Abstract
This paper investigates the evolution of customer service in the pilgrimage tourist industry, focusing on Mount Athos. In doing so, it empirically deconstructs the dialectics of the synthesis of “authentic experience” between “pilgrims” and “tourists” via a set of internal and external reciprocal exchanges that take place between monks and visitors in two rival neighboring monasteries. The paper shows how the traditional value of hospitality is being reinvented and reappropriated according to the personalized needs of the market of faith. In this context, the paper shows how traditional monastic roles, such as those of the guest-master and the sacristan, have been reinvented, along with traditional practices such as that of confession, within the wider turn to relational subjectivity and interest in spirituality. Following this, the material illustrates how counter claims to “authenticity” emerge as an arena of reinvention and contestation out of the competition between rival groups of monks and their followers, arguing that pilgrimage on Athos requires from visitors their full commitment and active involvement in their role as “pilgrims”. The claim to “authenticity” is a matter of identity and the means through which a visitor is transformed from a passive “tourist” to an active “pilgrim”.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
The paper focuses on two rival monastic communities situated on Mount Athos, an autonomous Christian Orthodox monastic republic of twenty self-sustainable monasteries and their settlements, situated in the mountainous peninsula of Chalkidiki in northern
The paper focuses on the years between 2002 and 2004, which anticipated the rapid increase in the estimated number of visitors to the peninsula of Athos
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The paper focuses on the years between 2002 and 2004, which anticipated the rapid increase in the estimated number of visitors to the peninsula of Athos. The changes in the way the monks relate to their guests affect traditional roles, such as those of the confessor evolving into that of the life-advisor, as well as monastic practices “Elder Ephraim of Mt. Athos speaks with TNH” (10 February 2018). By comparing two opposite claims to authenticity by the rival brotherhoods and their followers of the monasteries of Vatopaidi and Esfigmenou, the paper deconstructs the dialectics of Athonian “hospitality” (“filoxenia”) on the basis of a set of internal and external reciprocities taking place on the holy grounds of the monasteries between “the worlds of the laity and the celibate monasteries” By comparing two opposite claims to authenticity by the rival brotherhoods and their followers of the monasteries of Vatopaidi and Esfigmenou, the paper deconstructs the dialectics of Athonian “hospitality” (“filoxenia”) on the basis of a set of internal and external reciprocities taking place on the holy grounds of the monasteries between “the worlds of the laity and the celibate monasteries” (Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991, p. 16)
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