<<For more than a thousand years, Mount Athos, a forested peninsula jutting 40 miles into the northeast Aegean, has been the center of monastic life in the Greek Orthodox faith. Twenty monasteries, and little else, are scattered along its wild coastline. Some are as large as colleges; some rise from the rocks like the Potala Palace in Tibet. Inside their walls there is an astonishing abundance of medieval icons, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, jeweled reliquaries, precious metalwork and ancient marble. The Byzantine frescoes in just one of Mount Athos’s chapels would be more than enough art to fill a major exhibition in any of the world’s museums.>>
Thanks so much Suma. This is indeed an interesting read, and I'm not sure that I had known about it before. I'm drooling over such a collection of antiquities all in one place.
Last night I was reading just a little on the growth of ISIS in Iraq and learned that part of their wealth, almost half a billion dollars, came from selling around 8000 Syrian antiquities! Gotta wonder if many of these will wind up in Western museums. And if some of them are religious antiquities, how diabolical that would be. |
