Monastic community of Mount Athos

The monastic community of Mount Athos is an Eastern Orthodox community of monks in Greece who hold the status of an autonomous region as well as the combined rights of a decentralized administration, a region and a municipality, with a territory encompassing the distal part of the Athos peninsula including Mount Athos. The bordering proximal part of the peninsula belongs to the regular Aristotelis community in Central Macedonia.

In modern Greek, the community is commonly referred to as Agio Oros (Άγιο Όρος) translating to 'Holy Mountain', while Oros Athos (Greek: Όρος Άθως) is used to denote the physical mountain and Hersonissos tou Atho (Χερσόνησος του Άθω) in respect to the peninsula.

The community includes 20 monasteries and the settlements on which they depend. The monasteries house around 2,000 Eastern Orthodox monks from Greece and many other countries, including Eastern Orthodox countries such as Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and Russia, who live an ascetic life at Athos, isolated from the rest of the world. The Athonite monasteries feature a rich collection of well-preserved artifacts, rare books, ancient documents, and artworks of immense historical value, and Mount Athos has been listed as a World Heritage Site since 1988.

Although Mount Athos is legally part of the European Union like the rest of Greece, the Monastic community institutions have a special jurisdiction, which was reaffirmed during the admission of Greece to the European Community (precursor to the EU). This empowers the monastic community's authorities to restrict the free movement of people and goods in its territory; in particular, only males are allowed to enter, while women and most female animals are banned from Mount Athos by religious tradition of the community that lives there.