PHOTOGRAPHY Kostas Balafas "Costas Balafas for Mount Athos" [...] On the Holy Mountain, when I went for the first time, I had plenty of hardware with me. I had the Rolleiflex as the main instrument and a Nikomat for interiors, so it would have a bright lens and low speeds. I never used flash-bulbs, because that destroys the surroundings; it takes so many irrelevant features that by using the light can isolate them. It is above all the inexorable realism of the camera lens which requires skill in its use, so that you isolate from the prosaicness of the other things the features which have aesthetic value, to give them precisely that lustre which art possesses, the magic of truth and of reality. Art, in its approach by man, has a beauty and it has the gift, if it is good in plastic terms, of living on after the artist. This we can see in the Homeric epics, which have not grown old even now, and which are the first source and mother of literature. Achilles would have been merely one among the thousands of warriors which every country has. But since Homer held him in high regard and presented him as such in his poem, he became the hero of peoples for the whole of humanity. Thus the photographer is concerned with how he can isolate, from the accumulation of the pedestrian, those things which have an aesthetic value. This is what I have tried to do, as far as have been able, of course; to approach nature. [...] Every time that I have left the Holy Mountain, I have left a place which you feel is by its very nature sanctified. The vernacular architecture, the folk craftsmen have worked their miracle, they have produced these elegant works of art with a total respect for the environment and the natural surroundings. The men who served this place with their prayer and labour succeeded in making a meeting-place, one could say, for the temporary and the human with the eternal and the holy. Typical is the description which Spyros Melas gives of the beauty of the Holy Mountain, when he first went there: "So what more could God have in His Paradise than the Holy Mountain?". These trips of mine have helped me over how see human greed. I saw that the people there are happy with nothing, This poverty, where no one has anything of his own at all, this solidarity which they have with one another, their allotted tasks which they do from the heart, these people whom they entertain with such joy and such pleasure, and all this with a quality of humanity. There, then, in another human community, in a piece of Byzantium, which is as if it has been detached from the main trank and went and joined itself to that foot of Chalcidice, I saw people entirely separate, with their own calendar, their own timetable, their own vocabulary, their own human behaviour. All this alienated me in general from the other life, and I saw these people differently; people just a bit timid, scarecrew figures, who believe, of course, in God, but who fear Him; saw them coming out of those porticoes, with head bowed, without conversation, laughter, joy, with the only music their own - psalmody, For a people, the issue of music is an important one; a people has fought without weapons, but never without songs. And the song of the monks is psalmody, Byzantine psalmody; this is what resounds in this place, in the monasteries which were constructed with such balance and with such respect for the environment and with such beauty and such wisdom in their functionality: where will the church be, where will the such beauty and such wisdom in their functionality: where will the church be, where will the refectory be, where will their sleeping quarters be? - all these features with a wisdom in the structure of the buildings, and there I think that Roman skill worked wonders. These buildings and this world enchanted me. So I photographed both the buildings and the people, and without the one being irrelevant to the other. It wouldn't be fitting for people not wearing the habit to move about in there. We were aliens, interlopers; the people who were bound up with the environment were the monks themselves. They were in their natural surroundings. As for myself, I felt an awe, a respect for the place and the environment. Think where it is that you will be treading, that this is a holy place.