Panagia Hozoviotissa

Panagia Hozoviotissa is built into a cliff on the southeast coast of Amorgos: a strip of whitewashed masonry about 40 metres long, nowhere more than 5 metres wide, standing 300 metres above the sea. Three monks live in it, and it is regularly described as one of the oldest monasteries in Greece still in continuous use. The shape of the building is dictated entirely by the rock, eight levels stacked vertically and joined by narrow internal stairs, and from the water it reads as a white seam in a grey wall.

The Icon

The monastery exists because of an icon. Tradition holds that during the Byzantine iconoclasm, when images were being destroyed, an icon of the Virgin was set adrift in an unmanned boat at Chozeba in the Judaean Desert, the site of the monastery of Saint George in Wadi Qelt, and came ashore at Agia Anna, the beach below the cliff. The name Hozoviotissa comes from that place. The first core of the monastery is traditionally dated to 812 or 813, during the ninth-century iconoclast crisis, although some accounts give 1017 instead.

Alexios I Komnenos

The building as it now stands dates from 1088, when the emperor Alexios I Komnenos endowed the monastery and gave it stauropegic status, placing it directly under the patriarch rather than the local bishop. The evidence is an inscribed silver flabellum, a liturgical fan, still kept there. Alexios reigned from 1081 to 1118; it is the later date that belongs to the monastery.

The Building

Inside, the eight levels hold monks' cells, kitchens and ovens, storerooms, cisterns and wells, each fitted into whatever space the cliff allows. Arches and vaults, some of them built with porous stone brought over from Milos, carry the floors across the rock face. On New Year's Day in 1975 a landslide during a storm took off the roof of the refectory and damaged several floors; the repairs used reinforced concrete in places, which is why parts of the interior look newer than the rest.

Visiting

The monastery is about two kilometres from Chora, the island's capital, and the last stretch is a paved stair of roughly 300 steps up the cliff face. The climb is steady rather than steep, and it is the only way in. The dress code is real and it is enforced: long trousers for men, a long skirt for women, arms and shoulders covered. Wraps are usually available at the door for anyone who arrives unprepared.

Visitors who make the climb are received with cold water, loukoumi and a glass of psimeni raki, the Amorgos spirit made by simmering raki with honey, sugar, cinnamon and cloves. The main feast falls on 21 November, the Presentation of the Virgin, when pilgrims come across from the neighbouring islands.

Amorgos has no airport, and the monastery is at its most legible from below rather than from the path. Arriving by ferry means landing at Katapola or Aegiali and driving over; chartering a gulet in Greece puts the cliff, and the beach at Agia Anna underneath it, on the route itself.

Agia Anna is worth the stop on its own account. It is the bay where the icon is said to have come ashore, a set of small rock coves with clear water rather than a sandy beach, and this stretch of coast was used by Luc Besson for Le Grand Bleu in 1988, the film that first brought Amorgos a foreign audience.