A man who was adopted and raised by Orthodox monks in Greece astonishingly spent nearly his entire life without ever seeing a woman.
Imagine living your entire life without ever seeing or interacting with the opposite gender.
While this might sound like a dystopian scenario to some, for Mihailio Totolos, it was simply everyday life—and, sadly, it was all he ever knew.
Totolos, who came from Halkidiki, Greece, only knew of women through conversations with his peers and from descriptions in books.
Born around 1856, Mihailio Tolotos never had the chance to know his mother, who passed away shortly after his birth, leaving him orphaned and without any immediate family.
After her death, Tolotos was adopted by a group of Orthodox monks in Greece and taken to a secluded monastery on Mount Athos. There, he was raised under the monastery’s strict rules, living his life entirely within its walls and abiding by its austere traditions.
One of these rules was that, under no circumstances, were women allowed on the premises.
This restriction had reportedly been in place for centuries, and although Tolotos was technically free to explore the outside world, he never ventured beyond the monastery walls. As a result, he never actually saw a woman in real life, relying solely on textbooks and conversations to understand what he could about the opposite gender.
This left him to imagine what roughly half of the world’s population looked, sounded, and acted like—a truly remarkable thought.
Apparently never curious about life beyond the monastery, Tolotos continued his quiet existence until his death in 1938 at the age of 82.
After his passing, the monks of Mount Athos honored him with a special burial. They believed Tolotos might have been the only man in the world to have died without ever knowing what a woman looked like.
Tolotos’ passing was later acknowledged in a newspaper article, which pointed out that women were not the only experiences he had missed in his lifetime.
The article remarked that Tolotos had also spent 82 years without ever riding in a car, seeing a movie in a theater, or witnessing an airplane in flight.
Today, in an age transformed by digital advancements and modern technology, it’s unlikely the world will ever see another life quite like Mihailo Tolotos’.
