Peak of Mount Athos

Hilandar Monastery

On the easternmost of the three long peninsulas of Chalkidiki in northern Greece lies a place that has followed its own rhythm for more than a thousand years. Mount Athos, known throughout the Orthodox world simply as the Holy Mountain, is covered by forests, steep slopes and rocky coastline, with monasteries scattered between them like small fortified towns.

There are twenty principal monasteries on the peninsula today, inhabited by Orthodox monks from several traditions, and the entire territory has possessed a form of self-government since Byzantine times. Its first surviving constitutional charter dates from 972, centuries before many modern European states existed, and Mount Athos has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

Among those twenty monasteries is Hilandar, the Serbian monastery of Mount Athos.

Aerial view of Hilandar Monastery

Although an older monastery had previously existed on the site, the history of Hilandar as we know it begins in 1198, when the Byzantine emperor Alexios III Angelos granted the ruined monastery to two Serbian monks so that they could restore it and establish a permanent Serbian monastic community there. Those two monks were anything but ordinary newcomers: one had previously ruled Serbia, while the other had been born a Serbian prince.

They were Stefan Nemanja and his youngest son Rastko Nemanjić, better known after entering monastic life as Saint Simeon and Saint Sava.

Nemanjić Dynasty

To understand why Hilandar became so important to the Serbs, it helps to understand the family behind it.

Stefan Nemanja was the founder of the Nemanjić dynasty, the ruling house that dominated medieval Serbian history for roughly two centuries. Under Nemanja and his descendants, Serbia developed from a collection of territories competing for influence between larger powers into a kingdom with its own powerful ruling dynasty, an independent church, an extensive artistic and literary tradition and, eventually, an empire that controlled much of the Balkans.

Nemanja ruled as Grand Župan during the second half of the twelfth century, but toward the end of his life he did something unusual for a ruler who had spent decades building political power: he abdicated in favour of his son Stefan the Frist-Crowned, gave up secular life and became a monk under the name Simeon. His youngest son Rastko had already left the Serbian court for Mount Athos, where he had taken the monastic name Sava, and the former ruler eventually joined him there.

Saint Sava and Saint Simeon Fresco, Studenica Monastery

The image of the father and son together became one of the most recognizable scenes in Serbian medieval religious art: Simeon as the former ruler who abandoned his throne, and Sava as the prince who abandoned the possibility of ever sitting on one.

Their importance did not end with Hilandar. Stefan Nemanja created the dynasty around which medieval Serbia would develop, while Sava returned from Mount Athos and in 1219 became the first archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Church, establishing an ecclesiastical institution that could operate independently rather than remaining subordinate to a foreign archbishopric.

Hilandar therefore stood at the intersection of the two institutions the Nemanjić family was creating: the medieval Serbian state and the independent Serbian Church.

The monastery continued to grow under later members of the dynasty. Serbian kings granted it villages, estates, money and privileges, and one of its greatest benefactors was King Milutin (the Holy King), whose reign from 1282 to 1321 produced an extraordinary wave of church building throughout the Balkans. The main church that dominates Hilandar's courtyard today dates largely from his period, meaning that someone walking through the monastery is still physically surrounded by the architectural legacy of medieval Serbian rulers.

By the fourteenth century the dynasty had reached its political peak under Dušan the Mighty, who transformed the Serbian kingdom into an empire and adopted the title Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks. Hilandar benefited enormously from this period, receiving land, privileges and donations not only from Dušan himself but also from powerful Serbian nobles.

The dynasty eventually disappeared, Hilandar did not.

Monks of Hilandar Monastery commemorate the founder Saint Sava

The Holy Mountain and Hilandar

Hilandar cannot really be understood as an isolated Serbian monument because it forms part of the much larger Athonite world.

Mount Athos has been a major centre of Orthodox monasticism since the Byzantine period, and its twenty principal monasteries coexist alongside smaller sketes, hermitages and individual monastic cells. Greek monasteries form the majority, but the Holy Mountain also includes Serbian Hilandar, Bulgarian Zograf and Russian Saint Panteleimon, reflecting the wider Orthodox world that historically looked toward Athos as one of its major spiritual centres. UNESCO describes the peninsula as both a religious and artistic centre whose influence spread far beyond Greece into the Balkans, Russia and the rest of the Orthodox world.

Life there is intentionally separated from ordinary society. People do not simply arrive at Mount Athos as tourists; male visitors normally need special permission to enter, monasteries operate according to centuries-old rules, and much of the daily schedule still revolves around prayer, work, fasting and long church services.

The most famous Athonite rule, however, is the one that surprises almost everyone hearing about Mount Athos for the first time.

Women are not allowed to enter.

