Mount Athos

Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula in northern Greece, the easternmost of the three prongs of Chalcidice, and the site of an Orthodox monastic community governed as a self-administering part of Greece. Hermits lived there from at least the 9th century, and the first large monastery, the Great Lavra, was founded in 963. Its twenty monasteries kept their autonomy under Byzantine, Serbian and Ottoman rule, and women have been barred from it for centuries.