Mount Athos

The Holy Mountain

Athos is the easternmost of the three fingers of the Chalcidice peninsula in northern Greece: about 50 km long and at most 10.5 km wide, with a wooded mountain spine that ends in the marble peak of Athos, 2,033 metres high, rising straight from the sea.^[2] In the 5th century BCE the Persian king Xerxes cut a canal across its neck so his fleet could avoid the dangerous cape.^[2]

Hermits lived there before 850, and organised monastic life began in 963, when St Athanasius founded the first monastery, the Great Laura, with the help of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus II Phocas.^[2] UNESCO notes that the mountain has had an autonomous statute since Byzantine times.^[3] Russian and other Slavic donors endowed monasteries, giving it an almost pan-Orthodox character, and by 1400 there were 40 monasteries, half of which survive.^[2]

A monks’ republic

When the Turks took Thessaloniki in 1430 the monks submitted to Ottoman rule, and the community suffered badly during the Greek War of Independence of 1821–29, when whole libraries were burned.^[2] Its present constitution dates from 1924.^[2]

Greece’s constitution calls Athos “a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact”. It is governed by its twenty monasteries through the Holy Community, comes spiritually under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and no change is allowed to the number of monasteries. Anyone admitted as a novice or monk becomes a Greek citizen, and people who are not Orthodox may not live there.^[1]

In practice the Holy Council has one representative from each monastery, and an executive of four, the Epistasia, rotates every year. Greece is represented by a governor appointed by the foreign ministry.^[2] About 1,400 monks live in the monasteries.^[3]

“The Athos peninsula … shall, in accordance with its ancient privileged status, be a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact.”^[1]

No women

A tradition about a thousand years old bars women and female animals from the Holy Mountain.^[2][4] Women may not come within 500 metres of the coast, and under a 1953 law a woman caught entering can be jailed for two months to a year.^[4]

In 2003 the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the ban to end. The monks replied that it rested on their right to self-government, religious freedom and property, and the Greek government pointed out that the special status of Athos was written into its 1981 treaty of accession to the European Community.^[4] The ban stayed.^[2]