Today there are 65 monks in Simonopetra, mostly Greek; we met French monks and new arrivals from Lebanon and Syria, as well. On Athos itself, there are around 2,000 monks, mostly living communally in monasteries, but there are others living in very small communities called sketes, each with three or four monks. Some 30 or so live alone as hermits. I was intrigued.

It was late on our first day there that I met Father Ioanikios. He was a very handsome and physically fit man, probably in his late 60s, with the clearest eyes, olive skin and a long white beard. He briefly introduced himself to me and said: “Tomorrow you and I will go around Mount Athos. We will see the chestnut forests. You’re from New York?” I said yes. “Ah, New York. I used to live there.” And with that he shook my hand warmly and disappeared.

The next day, after getting up at 4 a.m. for church (which lasted for three and a half hours) and a modest lunch around 10:30, Father Ioanikios took me for a ride in his Toyota four-wheel drive (pretty much the only cars I saw on Athos) and told me his story.

He was Greek, but also an American citizen, and had studied mechanical engineering at New York University in the late 1970s before getting a master’s degree in economics. He used to live on 32nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. He got a really good job with Mobil Oil in New Jersey and used to commute back and forth. “Back in those days, I used to drink a little and go out,” he said. “You know that club that people went to …”

“Studio 54?”

“Yeah, I used to go there all the time.”

“Did you ever meet Donald Trump?” I asked.

“Trump? That guy? Forget it!”

He was set: living in Manhattan in his mid-20s, single and with a good job and clearly having a ball. But he told me that in his bedroom, he had a small icon of the Virgin Mary, to which he always used to pray before going to sleep, even when he’d had a little too much to drink. Then, in the early 1980s on a trip to see his family in Greece, he visited Simonopetra because his grandmother’s brother had been a monk there. He visited the cell of an old and very sick monk who knew his relative well. The monk couldn’t speak and could barely move. But Father Ioanikios told me that this wordless encounter stayed with him when he went back to New York. “The old monk had such life in his eyes. Such love,” he said. He couldn’t get the experience out of his mind.