The beautiful region of Europe in the EU where women are forbidden | World | News

Europe is filled with autonomous states and regions that simultaneously govern themselves and benefit from technically being a part of a bigger country.

Catalonia in Spain, the Åland Islands in Finland, and Sardinia in Italy are but a few examples.

They are unique and largely foreign concepts to the rest of the world, but some are stranger and more mystical than others, like the Mount Athos Autonomous Region in Greece.

An important centre of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism, this little slice of land has been a hub of spirituality since 1054, though its history goes back much further.

And, while anyone can visit the region around it, only male pilgrims can enter its borders, making it perhaps one of Europe’s last exclusive corners.

The slopes of Mount Athos are hidden in dense chestnut and Mediterranean forestry, its inclines pockmarked with ancient monasteries and their adjoining properties.

Covering a land area of just over 33,000 hectares, these holy sites are revered by Orthodox worshippers and visited by pilgrims from all over the world.

They consist of sketae (daughter houses of the monasteries), kellia and kathismata (living units operated by the monks), where farming constitutes an important part of the monks’ everyday life.

Visitors are restricted to 100 lay Orthodox and 10 non-orthodox pilgrims per day, each required to obtain a special entrance permit from the Mount Athos Pilgrims’ Bureau. Neither women nor children are allowed to visit the autonomous site, a rule which also extends to female animals (though female cats are allowed to hunt rodents).

The lack of visitors hasn’t, however, prevented UNESCO from naming it as a World Heritage Site, something it was afforded in 1988.

Mount Athos itself is governed as an autonomous monastic commonwealth within the Greek Republic.

It is technically part of the EU, and so benefits from the same privileges granted by Brussels to Greece. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the money provided by the bloc for restoration and conservation works on its historic buildings.

However, the status of the Monastic State of the Holy Mountain — and the jurisdiction of the Athonite institutions — were expressly described and ratified upon the accession of Greece into the European Community in 1981, meaning it holds a special position within the European Community while remaining distant from it.

Though the mountain has been a centre of spirituality since the Byzantine period, its existence as a holy site goes back to ancient times, with Christians having lived in and around it for almost 1,800 years. Meanwhile, its monastic traditions date back to at least 800 CE.

Today, over 2,000 monks from Greece and Eastern Orthodox countries like Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia live as close to their ascetic monk descendants as they possibly can.

In essence, they live isolated from the rest of the world and often never leave.

Many younger monks pursue university educations and advanced skills training to become qualified in cataloguing and restoring the Mountain’s sprawling library of manuscripts, liturgical vestments, icons, precious religious relics and art. Most, if not all of these items have never been seen by the public.

The monasteries also hold considerable amounts of medieval treasures that few outside the Orthodox order know about.

Not only are the religious artefacts tightly controlled within the community but also the movement of goods, which are subject to formal permission by the Monastic State authorities.