Under the aegis of the MEG, the Geneva Museum of Ethnography, and the French-speaking label FLEE, a fascinating book and a double album explore the songs and traditions of Mount Athos, this timeless Greek monastic peninsula.
It is a small hammer struck against a piece of wood, the semantron. The rhythm announces vespers, the evening office. At the foot of Mount Athos, 2033 meters which plunge steeply into the Aegean Sea, it is more or less the only musical instrument. At the same time, with a different timbre each time, we can hear these mallets striking in concert, from monastery to monastery. For the rest, the voice of man reigns unchallenged or almost, that of the monks, solitary or in choir.
This has been the case since at least 1045 and the promulgation of the rule of Abaton, which stipulates that no female vertebrate being is authorized to tread this sacred place of orthodoxy devoted to the cult of the Blessed Virgin and reserved for monks, pilgrims as well as non-Orthodox on the condition of obtaining at the port of Ouranoupoli, the only authorized route of passage, the diamonitiriona kind of paid visa. No female being, this includes children as well as adults, humans as well as animals, with the exception of wild species (free by essence), cats (predators of rats) and sometimes chickens (egg providers).
The songs immortalized in 1961
In 1961 a visitor from Geneva arrived at the tip of the Aktè peninsula with his heavy tape recorder. Traveling through Greece, the ethnomusicologist and Hellenist Samuel Baud-Bovy immortalized the songs of the monastery of Saint Gregory. Back on the shores of Lake Geneva, he deposited his musical treasure for posterity in the collections of the Geneva Museum of Ethnography, today the MEG.
In 2021 a second French-speaking team arrives on the stony slopes of the sacred mountain to record the current monks, measure the permanence or evolution of their songs and find one of them, once encountered by the eminent Genevan, the venerable father Daniel of shit of Sainte-Anne, a small hermitage.
Share this music in a book
Today, these documents are finally emerging from the walls of the MEG by the will of their curator, Madeleine Leclair, keen to share this music that is too beautiful and spiritual to be reserved only for the informed public of ethnomusicologists. How to reach new ears? This is where the French-speaking music lovers from FLEE come in, which is both a publisher and a record company.
The result: a book as beautiful as it is fascinating in two bilingual editions (French-Greek or English-Greek). There we find in particular a religious history of Mount Athos, an ethnomusicological analysis of these immutable songs, an article on the political and religious tensions which can disturb the peace of a place where Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian and Ukrainian religious people coexist, a photographic work as close as possible to daily life on Athos and finally a report from the female point of view. We discover that women can approach the holy relics… on the condition of remaining 500 meters from the shore on the tourist boat, the monks coming on board to celebrate the office and sell souvenirs. In short, 136 pages later, you will have the impression of having really visited the monasteries of the holy mountain of Athos.
A double album between fieldwork and rereadings
FLEE is also publishing a double album in vinyl, digital and CD format where we find a dozen field recordings made at Mount Athos. Those by Samuel Baud-Bovy and the most recent ones produced by the FLEE team. Bell at the top of the belfry, the songs of the monks have been entrusted, with the agreement of the monasteries concerned, to eight contemporary artists for a very free rereading of this sound material to be discovered in the second part of the album.
In the lists of these very inspired elected officials, we find the Finnish Jimi Tenor, the Swedes Inre Kretsen & Prins Emanuel, the Turks Esma & Murat Ertel from the group Baba Zula, the Greek percussionist Daniel Paleodimos or even Holy Tongue, one of the most exciting artists of the London dub scene (the art of inventive remixing of a musical track) who speaks here about his work: “We used a recording of the semantronthe wooden beam struck to announce the service, as the main rhythmic element, slowed down and modified. For space and ambiance, we used the parts of the recordings of the monks chanting in the monastery in which there was no chanting. Just the sounds of moving and echoing from the room. (…) We knew we wanted to create a slow, meditative, psychedelic dub track, and ‘Athos dub’ is the embodiment of that.”
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In the end, it was not a question of putting any rhythm or synth layer on these male voices (remember Enigma’s hit in the 1990s), but rather of creating a new work whose character secular nevertheless retains a strong spiritual aura.
In its bookish preface, “Athos, Echoes of the Sacred Mountain” concludes with a question: “Back on the boat watching the peninsula disappear as Ouranoupoli draws near, the future evolution of this distinctive place over the next millennium is contemplated: will these songs continue to endure as they have done for so many centuries?” Inspired, the Athos project contributes to their recognition.
Thierry Sartoretti/ld
“Athos. Echoes of the Holy Mountain”, FLEE Project. September 2024.
“Athos, Echos of the Sacred Mountain”, book accompanying the release of the disc “Athos. Echos of the Holy Mountain”, under the direction of Olivier Duport, Alan Marzo, Madeleine Leclair and Makar Tereshin. FLEE Project. 2024.
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