In 1945, a nun named Makaria Desypri walked the slopes of a quiet hill east of Mount Pentelicus and started clearing rubble where, she believed, she had been told to dig. What she uncovered were the ruins of a monastery that had stood here long before anyone living could remember. Five years later, she found something stranger still: a grave, and inside it the bones of a man who had been dead for 524 years. The mountain had a name from the old days, the "mountain of the pure," and on it she rebuilt a community that the centuries had nearly erased.
Mount Amomon rises in the Xilokeriza area of Attica, its lower flanks rolling toward the sea at Nea Makri. The name itself is a clue to the place's character. Centuries ago, when many small hermitages dotted these slopes, the hill was known as the mountain of the pure, a refuge for men who wanted distance from the world. A male monastery stood here as far back as the 10th century, then faded. By 1576 a community was operating again on the site, informally called Saint Paraskevi. A Patriarchal Seal of 10 May 1611, issued by Ecumenical Patriarch Neophytos, named it the Nativity of the Theotokos and gave it the rank of a Patriarchal Stavropegic monastery, answerable directly to Constantinople rather than to the local bishop. That parchment survives today in the National Library of Greece, a thread of ink connecting the modern convent to a vanished one.
The man in the grave was Ephraim, a monk martyred on this hill in the 15th century, his memory swallowed by the long Ottoman silence that followed. When Makaria discovered his relics on 3 January 1950 and his shroud earlier still, she gave Greek Orthodoxy a saint it had forgotten it once had. The monastery now keeps three feast days that trace his story: 3 January for the finding of the relics, 25 March for the Annunciation, and 5 May for the martyrdom itself. Veneration of Saint Ephraim spread quickly through Greece and beyond in the second half of the 20th century, drawing pilgrims to a site that, only decades earlier, had been a hillside of broken stone.
Walk into the courtyard and you find the tomb of Fotis Kontoglou, the painter and writer who, more than anyone, revived the Byzantine style in 20th-century Greek art. He chose to be buried here. To the left of the church entrance hangs his portable icon of Saint Ephraim, and it is incomplete, the brushwork stopping short of finished. Most of the monastery's art arrived the way the icon's subject did, as offerings and tributes left by the grateful. The community is a women's monastery now, under the Metropolis of Kifissia, Amaroussion and Oropos, led by an abbess who carries the name of its rebuilder: Makaria the Second.
The Saint Ephraim Monastery sits at 38.075 degrees N, 23.953 degrees E on Mount Amomon in eastern Attica, inland from the coastal town of Nea Makri and east of the marble bulk of Mount Pentelicus. Best viewed from roughly 3,000 to 5,000 feet on a clear day, with the Euboean Strait glinting to the east. Nearest major airport is Athens International (LGAV), about 20 km to the south. Summer haze and afternoon thermals are common over the Attic hills.