2023 marked the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the process of the Greek state’s expropriation of Athonite metochia (landholdings), with the initial decision by the Ministry of Agriculture to requisition 24 Athonite metochia for the purpose of settling refugees displaced by the Asia Minor Disaster. This served as a prelude to the lease, a year later, of 63 metochia in the Chalkidiki and Serres regions by Mount Athos to the Greek state for a period of ten years. This was followed by the sudden expropriation of another 27 metochia in the same year, the compulsory expropriation of 24 Athonite metochia on Thasos and Limnos in 1927, the implementation of legal provisions concerning the lease of Athonite estates in perpetuity and, finally, by Law 5377/1932 ‘on the assessment and payment of the value of the expropriated estates of the holy monasteries of Mount Athos’.  The net result was that almost all of the metochia of the Athonite monasteries – a total area of over one million stremmas (100,000 hectares) – were given over to the Greek state – an enormous contribution (one that has remained unvindicated) and a huge national gamble.

The one-day conference entitled ‘Compulsory Leases – Expropriations of the Athonite Metochia: an Historical Approach and Contemporary Legal Views’, held by the Mount Athos Center in the ‘Manolis Anagnostakis’ Hall of the Thessaloniki City Hall on 2 December 2023, attempted not only to make an appraisal of the historical facts and the various parameters involved but also to examine them from a contemporary legal standpoint.