Greece's constitution names Orthodox Christianity the country's prevailing religion and requires the head of state to be Orthodox, an arrangement funding clergy salaries from the state budget and giving the Church of Greece a formal advisory and ceremonial role in public life, though the constitution also guarantees freedom of religious conscience and worship for other faiths. Until a 2017 legal reform, Greek Orthodox monastic communities including Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic republic under Orthodox Church authority that bans women from entering entirely, retained special legal privileges reflecting the Church's constitutional standing.
Greece's Muslim minority in Thrace, protected under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne alongside a reciprocal protection for Greek Orthodox Christians remaining in Turkey, retains rights including Islamic religious courts for family law matters and Turkish-language minority education, an arrangement that has occasionally strained given broader Greek-Turkish tension.
Jehovah's Witnesses, whose refusal of military conscientious objection led to lengthy prison sentences and legal battles in Greek courts through the twentieth century, secured recognition as a legitimate religion only through a landmark 1997 European Court of Human Rights ruling against Greece, a case that also helped establish broader European jurisprudence protecting minority religious practice against majority-Orthodox state pressure.