The 6,000 beards of Athos

This curiosity of a book is the account of an extended visit to Mount Athos, the holy mountain of Greek Orthodoxy, with its great cluster of monasteries. The narrator is Ralph Brewster, a musically talented exotic, skilled photographer, and, as Jonathan Keates neatly describes him in his foreword, "someone whose gift was for embracing the pleasures and possibilities of the immediate moment." Twenty-nine at the time of this visit, he is accompanied by a young male Greek companion, Iorgos, whose good looks and extrovert charms are sometimes a little too much for the monks' resistance (which must have raised eyebrows when the book was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1935). Brewster appraises the individual monasteries and their inmates with no particular deference to the gravitas of the location, summarizing his findings in one of his appendices: the food at Lavra is "disgraceful," the rooms "Turkish gloom," the w.c. "unmentionable." At Kafsokalyvia, by contrast, the food is "very good," the rooms "very nice," the w.c. "uninviting" but -- wait for it -- "woods at hand." - Back cover.