On 2 November 1912, Greek marines landed at Dafni on the coast of the Athos peninsula and brought one of the most sacred...

On 2 November 1912, Greek marines landed at Dafni on the coast of the Athos peninsula and brought one of the most sacred places in the Orthodox world under Greek control. The landing was part of the First Balkan War, in which Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro were fighting together against the Ottoman Empire. As the Greek navy pushed through the northern Aegean, forces came ashore and secured Karyes, the administrative centre of the monastic community. Mount Athos is a self-governing republic of twenty monasteries perched on a narrow peninsula in northern Greece. Monks have lived there continuously for more than a thousand years, making it one of the oldest living monastic communities on earth. The liberation 114 years ago today ended Ottoman control over a place that Orthodox Christianity considers uniquely holy. Mount Athos retains its autonomous status to this day, governed by its own monastic council under Greek sovereignty, with access tightly restricted and open only to men with special permits. The First Balkan War reshaped the entire northern Aegean. Thessaloniki had fallen to Greek forces just days earlier, on 26 October 1912, and the campaign brought large swaths of Macedonia and Thrace into the Greek state within a matter of weeks. For the monasteries on Athos, the arrival of Greek marines in November 1912 marked the end of centuries of Ottoman rule and the beginning of a new chapter under the country whose national religion and language the monks had always shared. #MountAthos #Greece #FirstBalkanWar