Amalphion - A Documentary about the Benedictine Monastery on Mt Athos

I just learned about an interesting documentary which was published two months ago on the YouTube channel of the French-language Catholic television outlet KTO TV, about a Benedictine monastery of the Roman Rite on Mt Athos. (Closed captions are available in English.) When the Athonite peninsula was first settled as a monastic community in the later 10th century, the Italian city of Amalfi, (located on the gulf of Salerno, to the south-east of Naples), was a powerful maritime republic, with merchant ships traveling all over the Mediterranean. The Latin monastery was founded out of Amalfi, and therefore called Amalphion by the Greeks. The investigation in this video begins with documents from the archives of Athos which were photographed in the later 19th century by the French military; the photographs are now kept at the Collège de France, a research institute in Paris. The earliest reference to Amalphion is a document which was approved and signed by the very founder of the Athos community, St Athanasius the Athonite (ca. 920-1005), which means that a Latin presence was was part of the life of the Holy Mountain from the beginning. 

Scholars have long been aware of the fact that the Great Schism, the supposed definitive break between East and West in 1054, was not as abrupt or total as later historiography imagined, and Amalphion continued to exist well past it; as one of the Greek monks interviewed here says, the schism was “neither immediate nor absolute.” But the monastery did decline, in no small part because Amalfi (which is very small) declined before the growing power of Venice, the power which led to the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, the event which did bring about the definitive rupture between Byzantium and Rome. The last references to Amalphion in the Athos archives (also shown here) is in a document of 1287, by which time it was in ruins and abandoned, and its land had been turned over to the monastery known as the Great Lavra, the first on Athos. The documentary shows the only structure which remains, a tower which was turned into a defensive work against Ottoman incursions on the peninsula.

The researcher travels to the Georgian monastery on Athos, Iviron, to investigate its connection to the monks of the West. We also see a lot of really nice shots of daily life on Athos, including some (fairly brief) footage of the liturgy, and the natural beauty of the peninsula, which is impressive.