An epic movie about Alexander the Great is on the way. G. Y. Dryansky goes to Alexander's homeland, Greek Macedonia, and finds an uncrowded idyll

Alexander the Great's homeland is not everyone's idea of Greece. It is not, for example, like those white islands with their bone-simple, reductive beauty—the allure of a chant more than of a melody. For one thing, it doesn't have the crowds. At the height of summer, when the islands were lavishing pleasure on tan and pink foreigners, I closed my mind to the celebrated names and headed north to the green shores of the great emperor's origins: Greek Macedonia and Thrace. I got off a plane in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, but saved this little-publicized of-the-moment place for the end of my trip and drove, instead, to the time warp of the nearby coast.

The Halkidiki peninsula is just a short drive from Thessaloniki (which was once more familiar as Salonika). The peninsula ends in three narrow fingers. The westernmost, Kassandra, bustles with northern Greek vacationers; the third is Mount Athos, the holy place where women can never venture (nor anyone else without written permission from the Holy Executive of the Holy Mount Athos Pilgrims' Bureau) and where monks live in historic monasteries, some of which hang over cliffs that gape onto the emerald bay. The middle finger is Sithonia.

Local talk attributes as much as eighty percent ownership of the whole of Halkidiki to the Orthodox monks of Mount Athos, as over the centuries the pious have willed land to them. None of the worth of this real estate is reflected in luxury. The monks live the quietest of secluded lives. Until recently, not even female animals were permitted on Mount Athos. With a visa, men can stay briefly at the monasteries and share the monks' ascetic meals. Many people who are not of the Orthodox faith go to Mount Athos regularly and find it a regenerating spiritual experience. Whether or not their own beliefs coincide with this idea of a retreat, travelers in the area might be grateful to the monks: They are said to have had a hand in keeping the whole neighborhood free of boisterous development, and they seemed to be doing a very good job of it even on Sithonia, opposite their fief, when I was there.

On my first day, before dipping into the transparent sea, I took a speedboat all around Sithonia, a trip that also gave me the bonus of a close view of Mount Athos and its old seaside monasteries. We passed Sithonia's tiny beaches of tan sand, more often than not devoid of a soul, sometimes dotted with the umbrellas of a small hotel or a private house. It was August; I thought of the lotioned masses paving the shoreline of the Côte d'Azur and at almost any beach anywhere on the Mediterranean.

"Come in September or even October," Kimon Riefenstahl told me. "You'll practically be alone, and the sun is strong and the water warm." North, it seems, is a misleading word for this edge of Greece, where the winter rains keep healthily green the pine forests that sometimes go down to the sea, but where the clement months are hot except at night.