

The monasteries grow their own fruit and veg – 99% organic in the case of Vatopedi, according to Father Matthew. Vatopedi also bakes its own bread, makes its own wine and produces its own olive oil (it has 35,000 olive trees on the surrounding hills). Monks also catch local fish, squid and octopuses.

Exercise

There are no gyms on Athos. The monks don’t need them, because many are doing physical work – fishing, working in the fields, doing odd jobs in the monasteries – and the ones that aren’t are likely to be doing a fair amount of walking. The mini-buses to the capital Karyes are infrequent, and you may have to walk for two or three hours to get into town or to another monastery.

There are one or two fat monks – who have evidently learned how to stuff down large quantities in the short meal breaks, or are perhaps eating the gorgeous Turkish delight (the Greeks, for deep-seated historical reasons, prefer to call it loukoumi) given to guests as they arrive at the monastery. Father Arsenios, the chief administrator at the monastery of Vatopedi, says that rather than chastise the fatties or set them to work in the fields, they are given counsel – and told to lay off the oatcakes.

Time

I found myself looking at my watch repeatedly during the lengthy services and wondered if the monks were susceptible to the same temptation. The answer, of course, is no. Father Matthew at Vatopedia said monks rarely wore wristwatches – they did not want to be slaves to time – but he did keep one in a deep pocket of his robes.

The very idea of boredom is anathema to monks. They lead a ritualised existence in which each day is more or less the same as the one before. Everything is subordinated to the perpetual conversation they are intent on carrying on with God. “Nobody who has genuinely had contact with Jesus Christ in this life could ever think it would be boring,” Father Philotheous, an English monk at the Skete of St Andrew, told me. “The real experience of the grace of Christ is never ending. Boredom is a sign of the lessening of the grace of God within us. If someone has this continual relationship with Jesus Christ, where’s the boredom?” That told me.

Beards

These are obligatory among the monks on Athos, though it’s not clear if there is a law that monks must sport a vast beard. I asked Father Jeremiah at Iviron why everyone wears a beard, and he said it was for the sake of simplicity. “It’s more natural not to shave,” he said. “Christ had a beard.” Shaving smacks of vanity and time-wasting. Do the monks trim them? “Some do, some don’t,” he told me. “Personally I don’t.”

Even the pilgrims are hirsute: many also have bushy beards and the rest have decidedly non-designer stubble – not so much 5 o’clock shadows as 2 o’clock shadows, given how early the services start. I thought about not shaving during my stay, but in the end vanity won out. I used to enjoy shaving as the wind whistled through the opened window of the monastery’s communal bathroom in the early hours of the morning – a necessary wake-up call.

Spots

I seem to have had them ever since I got back from Athos. Maybe I was bitten by insects while I was there, but I like to think a more likely explanation is that I really did detox: no meat; lots of fruit and veg; much less caffeine; less sugar; delicate cakes rather than fatty monstrosities; more exercise; lots of walks and fresh air and thigh-strengthening hikes up and down hills; plenty of reading; no TV, radio or internet; perfect peace, with just the sound of the sea and the murmur of the wind through the trees for company.

Some of the bad things have come back into my life since my return of course – I’m writing this on a laptop with a cup of coffee by my right hand. But I’m sticking to as much of the Athos programme as I can – lots of fruit and veg, pasta, lentils, not too much meat, smaller portions, no pigging out, no snacking, no dropping in to Starbuck’s. And the spots, in response, do seem to be hanging on. What I’m not doing is getting up at 2.30am and going to a six-hour service. While I want to live a good, natural and simple life, I’m not quite ready to become a monk. Though exposure to Dancing On Ice may yet make me change my mind.

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