Frank BRUNI,
Greek Monks Stand Firm on Sacred Ground.

More than 100 monks have refused to leave a Greek Orthodox 
religious site at Mount Athos in northeastern Greece. 
The dispute started after Orthodox leaders opened a 
dialogue with the Catholic Church, which the monks at 
Mount Athos viewed as a betrayal of the religion.

The rebel forces occupying a rugged cove on the Aegean here number more than 100, and they 
will rot budge.

They have enough food to last them two years, given that they favor one rudimentary 
meals a day. 

They have enough faith to sustain them through utter isolation, which is actually their preferred lifestyle.

They have munitions, of a sort.

"There are 300 bullets here," said Father Methodius, their fearless leader, as he lifted 
his weapon in the air. 

It was a roped prayer chair of precisely that many knots, and his battalion of black-roped, bushy-bearded 
monks had plenty more.

This remote, mountainous peninsula in northern Greece, where 20 Orthodox monasteries lie 
beyond the reach of paved roads and most of the intrusions of everyday life, 
has become the unlikely setting of a holy war, or at least an extremely nasty spiritual spat 
over who says prayers, and which ones.

After Orthodox leaders began a dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, the monks 
of Esfigmenou, who viewed that as a betrayal of the religion, stopped mentioning one ecumenical 
patriarch after another in devotions. 

They also stopped praying with monks who did not take the same course.

They refused to repent. In November, the current ecumenic patriarch, Bartholomew, 
branded them schismatics and therefore squatters on sacred ground. 

After decades of defying and vilifying a succession of patriarchs of Orthodox Christianity, 
Father Methodius and the roughly 110 other members of the ultra-conservative Esfigmenou 
monastery have been ordered off Mount Athos. 

They were supposed to be gone by January 28.

The monks say they will die before they leave, a pledge underlined by the message on 
a banner that hangs by the entrance. 

It reads, "Orthodoxy or Death." One monk was killed last week when he drove off a tractor off 
a cliff in what authorities are calling an accident.

Representatives from other monasteries nearby vow to get rid of them. 

The dispute is before Greece's highest administrative court.

"We don't intend to shoot them or use force against them or even give them the pleasure of 
making them look like martyrs," said Father Ioannis, the chief secretary of the group that 
supervises the daily affairs of Mount Athos.

But, Father Ioannis added, "They have to understand that they cannot be the Taliban" of the peninsula.