Mount Athos, truly a Holy Mountain and the lot of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin, the heaven-neighboring Athos is a stadium of spiritual struggles, a place of asceticism, repentance, and prayer, and a workshop of holiness for the innumerable ascetics, monks, and hermits, both anonymous and renowned, who have practiced there through the ages. It is the pride and crown of the Great Church of Christ, the Holy Mother Church of Constantinople, under its canonical and spiritual jurisdiction and continuous ecclesiastical care and concern, as well as an unceasing prayerful supplication for the world, mystically irrigated by the uninterrupted day and night prayers and supplications of the monks “for the peace from above and the salvation of souls” of Orthodox Christians everywhere and “for the peace of the whole world and the stability of the Holy Churches of God.”