An unlucky man named Mihailo Tolotos was reportedly only to have known of a woman from books and from other people and never to have met any woman himself in his life. The man died at the age of eighty-two from his secluded home in Greece and was thought to have been born in 1856. He did not even know his own mother because she died shortly after she gave birth to him, leaving Tolotos an orphan who was raised by men.
After the young boy was made an orphan, Tolotos was adopted by Orthodox Monks at a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, where he was raised exclusively by male monks who did not allow women into their ranks. Like all the monks at the monastery, Tolotos lived by the very strict rules of the place, which included the exclusion of all women. No women were allowed to visit or come anywhere near the men who lived there.
Ever since the 10th century, there was a Greek law that prevented both women and domestic animals like cows and sheep from entering the Mount. This law is still allegedly being enforced to this day. The reason for this law is to ensure that the monks living in isolation at the monastery can fulfill their commitment to stay celibate for their entire lives and never bed a woman – or a sheep – for that matter.
However, Tolotos could have ventured away from the monastery and met a woman during his life. But he seemed to never have left the monastery for the decades of his life. Therefore, it seems that for the 82 years that he lived, he never met a member of the opposite sex because he never left Mount Athos.
Tolotos died at the age of eighty-two in 1938 at the monastery because he had never allowed his curiosity about the larger world to draw him away from the confines of his religion or the world that he had known within the walls of the house he had grown up in.
Because Tolotos was believed to have never known the form of a woman, he was given a very special burial. He was given the special burial of the monks living at Mount Athos but with the special knowledge that he was the only man who died, never having known what a woman looked like or smelled like.
A woman was not the only thing that Tolotos had never seen in his life. He had missed many modern things in addition to being a member of the opposite sex. He allegedly had never seen a car, an airplane, or a moving picture. A newspaper article published at the time of his death articulated the amazing circumstances of the Greek monk’s ability to remain isolated from the outside world and to keep away from women and modern conveniences like cars and airplanes.