In the spring of 587 AD, two monks, John Moschos and his disciple Sophronius the Sophist, set out to traverse the entire Byzantine Empire of the time, from the shores of the Bosporus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Their purpose was to collect the wisdom of the desert monks, the Holy Fathers of the Byzantine East, before the fragile world they inhabited, clearly already in a state of advanced decay, would be irrevocably destroyed and vanish.
The essence of their journey was the "Laimonario," a book that can today be rightly regarded as the masterpiece of Byzantine travel literature. Fourteen centuries later, William Dalrymple embarks on the same journey to Mount Athos, guided by Moschos. His aim is what no future generation of travelers will be able to achieve: to witness, where it is still possible, what Moschos and Sophronius beheld, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray beneath the same frescoes, to discover what remains, and to record the last flicker of Byzantium.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
