The Greek police have sent a letter to the Holy Kinotis (the community of representatives of the 20 Athos monasteries that make up the leadership of Mount Athos) asking for assistance in complying with a court order to release the Esphygmen Monastery, which has been held by schismatics for several decades .
Kinotis discussed the letter from the Greek police and asked for further information on how the operation would proceed, as well as assurances that there would be no incidents similar to those of 2013 or of December 2006, when footage of bloodied monks from the old and new brotherhood of the “Esphigmen” was circulated by the media, and wounded on both sides were hospitalized after a fierce battle. It was decided to ask the Police Directorate of Athos to clarify its request regarding monasteries to host a large number of police officers for a long period of time, as well as to clarify exactly what the police mean about the use of the roads and the passage of large vehicles on them.
Meanwhile, the deadlines, at least for this period, are very short. Enforcement is prohibited for the period from August 1 to 31, as provided for in the Greek Code of Civil Procedure, so any action by the bailiff to vacate the buildings can be taken until next Wednesday, July 31. Otherwise, the procedure will be repeated from September onwards.
This was reached after two decisions of Greek courts – the Court of First Instance of the regional city of Poligiros in 2018 regarding real estate owned by the schismatics, and the Court of Appeal of Thessaloniki in 2020 regarding movable property. The two decisions were appealed by the Zealots at the Esphygmen Monastery, but the requests for annulment were rejected and made final by a decision of the Supreme Court in June 2023. Now a bailiff has taken over the execution of the decisions, and the Police Directorate of Athos is asking for assistance to that the judgments of the court may be executed and the buildings of “Esphigmen” may be vacated.
So far, the state has made many attempts to restore order on the Holy Mountain, the most dramatic being the attempt in 2013, when it came to incidents. The schismatic monks threw Molotov cocktails at the bailiff and the team that smashed the entrance to the Konak (the monastery’s representative office in Kareia, the administrative center of Athos) of Esphygmen using heavy machinery. These incidents resulted in several monks being sentenced to years in prison, and among those convicted was the abbot of the Zealots, Methodius.
According to the statutes of the Holy Mountain, schismatics who are not part of the canonical Orthodox Church cannot rule any of the twenty monasteries. At the same time, in the monastic republic there are separate Zealot cells inhabited by monks who are not in communion with the canonical Church and are part of various old-calendar factions. The Esphygmen Monastery was officially declared schismatic in 2002 and has since become a banner of the “church resistance” of various movements – Old Calendarists protesting against the ecumenism of the Ecumenical Patriarch, COVID-dissidents, opponents of the “official church” from all Orthodox countries, supporters of the so-called non-systemic parties, populist political movements, etc. His “Orthodoxy or Death” black flag, raised in 1974, became a byword for religious fanaticism. Any attempt to restore order on Athos was met with reactions “in defense of the persecuted for the faith” in Athens and outside Greece. Such a wave of sympathy for the Zealots in “Esphygmen” is now also rising in Russian media, because it is an opportunity for another attack on the Ecumenical Patriarchate, without mentioning that the Esphygmen monks are not in church communion with any local church, including and with the Russian Orthodox Church. The case is used by the zealots themselves as another opportunity to reinforce their image as “confessors”, an image that religious people are very sympathetic to.
Already in October 2022, the Greek newspaper “Kathimerini” wrote about a police investigation in connection with Russian money transfers to private accounts of Mount Athos
The Anti-Money Laundering Department then investigated suspicious money transfers from abroad to individual accounts of monks from Mount Athos. In 2022, the case developed without much fanfare, with a new development received after the start of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed by the West on individuals and legal entities associated with the Kremlin, which has traditionally maintained close ties with the monastic republic.
A source of the publication familiar with the matter revealed that there are at least twenty transactions that in the last twelve months are considered suspicious and are being investigated by the officials of the service. It is about the movement of large sums of money from banks and foreign money transfer companies, and the money ends up not in the accounts of monasteries, which in the recent past were visited by high-ranking Russian officials, but in the individual accounts of monks from Mount Athos. Competent sources explain that these transactions were considered suspicious by credit institutions in the country mainly because they involved transfers of unusually large sums amounting to tens and even hundreds of thousands of euros. In one case, a transfer of more than one million euros was discovered, but the investigation concluded that the money was intended to finance a mission in Africa.
Most of the money transfers investigated are related to funds coming from Russia. The newspaper’s sources clarified that the money found in the monks’ accounts did not come from legal entities or individuals that have been subject to war-related sanctions since February last year. One of the scenarios being considered is that wealthy Russians have decided to move their money out of Russia with the help of Athos monks to preserve their funds in the event of a collapse of their country’s financial institutions or even a freeze on their funds by Kremlin because of the war.
For the same reason, in recent months a number of Russians have undertaken or expressed interest in buying properties in Greece.
“No evidence has emerged to fully corroborate the information that the transactions are part of a broader, organized effort by Russia to infiltrate the Holy Mountain,” a knowledgeable source said. “These efforts are taking place mainly through business circles and political circles,” he added, referring to the recent data of the US intelligence services on the transfer of three hundred million dollars from Russia to parties and politicians in Greece since 2014.
In addition to the funds of Russian origin, several of the cash deposits of monks from Mount Athos, which are the subject of the investigation by the Anti-Money Laundering Department, were made by people from Balkan countries, mainly Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. The auditors do not exclude the possibility that this is money from illegal activities that is legalized in the form of donations to the monks.