Director of the International Institute of the Athonite Legacy, Serhiy Shumylo

“Putin was seated on the throne of the Byzantine emperors on Mount Athos, signifying his recognition as an Orthodox emperor.” This was precisely how Russian media outlets in 2016 widely spread false claims about the Russian president’s official visit to Greece, during which he also spent a couple of hours on the Holy Mountain of Athos. In Russian media, photographs of Putin sitting in the very place where I am sitting now, in the Protaton, the main church of Mount Athos, were presented as evidence that Athos had recognised him as an “Orthodox emperor.” Headlines like these flooded the entire Russian-language internet at the time.

This was how yet another myth was created about Putin supposedly receiving the “blessing” of Athonite elders to revive Russia as an “empire” and the “Third Rome,” allegedly confirmed by photographs showing him sitting on the “throne of the Byzantine emperors” in the main church of Mount Athos.

This falsehood was intended to become yet another “sacred bond” underpinning the ideology of the “Russian world” and the revived “Russian Empire,” supposedly demonstrating the Kremlin impostor’s imaginary succession from the Byzantine rulers themselves, falsely “sanctified” by Athonite monasticism. Millions of “Orthodox” Russians and even Ukrainians took it at face value.

I have written before that, in reality, this was a crude manipulation and a lie by Russian propagandists and ideologues of the “Russian world,” aimed at people unfamiliar with the facts.

First, Byzantine emperors never visited Mount Athos, which means there were never any imperial thrones there.

Second, what Russian propagandists called the “throne of the Byzantine emperors” is not a throne at all, but a stasidia for receiving honoured guests. It was made in the 17th or 18th century, during Ottoman rule, when neither the Eastern Roman, that is, Byzantine Empire nor the Byzantine emperors had existed for a very long time.

Third, any honoured guest visiting Mount Athos may be invited to sit in this stasidia, from bishops to various distinguished public figures.

To put the myth that Putin was somehow “made emperor” on this “throne” to rest once and for all, I should add that the Athonite fathers also gave me their blessing to sit in this stasidia and have my photograph taken. So, if one wished, I too could now be proclaimed an “emperor.” Of course, this is absurd. And all of this would have remained nothing more than a banal curiosity had the diseased imagination of the Kremlin’s paranoiacs not become the cause of a horrific war against Ukraine and their daily killing of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destruction of Ukrainian cities.

I am publishing this photograph to demonstrate clearly how the myths of the “Russian world” were fabricated out of thin air, myths that Kremlin manipulators and intelligence services spent years spreading among Russian Orthodox Church believers in order to prepare for and justify a war of conquest in the name of a false “Third Rome” that, in reality, never existed.

In short, “the tsar isn’t real!” Just like his entire dying pseudo-empire…