Women defy Mt Athos exclusion
“Women break ancient ban on entering Greece’s Mount Athos,” Southeast European Times reported yesterday:
About ten women jumped a fence and stayed for about 20 minutes in a symbolic protest against the monks’ claims to more than 20,000 acres of land on the Halkidiki peninsula.
Women, along with eunuchs, beardless youths, and female animals, are banned from the Holy Mountain, a self-governing part of Greece divided between twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries of various nationalities.
This kind of protest takes a bit of civil courage. The ban on females of any species is included in the Mount Athos Charter, ratified by Greece in 1926. According to Graham Speake, Greek law provides for an automatic prison sentence of up to 12 months for any woman who sets foot on the place (Speake 2002, 163). But SE Times does not report that anyone was arrested. (And defying the ban, apparently, was only an attention-getter for another cause, not an end in itself.)
Greek state sanction of this kind for gender-based exclusion from sacred space strikes me as an example of religious exception to human rights in Europe. It is not, of course, the only one.
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