"During a rarely granted artistic residency on the holy Greek peninsula Mount Athos, Xavier Zimbardo discovered in an abandoned monastery hundreds of deteriorating photographs of Russian monks who were in residence there prior to returning to their home country to fight against the Bolsheviks in 1917. Zimbardo photographed a selection of these images on site, never moving them from where he found them; the result is a visually arresting collection of seventy-five intimate portraits that evoke the chasm between absence and presence, physicality and spirituality, sensuality and disintegration."-the publisher.