Bob Simon gets rare access to Mount Athos, a remote peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity. For more than a thousand years, monks on Mount Athos have lived ...

The skulls, lined up five deep on wooden shelves, date back hundreds of years, with the names of the more recently deceased scratched onto their foreheads — Monk Theolothelis, 91, 26-6-1986, or Monk ...

"60 Minutes" producer Michael Karzis is the perfect tour guide to take you behind the scenes on the show's Mt. Athos story. Karzis is the son of Greek immigrants and he speaks Greek. Those things ...

Schema-Archimandrite Jeremiah (Alekhin), Abbot of the Russian St. Panteleimon’s Monastery on Mt. Athos, has made a visit to the most ancient Russian Athonite monastery—Xylourgou, or the Holy Dormition ...

It was while visiting Mount Athos, more than a quarter of a century ago, that I first heard the Soviet Union would collapse—and would do so in my lifetime. There, in northeastern Greece one ...

An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.3 struck the peninsula of Mount Athos on June 7, at 15:46. The strongest in a series of tremors, its epicenter was located in the sea near the coastal monasteries ...

On July 27-28, the Day of Holy Prince Vladimir, Equal-to-the-Apostles, the Synaxis of All Holy Russian Sovereigns was solemnly celebrated at St. Panteleimon’s Russian Monastery on Mt. Athos, reports ...

Orthodox church’s decision to make Ukrainian branch independent of Russia causes schism and predictions of violence In the chilly pre-dawn gloom one recent morning, Father Makarios hurried to his ...

A monk looks toward Dionysiou from the ferry. Dionysiou, which was built in the 14th century, is one of 20 monasteries that are on the peninsula. Photograph: Rick Findler Mount Athos is the spiritual ...

This story appears in the December 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. The holy peninsula of Mount Athos reaches 31 miles out into the Aegean Sea like an appendage struggling to dislocate ...