As King Charles III is treated for cancer, he is being counseled by a Greek Orthodox monk he met on pilgrimages to Mount Athos

The story behind the King's spiritual quests in Greece

Since the 75-year-old King began treatments for cancer three weeks ago, the public has had several glimpses of him in photographs and videos. But it emerged this week that privately he has sought spiritual guidance from his longtime friend, Archimandrite Ephraim, Abbot of the Greek Orthodox Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. “Yes, he has been in contact since the diagnosis and I believe he’ll overcome it,” the 67-year-old abbot told a Greek newspaper. “Charles has a spiritual sophistication, a spiritual life.”

Father Ephraim, Abbot of the Greek Orthodox Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos

Although as monarch, Charles is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith, he has always been fascinated by other religions, especially the Greek Orthodox Church in which his father, Prince Philip of Greece, was baptized. The King’s coronation service last May included a Greek choir singing Psalm 71 in Greek. On marrying the future Queen Elizabeth II in 1947, Philip converted to Anglicanism. But both father and son kept a spiritual connection to the Eastern Orthodox faith in general and in particular to the mystical monastic enclave of Mount Athos on a peninsula in northern Greece.

Monastery building at Vatopedi, Mount Athos, Greece, a watercolor painted in 2000 by Prince Charles, who signed lithographs of his artwork as “A.G. Carrick”—a pseudonym combining A and G, the initials of Arthur and George, two of his names. Carrick stands for the Earl of Carrick, one of the Scottish titles held by the heir to the British throne

Charles’s paternal grandmother, Princess Alice, remained Orthodox and founded her own sisterhood of nuns in Athens. For the last three years of her life, she had a suite of two rooms on the first floor of Buckingham Palace under the care of Prince Philip, and she came to know Prince Charles well. She worshipped in her own Orthodox chapel, where her eldest grandson was fascinated by her ancient rituals. She dressed every day in her gray nun’s habit, smoked cigarettes nonstop, and spun tales in her croaky voice. When she died in 1969, her worldly goods consisted of three dressing gowns that were given to her nurses.

Princess Alice never visited Mount Athos, since women (and for that matter, female domestic animals) have been forbidden there for over a thousand years. But her son, Prince Philip, took a retreat there and shared the experience with his son. Friends, writers, and artists further stirred Charles’s imagination about the rugged thirty-one-mile peninsula, which is home to 2,000 monks in twenty monasteries and hermitages for one or two men. 

A solitary monk in his hermitage near the peak of Mount Athos

Charles listened to Greek Orthodox chants composed by his friend, Sir John Tavener, who converted to the faith in 1977. He also studied the watercolors of Athonite monasteries and landscapes by nineteenth century British artist and poet Edward Lear, and read descriptions by Robert Byron, one of his favorite writers, of the “extraordinary beauty…a kind of cold misty light, shadowless and unbegotten.”  In 1994 he even joined his father as an honorary member of the Friends of Mount Athos. But it wasn’t until four years later, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, that Charles traveled to the “Holy Mountain” for the first time.