The journey to Athos produced remarkable travel literature, offering wonderful texts to the Greek travel literature. The literary texts of modern Greek writers that we chose to study, from the late 19th century to the dawn of the 21st century, fall within the three essential axes of the theory of General and Comparative Literature: historical time, spatial time, and the personal time of the traveler-narrator.
We placed the literary travels within the historical context in which they took place, simultaneously examining the age, the motivations that led to such a journey, the "luggage of relevant readings" of the writer, and generally all the prerequisites of the journey. In this sense, the journey to Athos is a unique experience, a distinct personal encounter for each of the writers we included in our monograph.
W. Dilthey sees the "encounter" that the journey brings at the level of the experience of the "I-You." Therefore, the journey transforms into an "awakening," sometimes leading to a conversion and differentiation, and proving to be crucial for the subsequent course of the traveler's life, which it also gives meaning to.
