Travelling around the Mediterranean, one is continually met with situations of exclusion, in places where certain groups of people are forbidden from crossing certain borders: The Lebanese are not permitted in Israel, the Israeli are not permitted in Lebanon; non-Muslims are not permitted to enters mosques in Morocco, sub-Saharan Africans are not permitted in European Melilla. But that there exists a European territory whose borders may not be crossed by any living creature and access to whose coastline is only granted conditionally to male members of the human race must be one of the most absurd phenomena in the Mediterranean Sea’s entire contradictory border world. Located on the eastern finger of the Chalkidiki Peninsula, the monks‘ republic Athos belongs to Greece according to public national law. However, the republic has special autonomous status, and the monks who live there control the area’s management and inner affairs. Whenever EU officials attempt to take measures against the ban on women there, the monks refer to Byzantine documents from over a thousand years ago that assured the monks of their sovereignty for all of eternity. The Holy Mountain lets no one tell them what to do – especially not the European Union.