The prohibition is known as the avaton, and unlike rules that simply exclude women from the private quarters of a monastery, the Athonite restriction applies to the entire Holy Mountain. The traditional religious explanation describes Athos as the Garden of the Mother of God, a territory especially dedicated to the Virgin Mary, while historically the restriction also served the monastic ideal of separating monks from ordinary family and sexual life. The rule has existed in one form or another for centuries and remains in force today.

There have nevertheless been exceptions and violations throughout history, and one of the most interesting involves the most powerful Serbian ruler of the Middle Ages.

During the winter of 1347–1348, as the Black Death spread through the Balkans, Emperor Stefan Dušan travelled to Mount Athos with members of his family and court.

Among them was his wife, Empress Jelena.

Her presence is not merely a later Serbian legend. Medieval evidence records that Dušan came to Athos with Jelena, that they visited Hilandar and prayed at the tomb of Saint Simeon, and that the imperial family distributed gifts to monasteries and visited other monastic communities on the peninsula. Modern scholarship considers Jelena one of the very few women reliably documented as having spent substantial time on Mount Athos during the Byzantine period.

According to a famous oral tradition, Jelena was permitted to accompany her husband onto Athos because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the plague, but she supposedly never allowed her feet to touch the soil of the Holy Mountain. Instead, the story says that members of the imperial escort carried her while she travelled around the peninsula.

Great Schema Monks

Visitors seeing Orthodox monks for the first time may notice that their clothing is not always identical, and one of the most striking forms of monastic dress belongs to monks of the Great Schema.

Orthodox monastic tradition recognizes several stages of monastic life. A man may first live in a monastery as a novice under the direction of experienced monks; later he may become a riassophore, receive the Small Schema and, in comparatively rare cases, ultimately receive the Great Schema.
In Orthodox tradition, a monk of the Great Schema is often seen as something close to a living saint, someone who has withdrawn almost completely from worldly life and devoted himself to prayer, repentance and ascetic discipline.

The most immediately recognizable piece of clothing associated with it is the analavos, a black garment covered with crosses, religious inscriptions and images connected with Christ's Crucifixion. To somebody unfamiliar with Orthodox monasticism it can almost resemble ceremonial armour, particularly when seen from a distance, but the symbolism is deliberately ascetic: the monk is figuratively taking the Cross upon himself.

When a monk receives the Great Schema he may also receive another monastic name, emphasizing the idea that his previous worldly identity has become even less important.

Serbian medieval art itself illustrates this tradition. In the great fourteenth-century church at Visoki Dečani, Saint Simeon is depicted dressed as a monk of the Great Schema alongside Saint Sava and King Milutin, visually joining three aspects of the Nemanjić legacy: monasticism, the Serbian Church and royal power.

Naos - the main body of the church, Hilandar

Calling Hilandar simply a church would badly underestimate what medieval monasteries actually were.

Monasteries could function simultaneously as religious communities, libraries, archives, schools, artistic workshops, landowners and centres where manuscripts were copied and preserved. Hilandar became especially important because it accumulated material across centuries during which political borders and ruling dynasties repeatedly changed around it.

Its collections today include approximately 1,200 icons, 507 manuscript charters issued by medieval rulers and 1,041 manuscript books containing more than 300,000 pages, together with tens of thousands of later printed books and an extensive collection of historical objects. The monastery's digital treasury continues to document and digitize this material.

Among its most famous religious objects is the icon of the Theotokos Tricheirousa, known to Serbs as the Bogorodica Trojeručica (the Three-Handed Mother of God).

Wonderworking Icon of Bogorodica Trojeručica

The unusual third hand visible on the icon is connected through Orthodox tradition with Saint John of Damascus, while later tradition links the icon with Saint Sava and Hilandar. Within the monastery, Trojeručica occupies such an important place that she is traditionally regarded not merely as one sacred image among many but symbolically as the abbess of Hilandar itself. Hilandar's own heritage foundation describes it as the monastery's most revered icon.

The monastery therefore preserved far more than religious worship. Its charters record rulers, land ownership and political relationships; its manuscripts preserve language and literature; its frescoes and icons preserve medieval art; and the architecture itself records successive periods of Serbian, Byzantine and broader Balkan history.

This became especially important after the medieval Serbian state disappeared under Ottoman rule. Kingdoms could be conquered and royal courts could vanish, but monasteries were sometimes able to continue preserving documents and traditions long after the political institutions that created them had ceased to exist.

Hilandar therefore survived not because the world around it remained unchanged, but because generation after generation considered it worth preserving. Rulers, monks, pilgrims and ordinary donors all left something behind there, and together they turned the monastery into one of the longest continuous links between medieval and modern Serbian culture.

The state that founded it changed beyond recognition, the dynasty disappeared, and the political map of the Balkans was redrawn many times, but Hilandar remained on Mount Athos, still Serbian in character, still monastic and still alive.