Management of Living Religious Heritage: Who Sets the Agenda? The Case of the Monastic Community of Mount Athos

Abstract

This paper explores the decision-making process for heritage management at the monastic community of Mount Athos, a World Heritage Site in Northern Greece, in relation to the concept of living religious heritage and the pursuit to balance the heritage values of both the experts (heritage professionals) and the non-experts. The function and impact of a specific heritage agency — KEDAK (Centre for the Preservation of Athonite Heritage) — designed to establish the decision-making power of the Athonite monasteries will be critically discussed. A range of interesting compromising solutions and some challenges and problems raised by the function of this agency will serve as the background for examining the extent to which different perceptions on heritage management can coexist, particularly when heritage professionals find themselves on the bottom of a top-down decision-making process.

Keywords:

• living religious heritage
• intangible heritage
• Mount Athos
• monastic communities
• Orthodox heritage
• Greece

The research that has informed this paper owes a lot to the late Dr Stelios Papadopoulos who introduced me to the monasteries of Mount Athos and encouraged and supported my venture of writing up a PhD thesis about the monastic peninsula. I would also like to thank the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) for funding my studies (MA, PhD) at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and my supervisors, Tim Williams and Tim Schadla-Hall, for offering their insights and comments on various stages of my research. Special thanks are due to Dr Ioannis Tavlakis (10th EBA) for sharing his experiences from Mount Athos, and to all the Athonite fathers and monasteries who offered their hospitality and facilitated my research. I am also grateful to Dr Kalliopi Fouseki for providing useful comments and feedback during the preparation of this paper.

Notes

* According to the website of the Supreme Council of Hellenes Ethnikoi, more than 2500 people gathered in March 2011 at the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora in Athens to protest against the reburial of an altar dedicated to the twelve Olympian gods which was unearthed during works on the Athens Piraeus Electric Railways (YSEE, 2012).

* Concise general information on Mount Athos can be found in a variety of publications in Greek and English (Kadas, 1986; Karakatsanis, 1997; Speake, 2002; Pentzikis, 2003) and various online resources (e.g. <http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Athos/>; <http://www.athosfriends.org/>).

* This enormous repository of artefacts includes, among many other things: the largest collection of Orthodox portable icons in the world, numbering approximately 20,000 (Tsigaridas, 1997: 47); around 15,000 manuscripts, including the largest collection of Greek manuscripts worldwide (Atsalos, 1997: 511); more than 200,000 printed books; extensive collections of historically significant archival documents; textiles, works of minor arts, artefacts of gold- and silversmithery, etc. (Karakatsanis, 1997).

* The MAC is recognized by Article 105 of the Constitution of Greece as a law of superior formal force in comparison to the other laws of the Hellenic Republic (Papastathis, 2004: 509). However, it is worth noting that the most comprehensive and heritage-specific guidelines (albeit focused namely on movable heritage) are advocated in documents such as the Normative Provision 13/05/1947 (Alexopoulos, 2010: ch. 5).

* The former Ministry of Culture has recently become a sub-Ministry and has been merged into the newly formed Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs, Culture and Sports.

* The former Ministry for Macedonia and Thrace, to which KEDAK has belonged, has recently been turned into the General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace and is placed under the administration of the Ministry of the Interior.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Georgios Alexopoulos

Georgios Alexopoulos is a Research Associate at the Initiative for Heritage Conservancy, Greece. He holds a BA in archaeology and art history and an MA in cultural heritage studies from the University of Athens and the University College London respectively. His PhD thesis at the UCL Institute of Archaeology dealt with the management of cultural heritage in the monastic community of Mount Athos. He has been employed as a Research Associate for the University of York (Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past) and as Visiting Research Fellow for the Initiative for Heritage Conservancy.

Correspondence to: Georgios Alexopoulos. Email: [email protected]