Used book – Ap. J.-C. - Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française 2007, Vassilis Alexakis

The story begins today in Athens, at the home of Nausicaa, an eighty-nine-year-old woman, who asks the student she is hosting to investigate the monks of Mount Athos. Is she considering leaving them her fortune? Is she hoping to find her brother, who disappeared fifty years ago, among them? Although he is only interested in ancient history and the pre-Socratics, the young man accepts.

His investigation will take him far, a thousand years back, to the time of the construction of the first monastery. Even further back, to Antiquity when Athos was already inhabited. He will discover that Christianity was only established at the cost of centuries of destruction and massacres, and that the Olympian gods also had their martyrs. His investigations will lead him to meet increasingly singular characters: a journalist who considers the Orthodox mass a work of art, a historian who claims that Christianity does not extend Antiquity but follows it "as night follows day," a defrocked monk, a Peruvian poet living on the Holy Mountain, members of a strange community near Thessaloniki who twice a year dance barefoot on hot coals. Also five women, including a diver from the underwater archaeology department who will give him three hazelnuts found in a Spanish ship sunk in the Ionian Sea in 1600. He will meet a French monk, owner of a house in Normandy where Abbé Prévost wrote Manon Lescaut, and a madman of God, who salutes passing planes with a Byzantine flag. He will learn that, on Mount Athos, which is in principle forbidden to women, women danced not so long ago. Above all, he will discover a very wealthy community, which has a considerable impact on the country's political life and whose privileges no one dares to challenge or whose secrets no one dares to reveal.