{"id":143,"date":"2025-06-26T12:57:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T09:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/?p=143"},"modified":"2025-07-24T21:44:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T18:44:50","slug":"the-pine-cone-and-the-pythia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/2025\/06\/26\/the-pine-cone-and-the-pythia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pine Cone and the Pythia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century Orthodox monastery, is just down the road from Delphi. Are they linked by more than proximity?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

By Noah LaBelle<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Father Anthimos left home at the age of twenty and spent fifteen years without seeing his mother. If that\u2019s what devotion to the Almighty demanded, it was fine by him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMount Athos is a peninsula, and it is not allowed for women,\u201d he said, describing the Eastern Orthodox monastic community where he\u2019d spent nearly all of his adult life. Twenty monasteries. Some two-thousand monks. \u201cI liked it very much there, because I did not have my mother,\u201d he quipped.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, he\u2019s at Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century monastery tucked into the olive-covered foothills of Mount Helicon. It\u2019s just over a half-hour\u2019s drive from Delphi, another site of ancient sanctity.<\/span><\/p>\n

At first glance, the two\u2014Delphi and Hosios Loukas\u2014seem at odds. One, in ruins, is stone-strewn. Its temple, treasuries, stadium, and amphitheatre are now divided among reconstructed fragments, displays in the adjacent museum, and still-buried remains. The other, intact in an elegant m\u00e9lange of brick, stone, and marble, beams with golden mosaics, as revered today as they were in Byzantium.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the tension between God and the gods. \u201cPhoibos [Apollo] no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay, nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up,\u201d the Pythia lamented in 362 A.D., in one of the final Delphic auguries. Gone were the days when Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates, and Alexander the Great schlepped up to the vapor-dazed oracle. Predictions ceased.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That is, until Luke of Steiris, a Hellenic hermit, came along half a millennium later. With his mother\u2019s blessing, a fourteen-year-old Luke left to live as an ascetic on a mountain called Ioannitza. A life of Christ-centered divinity\u2014over Apollonian divination\u2014ensued, and with it, prophecy. In his teens, Luke foretold the Bulgarian invasion of Ioannitza. H<\/span>e also predicted Emperor Romanos\u2019 conquest of Crete: fulfilled in the 960s, a decade after Luke\u2019s death in 953. By then, he\u2019d already settled down, founded Hosios Loukas, and, as tradition holds, got caught levitating during prayer.<\/span><\/p>\n

The gods had gone silent on Mount Parnassus. Luke\u2019s monastery still prays. God, it appears, never left central Greece.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I met Anthimos in the courtyard, apron pale against his black habit and kalimavkion. Together, they mirrored the charred conifer abutting the entry walkway. In August 2023, a wildfire swept the valley, and a pine cone-turned-grenade torched one of the oldest buildings to a crisp. Anthimos arrived this March.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inside the octagonal katholikon\u2014christened the finest surviving church interior from the first centuries after Iconoclasm\u2014his\u00a0phone rang. He let it. First, he scrubbed the icons a visitor had just kissed, post-<\/span>signum crucis<\/span><\/i>. Mary. Loukas. I watched, pondering the contents of the spray bottle. Windex? Certainly not. (Later, I consulted The Byzantine Forum, an online hub for all things Eastern Christian, which suggested a mix of waters: rose and holy. But, as one commenter warned, \u201cRosewater doesn\u2019t remove lipstick.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI never imagined that one day someone would call me to go outside of Mount Athos,\u201d Anthimos told me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the Archbishop called. \u201c\u2018I have this monastery,\u2019\u201d Anthimos recalls him saying. \u201c\u2018There are three monks. Can you help me?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Only the Archbishop himself knows if it was the wildfire that prompted Anthimos\u2019 move, or the lopsided ratio of fathers to foreigners. Perhaps both.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, it beats Mount Athos. There, the monks rose at two o\u2019clock sharp. After devotion: hours toiling on trees. \u201cHere, we start at seven,\u201d Anthimos said, smiling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure whether his chats with visitors, myself included\u2014\u201cfrom Australia, from Canada, from Hong Kong,\u201d he said\u2014counted toward his eight hours of work or his eight hours of rest. Prayer, I surmised, was separate. Then again, sharing the monastery might be a kind of devotion in itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

What was clear: this wasn\u2019t the Delphi crowd. The day before, to my chagrin, a woman in a safety vest\u2014just a stone\u2019s throw away\u2014screamed into a whistle when she spotted a pack of kids trying to hop the stadium wall. Delphi sees close to a million visitors a year. For Hosios Loukas, there\u2019s no public figure. Enough to keep Anthimos busy, and make him want to stay.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut, I\u2019m open in everything in my life,\u201d Anthimos said, once certain he\u2019d die at Mount Athos.<\/span><\/p>\n

At Delphi, there was a phrase for that: <\/span>kair\u00f2n gn\u00f4thi<\/span><\/i>\u2014know the right moment. Stobaeus found it etched near the Temple of Apollo, and recorded it in his fifth-century anthology of Delphic maxims. This was just years after Theodosius, the Roman Emperor, had outlawed the old gods, cementing the empire\u2019s shift to Christianity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That alone didn\u2019t shutter the oracle. It took a natural disaster: an <\/span>earthquake<\/span><\/a> in 381 A.D. sealed the fissures releasing ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas that induces euphoria, and with them, the vapor trances that powered the Pythia and their prophecies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One more rogue pine cone, and Hosios Loukas might\u2019ve gone the way of Delphi. \u2666<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century Orthodox monastery, is just down the road from Delphi. Are they linked by more than proximity? By Noah LaBelle Father Anthimos left home at the age of twenty and spent fifteen years without seeing his mother. If that\u2019s what devotion to the Almighty demanded, it was fine by him. \u201cMount Athos … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Pine Cone and the Pythia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6882,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6882"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}