Mount Áthos

Mount Athos, the easternmost prong of the Chalkidiki peninsula in Macedonia, is the foremost monastic centre of Eastern Orthodoxy, known in Greek as the Holy Mountain. Christian hermits had settled its forests by the fourth century, and tradition holds that the Virgin Mary was blown ashore there and consecrated the mountain as her garden.

Organised monasticism took shape in the ninth century, and in 963 Athanasius the Athonite, backed by Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, founded the Great Lavra. Byzantine emperors and Orthodox rulers endowed further houses, and the community came under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the monasteries kept their rights under Ottoman rule, and nineteenth-century donations from Russia, Serbia and Romania funded a revival. By tradition and later by law, women are barred from entering the peninsula.