Bob Simon gets rare access to Mount Athos, a remote peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity. For more than a thousand years, monks on Mount Athos have lived ...

MOUNT ATHOS, the easternmost of the three prongs of the peninsula of Chalkidiké, has been for centuries the "Holy Mountain" of the Orthodox Church. Pious, or at least penitent, Byzantine, Trapezuntine ...

MOUNT ATHOS, Greece (AP) — The medieval monastery clings almost impossibly to sheer cliffs high above the shimmering turquoise of the Aegean Sea. Rising from the rugged granite rock, its walls enclose ...

The skulls, lined up five deep on wooden shelves, date back hundreds of years, with the names of the more recently deceased scratched onto their foreheads — Monk Theolothelis, 91, 26-6-1986, or Monk ...

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 ...

A Greek Orthodox monk on Mount Athos, the center of Orthodox monasticism, died at the age of 82 without ever seeing a woman.

On a rugged peninsula in northern Greece lies one of Europe's most unusual and secluded places. Known as Mount Athos, or the Holy Mountain, this autonomous monastic community has barred women from ...

On this Easter Sunday, we're going to take you to a place outside our world. It's not Mars or Venus but it might as well be. It's a remote peninsula in northern Greece that millions believe to be the ...

It was while visiting Mount Athos, more than a quarter of a century ago, that I first heard the Soviet Union would collapse—and would do so in my lifetime. There, in northeastern Greece one ...

A Protestant’s journey among the monks of Mount Athos. When you first arrive at a monastery on Mount Athos, the traditional center of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, the first thing you do is knock ...

This story appears in the December 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. The holy peninsula of Mount Athos reaches 31 miles out into the Aegean Sea like an appendage struggling to dislocate ...