Rare footage from 1929 expedition to Mount Athos discovered at Princeton University

These days the discovery of film footage shot in Greece in 1929 is greeted with the same excitement as that for an ancient archaeological find. Especially when the moving image is accompanied by a rich archive of rarely seen shots of the country taken by award-winning American photographer and cinematographer Floyd Crosby (1899-1985).

This visual treasure, which had lain "buried" for decades, was discovered at Princeton University in the United States in 2017, and the initial results of research being conducted by experts at the Mount Athos Center in the northern port city of Thessaloniki suggest that it is a record of the first known mission conducted by American travelers to Mount Athos and Meteora, a mission by three artists to document these two sacred locations. A 33-minute film and 336 photographs are what survive from that journey.

The project was titled "No...