As one monk says, "If women were to come here, two-thirds of us would go off with them and get married." A monk cuts his ties from his mother but gains another: the Holy Virgin Mary (who, legend has ...

MOUNT ATHOS, Greece (AP) — The medieval monastery clings almost impossibly to sheer cliffs high above the shimmering turquoise of the Aegean Sea. Rising from the rugged granite rock, its walls enclose ...

Mount Athos is a semi‑autonomous state in northeastern Greece with over a thousand years of history and serves as a spiritual centre for Orthodox Christianity. A longstanding custom forbids any female ...

This enclave, considered by Orthodox Christians to be the Garden of the Virgin Mary, houses about twenty monasteries and maintains a special legal regime known as ‘ávaton’ that admits only men ...

2006-10-08 04:00:00 PDT Mount Athos, Greece-- Welcome to the Monastic Republic of Holy Mount Athos. Please set your calendar back a thousand years. Clocks here run on Byzantine time, which starts at ...

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a new travel blog. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. On a mist-shrouded peninsula east of Thessaloniki is a place where time has stalled and ...

MOUNT ATHOS, Greece (AP) — Mount Athos, a verdant peninsula in northern Greece, has been a center of Christian Orthodox monasticism for more than 1,000 years. The all-male autonomous community, known ...

On a small, rocky peninsula jutting out into the Aegean Sea is Mount Athos, home to 20 of the world's most ancient and remote monasteries. Today, the mountain is an "Autonomous Monastic State" of ...

Visitors to the Holy Community of Mount Athos, on a hilly, heavily forested peninsula in northeast Greece, will have to do without radio, television or newspapers. Nor are they likely to see paved ...

Bob Simon gets rare access to Mount Athos, a remote peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity. For more than a thousand years, monks on Mount Athos have lived ...