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Mount Athos is not onl.y host to some of the most beautiful. coastline on the Mediterranean, it is also the hub of Christian Orthodoxy, home to twenty monasteries, 1, �OO monks, one of the largest collec tions of Byzantine and Late Byzantine art. Mount Athos sees ten foreign pilgrims per day and no tourists. Oh, and women are outlawed.
Monks laughing. There's something disconcerting about a guy in a black robe, long beard and solemn hat letting fly with boffo yucks and guffaws. After all, god is serious business. But laughter fills the air on Mount Athos, a lush Greek peninsula peppered with monasteries and occupied for the past 1, 100 years by Orthodox men of the cloth. And 'Men' is the operative word here.
Athos, the third finger of the Halkidiki Peninsula, also known as the "Ark of
Orthodoxy," has prohibited women from entering its grounds for almost a millennium-ever since a nasty sex scandal involving Vlach shepherdesses and some grace-fallen members of the
