The Self-Governing Peninsula Where the Office Is Most Concentrated

Mount Athos in northern Greece, a self-governing monastic republic under Greek sovereignty and the special protection of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, is home to twenty ruling monasteries and a population of monks unusually dense with hieromonks relative to ordinary monasteries elsewhere, since pilgrims visiting Athos rely on resident hieromonks specifically for confession, communion and other sacraments not available from an unordained monk, making the priesthood-within-monasticism a practical necessity of daily life on the mountain rather than an occasional convenience.

Athos maintains a long-standing prohibition, the avaton, on the entry of women onto the peninsula at all, a restriction defended by the monastic communities there as integral to their contemplative way of life and repeatedly challenged by outside critics, including at the level of European Union institutions, as a form of gender discrimination inconsistent with general principles of equal treatment; the dispute remains unresolved, with Greek and Church authorities maintaining the exemption and no legal mechanism currently in force that has actually ended the practice, leaving Athos as one of the clearest documented cases of a still-functioning closed religious space defined explicitly by the exclusion of one sex.