The land on Mount Athos is divided among its 20 monasteries. Any other community on the Mountain is thus on the land of one of the 20 monasteries, and is called a dependency of that monastery. Lakkosketti is a dependency of Agiou Pavlou (St. Paul's). Technically it is not a monastery, even though there 50+ monks here, but a Skete.
This Skete is made up of 13 smaller communities, ranging in size from one or two monks to as many as 12 or so, called 'kelliα'. Each kelli/kellion (modern and ancient singular forms of 'kelliα', I think :-) has its own spiritual father, rule, and chapel; i.e., its own rhythm. Thus the Skete is said to be idiorythymic. There is a Catholicon (main church) where monastics from all the kellia meet on Sundays and feast days. There is no abbot of the Skete as a whole, but there is an administrative head, a position which rotates among the spiritual fathers of the kellia, on an annual basis. The kellia are located up and down a steep river valley between two ridges coming off the Holy Mountain, whose peak is beautifully visible to the south from my kellion, as is the Aegean to the east.
The patron of the Skete is St. Dimitrios, and of the kellion at which I am staying is the Protection of the Mother of God, which coincdently happens to be the feast that I and my family were received into the catecumenate nearly 20 years ago (Oct. 1). The Gerontas (elder, spiritual father) here is named Ștefan; he speaks not a word of English. I seem to be under the care of Fr. Paisios, whose soft-spoke and gentle English is delightful and comforting. More on them in a later post.
While most of the monastic communities are Greek, Lakkosketti is Romanian.
The views are beautiful, but pictures will need to wait until i find a better cell connection.
Lest there be any doubt, I am enjoying my time here greatly, and benefitting in ways I hadn't anticipated. While I greatly miss my community back home, I feel strangely at home here. Must be the Romanian hospitality.
