unique natural and cultural experience

Travelling to Ágios Óros it’s a fantastic adventure. It’s a unique natural and cultural experience taking you back to the byzantine Middle Ages. There are twenty monastic communities. My suggestion, based in my own experience, is as follows.
After you have your visa emitted by the Ágios Óros consulate at Thessaloniki and the monasteries booked, you catch the only way to enter in this semi-state within Greece: the boat that connects Ouranópolis to Dáfni, the main port of the peninsula. The journey allows you to admire the preserved Mediterranean vegetation along the coastal slopes interacting with the blue Aegean waters. Your boat will be probably accompanied by dolphins making you remember an older Minoan Greece. Along the shore you will notice several old monasteries belonging to different orthodox countries. This is a religious community, which exists since the Middle Ages and protected by imperial byzantine and later ottoman laws.
Passing through Dáfni you should go directly to Grigoríou monastery. The monks are usually friendly and receive you with some traditional sweets and refreshing watermelon. Don’t’ expect to eat a lot. Meals are usually frugal but it makes part of the monastic experience. From there you leave to Simonas Pétras monastery by foot admiring the landscape through high slopes and rocky but almost untouched beaches. Although the monks don’t approve bathing in the beaches you can nevertheless appreciate the place. Climbing to the eagle nested Simonas Pétras is an astonished experience for itself. The long wooden balconies along the stone high walls seem you’re approaching a medieval castle.
Arriving to Simonas Pétras allows you to enter in a monastery where the monks sing divinely. You must attend to the 4 am mass – it’s unique! Imagine yourself in byzantine small church candle illuminated, the holy icons and frescos balancing along the walls and those divine tenor voices echoing. Outside the wind whispers and dawn announces the day. After the mass, in the wooden balconies you will possibly see clouds jumping the Áthos mountain and at your feet, meters below, fields in terraces, the sea and the small port.
From there catch another boat back to Dafní. From there a bus or a taxi (long ago only by donkey) takes you to Karyes, the small byzantine capital. There visit the 1000 years small cathedral alongside the governmental white building. I recommend you to walk around and visit some old shops.
Walking east through countryside landscape, you can go till Stavroníkita monastery. Standing by the shore, it seems like a Tuscan castle. Its medieval tower testifies past violent times. From there you can visit two other monasteries: Pantokrátora and Íviron. I recommend the last one. With the Áthos mountain in the horizon, you pass through dense woods and dazzling rocky beaches. Íviron is one of the older and biggest monasteries. The church mosaics are marvelous as the church itself. Although the monks are usually quiet and avoid contact, many are converted foreigners and high educated men that are looking for a purpose in life.