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 — 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 in ...

For as long as humanity has possessed a connection to the spiritual, there have been those who have dedicated themselves to silent meditation and prayer. Christianity itself has a rich history of men ...

A still from the documentary film ‘Where Are You Adam?’ (Credit: Courtesy of Katholiek Nieuwsblad.) Listen Mount Athos is a peninsula in northeastern Greece and is an autonomous monastic republic. For ...

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Christian Orthodox believers know Greece’s heavily-forested northern peninsula of Mount Athos as the “Orchard of the Virgin Mary,” but women have been strictly barred from ...

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 ...