It took Bob Simon and his team from U.S. television show “60 minutes” almost two years until they were able to attain access to monastic life on Mount Athos, Greece.

The result is a portrait of a Christian community where prayers have been offered every day, with no interruption, for more than a thousand years, a community that has probably changed less over the centuries than any other inhabited place on the planet. The monks come to Mount Athos from all over and do everything they can to keep what they call “the world” far away.

CBS’s correspondent Bob Simon had the rare opportunity to discuss with the monks their unique way of life and the reasons that drove each one of them to the Holy Mountain. He also got to see a few of the almost 4,000 religious icons stored there, along with many other sacred treasures and religious relics that date back to the days of the Byzantine Empire.

The rare treasures on Mt. Athos – or devotional objects, as the monks prefer to call them – have attracted many invaders over the centuries. The monks’ most recent brush with history happened only 70 years ago when the Nazis were coming their way.

“In the spring of 1941 the Germans invaded and occupied Greece”, Father Maximos said to Bob Simon.
They marched up the Acropolis, raised the swastika beside the Parthenon and were about to invade. The monks asked for a meeting with Nazi officers who told them to appeal to Hitler himself.
The monks wrote Hitler a letter. “And in the letter, the monks identified themselves. They said, ‘This is who we are.’ And they asked Hitler to place the Holy Mountain under his personal protection,” Father Maximos said.
When asked what kind of response they got, Father Maximos said, “It seems that Hitler liked the idea. He accepted the invitation to become the personal protector of the Holy Mountain.”
Hitler sent a team of German academics to Mount Athos. They took 1,800 pictures of the mountain’s treasures, and it wasn’t because they enjoyed photography – Hitler wanted the monasteries’ riches in Berlin.
“The professors were sent as an advance team to catalogue the treasures of the Holy Mountain so that a selection of things could be looted”, Father Maximos explained.
But it didn’t happen that way and not a single item was taken.
Father Maximos believes they have the Russians to thank for that: by the time the Nazi scholars completed their work, Hitler was bogged down in Russia and wasn’t thinking about icons.

Mt. Athos
Mt. Athos was created by ancient Byzantine emperors to be the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity. Millions of Orthodox Christians believe it is the most sacred place on Earth. According to the Athonite tradition, the mountain was consecrated as the garden of the Mother of God and is out of bounds to all other women, a ban that’s been in effect for a thousand years. Nowadays, Athos is home to 20 Eastern Orthodox monasteries and is inhabited by approximately 2000 Athonite monks.

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