On Mount Athos, turmoil as Greek police hunt protesting 'Old Calendarist' monks

ATHENS -- Police combed the wooded hills of the Mount Athos monastic community in Northern Greece yesterday after a militant band of monks barged their way in to join an Ascension Day service.

The action by hundreds of bearded and black-clad monks belonging to the Old Calendarists, a sect that refuses to follow the modern Western calendar, brought turmoil to the 1,000-year-old community on the rocky peninsula...

For years the Calendarist monks of [the Esphigmenou] monastery have been shunned and boycotted by the more moderate Orthodox establishment as extremist. Its inmates have been known to hang banners over the walls calling the Pope an Antichrist. Calendarists from the mainland are banned from Athos.

The police garrison at Ouranoupolis (Heavenly City) at the narrow gateway to Athos was overwhelmed as Calendarist monks surged into what the Greeks call the Holy Mountain. Other monks got into boats and landed on the rocky western shore of the peninsula. About 50 are believed to be still hiding among the wooded peaks...

The Old Calendarists are those Orthodox who refused to follow the church’s conversion from the Julian to the Western Gregorian calendar in 1925...The Greek state and official church consider the Old Calendarists an illegal organisation.