Greek police prepare to evict 118 monks from Esphigmenou Monastery on Mount Athos

Greek police are preparing to storm the Orthodox pilgrim monastery of Esphigmenou on Mount Athos. In the news reports the monastery is called nothing but schismatic, because for many years Esphigmenou has stood in opposition to the rest of the Holy Mountain, to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and to the Greek Orthodox world, protesting against the ecumenical activity of the Patriarch of Constantinople with the Catholic Church and other organisations.

The purpose of the storming is the eviction of the monastery's 118 resident monks.

When the Athonite monasteries protested against changes in the Greek Church by ceasing to commemorate the Patriarch at divine service, the Esphigmenou brotherhood joined the schismatic Old Calendarist jurisdiction.

Under the Constitution and the statute of Athos, monastic cohabitation with the heterodox and with schismatics is forbidden, and it is precisely this that lies behind several earlier attempts to evict the monks, among them the incident of 2013, when the inmates of the monastery hurled bottles of incendiary mixture at the police.

As early as 2017 the abbot and several other monks were convicted and sentenced to terms of between 20 and 10 years' imprisonment, which were eventually reduced several times over. And in July 2020 the Greek courts obliged the schismatic brotherhood to hand over all its territories, both on Athos and beyond it, to the New Esphigmenou Brotherhood, created by Patriarch Bartholomew in 2005 and residing in the Athonite capital, Karyes. At that time the authorities also began evicting the monks from the monastery's properties in Greece. And now the police are preparing another attempt at eviction, with the deployment of considerable police forces and vehicles.

Thank God, Abbot Methodios and the brethren have no intention of surrendering, and declare that they are ready to defend their spiritual homeland unto death 🙏🏻