Theodora is a young woman who left Greece to find the opportunities that her country did not offer her. When she returns to her homeland, no one imagines what her true goal is. She has decided to secretly infiltrate, disguised as a man, the most sacred space of the Orthodox Church, an area forbidden to women, at Mount Athos.

But what drives the heroine to leave her relatives and friends, cut her hair, and start pretending to be Theodoros, a pilgrim traveling to the monasteries of the Athos peninsula? Theodora soon realizes that things there are not exactly as she expected. Sins, intrigues, and deceit are present even behind the walls of the monasteries, something she will discover in a painful way.

Technology and spirituality, purity and corruption, feminism and religious fanaticism. Sacrilege is a strange and captivating novel set in a mysterious territory, where the adventures of a woman seeking herself intersect with centuries-old rituals and dark, dangerous political maneuvers.

"Sacrilege is an exciting novel precisely because it does not follow the beaten path, that is, the classic recipe of continuous suspense provocation, but makes the reader a participant in a conflict between being and appearing, which runs throughout the entire novel. The other exceptionally interesting element is the description of Mount Athos. And this was my second big surprise with Alessia Biazato's novel. When I read the relevant chapters, I often had the impression that it was not Theodora, but Alessia Biazato herself, who had visited Mount Athos in disguise to record it with such detailed descriptions."

From the foreword by Petros Markaris