The Protaton, the Monastery of Vatopedi and the Cretan School The Holy Mountain has been the great centre of Orthodox art since the fall of Constantinople. But art flourished on Mount Athos much earlier than that, as is shown by some icons and miniatures that have survived the severe vicissitudes through which the Holy Mountain has passed. Of the older iconographic works, there are the remains of the mosaics in the katholikon1 of the Monastery of Vatopedi. They comprise the following: Christ on a throne flanked on either side by the Holy Virgin and Saint John the Baptist, situated above the central door of the narthex, with an inscription of the eleventh century; the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin, on the wall of ...
It may well be that I don’t have good taste and that I don’t understand much about art, but this was my impression and I share it most sincerely with my readers. This beautiful iconostas is a gift from the late Abbot, Antonij Bochkov (a former merchant), who spent his last years as a monk near Moscow, at the Monastery of Nikolo-Ugreshkij . Apart from the iconostas, there’s not much in the empty, spacious chapel of the Pokrov (Protecting Veil) which makes an impression in terms of the feast or ceremony (I don’t, of course, mean the service itself: the scrupulous order of the monks on the Holy Mountain is exemplary and I haven’t seen anything like it either in the churches ...
