Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 5

FIVE

Arrival in Greece: It took me many months of casual peddling to get from my friend’s quaint old house in southern Germany to the City of Thessaloniki in Greece, partly because I took a long detour to another traditional pilgrimage city-- Santiago, Spain. I then spent the winter months helping out at another friend’s small hotel near Florence, Italy.

But when I eventually rode into Thessaloniki, the famous city looked like any other unwelcoming, crowded, dirty old hive.

Nevertheless, I managed to find the Office of the Administration of Holy Mountain.

I had read somewhere that a pilgrim to Holy Mountain needed to get a special visa from this office—so it was in this office that I first officially declared my desire to visit Agion Oros, though I had been on the way for almost two years.

I soon learned several things: first, a foreigner (non-Greek) is only permitted to stay four days in Holy Mountain Autonomous Republic, and second, only three foreigners with reservations are allowed per day and, unfortunately, though it was early July, the foreign visitor reservations were filled until late September.

Not good--since I can’t seem to learn much of anything worthwhile in a four-day stay anywhere—that’s just about enough time for me to find out where to eat and sleep and use the toilet and I’m not kidding.

For me these two-week tours covering four European countries are useless. It often takes me four days just to ride my decrepit old bike fifty miles and it often takes me a full day in a strange town to find a reasonable place to sleep. I can easily spend one whole day exploring two rooms of a museum and twelve hours resting on a quiet, sunny hilltop.

Some kindly Italian Yoga students had donated about eighty dollars in a variety of currencies for my pilgrimage so I was not exactly penniless, but sadly, city living is always expensive, even in Thessaloniki, which is no Paris. I could stay in this bleak town and see what fortune would bring or bicycle on to Holy Mountain.

I thought perhaps I could get in without a visa since I am sometimes lucky that way so I decided to ride on.

Daphne, the small harbor village where you board one of the little ferry boats that carry pilgrims, monks and supplies to the monasteries scattered around the Holy Mountain peninsula, is not very far from Thessaloniki, but it takes me two full days to peddle there.

I think perhaps I can just ride my bike right out onto the peninsula, but when I get to the border, just beyond Daphne, I am stopped by cyclone fences with barbed wire on top, a plowed “no-man’s land” and no road or entrance gate at all.

However there are big warning signs posted on the fences in half a dozen languages advising that there are armed guards with savage dogs inside the fence which will welcome you not.

Tomasito, 2009


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