Mount Athos Has Banned Women, and Most Female Animals, for a Thousand Years

Mount Athos is a wedge-shaped Greek peninsula about fifty kilometres long, jutting south into the Aegean from the Halkidiki coast. It is technically part of Greece, but governs itself as an autonomous monastic republic — the Athonite Holy Community, with twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries spread along its slopes and roughly 1,700 monks living in them at last count. It is also the longest-running enforced single-sex zone on Earth.

The rule that bars women is called the avaton, an Old Greek word meaning literally "untrod." Tradition traces it to a sixth-century edict of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, but its formal codification dates to a 1046 chrysobull of Constantine IX Monomachos. The justification given by the monks then and now is doctrinal: the peninsula is the Garden of the Virgin Mary, and the Theotokos alone represents her gender on the holy mountain. The practical justification is that monks have committed to celibacy, and an environment with no women in it makes celibacy easier to keep.

The restriction is strict. Female domestic animals — cows, sheep, hens, mares, female dogs — are also barred from the peninsula. Eggs and dairy come in by boat from the mainland. The single exception is cats, which the monks tolerate for the killing of mice; female cats stay. Visiting workmen, deliverymen, and tourists must show paperwork at the only road checkpoint. The pilgrim quota for non-Orthodox men is ten per day.

Women have entered all the same. The French writer Maryse Choisy spent a month on Athos in the 1920s disguised as a sailor and wrote a book about it. Aliki Diplarakou, who would later be Miss Europe, snuck across as a young man in the 1930s. In 2008 a group of Greek and Moldovan women jumped the border fence in protest. Each case ended with the rule reaffirmed. Greece's accession to the Schengen Agreement carries an explicit declaration preserving the avaton.