Veronica della Dora is a topophiliac, a person in love with a specific place. But like a woman who falls in love with a prisoner, she has lost her heart to somewhere that she is forbidden to visit. An Italian graduate student studying in Los Angeles, she found that her life was changed by a spit of land in the north Aegean, 7,000 miles away. The closest she was able to approach was 547 yards offshore, on the deck of a boat, but this rocky Greek peninsula became, for her, "a presence even more alive than the place where I was living."
Mount Athos, literally "holy mountain," is a 36-mile finger of granite and schist culminating in a 6,670-foot peak of white crystalline limestone that is visible 100 miles away. At first glance, it seems an improbable target for Ms. della Dora's obsession. Legally accessible only by sea, it is a living fragment of the Byzantine world, like a fossil with flesh, where men have worshipped uninterruptedly since the arrival of Christian hermits in the 9th century. Today, Mount Athos is home to some 1,800 monks living in 20 monasteries and outlying hermitages. They dress in black because they are supposed to be dead to the world, and they sport impressive beards. It is the oldest existing democracy on the planet—governed by a "holy community" consisting of representatives from each of the monasteries. Yet Mount Athos is more famous for being an all-male enclave.
Tradition narrates that the Virgin Mary was blown off course here on her way to visit Lazarus in Cyprus. She blessed the mountain—then sacred to Zeus, but named after one of the rebellious giants of Greek myth—and declared the peninsula her garden, jealously forbidding it to other women. In 1406, the ban was extended to include all female animals, including poultry. Under current Greek law, a woman caught on Mount Athos faces an automatic prison sentence of up to a year.
Prohibited from visiting physically, Ms. della Dora has had to travel to "the immutable cone of Athos" on the crinkly backs of maps, etchings and photographs, and through the masculine accounts of poets, theologians, botanists, bibliophiles, art historians and escaped World War II POWs. She describes her book as the story of Mount Athos "in the geographical imagination." "It is," she writes, "about the ways in which this physical space has been narrated in the Orthodox and Western world."
In classical times, the peninsula's inhabitants were said to be snake-eating troglodytes of legendary longevity, surviving to 140 years or more. This landscape of storms and sea-monsters evolved into one of hubris and megalomaniac excess. In 480 B.C., Xerxes tried to sever the peninsula from the mainland by digging a canal to allow his invasion fleet passage away from the perilous waters around the Athonite point.
Two centuries later, the Macedonian architect Dinocrates proposed reshaping the mountain into a statue of his patron, Alexander. This fantasy of a mountain colossus would fuel the Renaissance dreams of egocentric popes, leave its traces in Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan" and on the slopes of Mount Rushmore, and rear its gigantic head again as recently as 2002, with a proposal by a Greek-American sculptor to carve a 240-foot likeness of Alexander into nearby Mount Kerdyllion ("to be complemented by a museum, an amphitheatre and a parking lot").
Ms. della Dora, like British and French topographers in the 19th century, finds it "difficult, almost impossible, to divorce the territory from its classical past, scientific knowledge from myth, the visible from the invisible." In large part, this is because Athos is a place where myths, and versions of myth, have superimposed themselves to form a virtually impenetrable conglomerate; where erudite references and cartographic measurements are barnacled—unprizably—onto what, originally, may have been little more than local hearsay. Athos was said to be the summit from which the devil tempted Jesus. At the Hilandar monastery, monks will show you "a piece of the burning bush" and the "old vine of Saint Simon." At Vatopedi, it's the camel-hair girdle worn by the Virgin Mary and a four-inch fragment of the Cross. (Together, the Athonite monasteries own 54 cubic inches of the Holy Cross). About the multitude of Athos stories, Graham Speake, in what remains the outstanding book on the peninsula ("Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise," 2002), recommends: "it seems to me preferable, as so often with Athonite oral tradition, to regard them as embroideries of a fundamental truth." They are candles to light other candles, to keep alive the flame of the pure faith.
It requires more than faith, though, to write with vigor and perception about Mount Athos without having set foot on the place; and it is hard to see what new or unique perspective Ms. della Dora brings to her subject. She has not trodden the stone paths, knobbly like elephants' knees. She has not heard the rustle of lizards in the dead leaves. She has not seen the frescoes at the Vatopedi monastery, lit by the golden points of candles. Everything comes to her secondhand.
Imagination takes no automatic precedent over experience. Only by going to Mount Athos did Bruce Chatwin realize: "There must be a God." Only by going there, after obsessing about it for eight years, did Edward Lear conclude the opposite. "If this I say be Xtianity, let Xtianity be rooted out as soon as possible." An unavoidable point about Mount Athos, perhaps the chief point, is the way in which, as a place, it operates on you when you are there. Ms. della Dora exposes herself to no such mystery.
Imagining Mount Athos
By Veronica della Dora
Virginia, 312 pages, $35
She writes, moreover, with the inflexibility of a devotee and takes care to fall short of the modern era. The reader will find no mention of Vatopedi's controversial trading of low-value rural land for much more valuable state property, which when revealed helped topple the Greek government in 2009. Nor, though a professional geographer, does she explore the impact on her cherished imagined landscape of the 1993 road built from Daphne to Karyés that brought buses and four-wheel drives to this unchanging paradise. Relying on a bouquet of other men's flowers, her inoffensive account has the blur of a reproduction.
—Mr. Shakespeare's books include the authorized biography of Bruce Chatwin and the novel "The Dancer Upstairs."