Overview

Mount Athos, the spiritual heart of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism, is perhaps the most sacred and mysterious place in Greece: an autonomous state, where no woman can set foot, which has its own calendar and its own time. This ruggedly beautiful peninsula in Macedonia boasts a history that stretches back to Herodotus and has been a sanctuary from the earliest days of Christianity, through the Byzantine and Ottoman eras, two world wars and up to the present day. In 1927, at the age of 22, Robert Byron journeyed to Athos with his friends and embarked on an adventure whose influence would remain with him for the rest of his life. Through compelling descriptions of the monks of Athos, their daily lives and the treasures held in their monasteries, Byron illuminates an ancient and enigmatic world, long shrouded from the eyes of outsiders. Published nine years before his classic The Road to Oxiana, The Station reveals the roots of a fascination with the Byzantine world that would become refined in Byron's later writings and establish him as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation.

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9781848855076

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'One comes away from reading him with a joyous consciousness of having seen for the first time a whole world of unsuspected things.' - Christopher Sykes; 'Byron's skill at detail while delivering sweeping observations on the politics and turmoil of the times, is not only good fireside reading but it should be the aspiration of any serious writer attempting to define a journey instead of a trip.' - Kathleen Buckley; 'It is a volume that will bear reading again and again.' - Daily Telegraph; 'The Station reveals a travel writer of sly, urbane wit with a sense of style and a refreshing vocabulary.' - Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard

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"Robert Byron was one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers as well as a noted art critic and historian. Byron's The Road to Oxiana is considered by many to be the first example of great travel writing; Paul Fussell said that it is to the travel book what ""Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry""; Bruce Chatwin described it as ""a sacred text, beyond criticism"", carrying his copy, ""spineless and floodstained"" on four journeys through Central Asia. Robert Byron also wrote Europe in the Looking Glass, The Byzantine Achievement and First Russia, Then Tibet. He died in 1941, at the age of 35, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a German U-Boat in the Atlantic."

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