Mount Athos (Holy Mountain)

The peninsula in northern Greece that has been given over to monks for more than a thousand years, and the heart of Orthodox monasticism. Hermits lived there before the tenth century, but its history as the Holy Mountain begins with St Athanasius the Athonite, who founded the Great Lavra in 963. Twenty ruling monasteries share it, seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Serbian and one Bulgarian, with sketes, cells and hermitages among them. They govern themselves through the Holy Community at Karyes, under the spiritual authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the sovereignty of the Greek state; they keep the Julian calendar and Byzantine time, and admit no women, for the mountain is held to be the Garden of the Theotokos, who by tradition landed there on her way to Cyprus. St Gregory Palamas prayed there and St Nikodemos edited the Philokalia there, and after a long decline the late twentieth century brought it young monks again, many of them spiritual children of St Joseph the Hesychast. Men come as pilgrims with a permit, the diamonitirion, and stay as guests of the monks.