Monastery of Saint John the Theologian

A fortified grey mass on the ridge above Chora, the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian looks more like a castle than a church, which is exactly what its founder had in mind. It has held the highest ground on Patmos since the late eleventh century, and together with the town below it and the Cave of the Apocalypse it is the reason the island carries a UNESCO listing.

How the monastery came to be built

In 1088 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos handed the whole island of Patmos to a monk, Christodoulos Latrinos, along with permission to found a monastery on it. The dedication went to Saint John, traditionally held to be the author of the Book of Revelation, which he is said to have received in a cave on the slope between Chora and the harbour.

Patmos was close to empty when Christodoulos arrived. Muslim raids from the seventh to the ninth century had driven most islanders off and destroyed the grand basilica of about 300-350 AD that had stood on the hilltop, itself raised over an earlier sanctuary of Artemis. Christodoulos put his monastery on the same spot and walled it heavily, less against armies than against pirates and Seljuk raiders, a threat that did not go away for another five hundred years. Building work began within a few years of the grant and the main structure went up quickly.

The building

The walls rise more than 15 metres and enclose a compact footprint, roughly 53 metres north to south by 70 east to west, broken by towers and ramparts. The single entrance is on the north side, between two rectangular towers. Above the reinforced door sits a murder hole through which boiling oil, water or molten lead could be poured on anyone attacking it; the monks called it "the killer", and it was the last line of defence.

Inside, the Katholikon keeps the standard Byzantine plan of a domed cross-in-square. Its floor is marble laid in opus sectile, and its walls carry paintings and frescoes going back to the Middle Ages. In front of it an arcade of four arches is painted with the miracles of Saint John. On the south side of the complex a two-storey arcade of arches and columns was added in 1698.

The rest of the complex works like a small self-sufficient town. The courtyard holds a well of holy water and the great earthenware pithoi that once stored oil and wine. Off it are the kitchen, the granary and the old bakery, where a stone oven and the long wooden trough the monks kneaded bread in are still in place. Around ten chapels are scattered through the buildings: the Chapel of the Virgin keeps frescoes from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Chapel of the Holy Apostles, built in 1603, holds the relics of the founder.

The library and the treasury

The library is why scholars come. It holds at least 330 manuscripts, 267 of them on parchment, including 82 manuscripts of the New Testament, alongside some 13,000 historical documents and around 2,000 printed volumes of religious texts, saints' lives, the works of Nikiforos of Laodicea and other ecclesiastical writing. The documents matter as much for the economic and legal history of the Aegean as for church history: the monastery was a large landowner, and its archive recorded the fact in detail.

The sacristy opened as a museum in 1988, for the monastery's 800th anniversary, and displays the relics and liturgical goods. The best known object is the skull of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Around it are vestments and altar cloths worked in silver and gold thread, silver icons and ceremonial utensils accumulated over nine centuries.

The cave and the town

The UNESCO inscription covers three things, and the other two are worth the walk. Halfway down the hillside, on the old path between Chora and the port at Skala, is the Cave of the Apocalypse. Tradition places John's exile here under the emperor Domitian in the first century, and has him dictating his visions to his disciple Prochoros; the rock inside is split by three narrow fissures, read as a sign of the Trinity, through which the voice is said to have come. A chapel dedicated to Saint Anne, mother of Alexios I Komnenos, was built over the cave mouth, and the whole thing now functions as a small church rather than a bare cave.

Chora itself grew up around the monastery walls, and its plan shows it: a dense knot of whitewashed houses, vaulted lanes and blind alleys laid out so that raiders coming up from the sea would lose their bearings. Several of the larger houses date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Patmian shipowners and merchants were doing well, and the town has been protected as a historic centre in its own right.

Patmos today

The monastery is still a working community and still the centre of religious life on the island, keeping the same liturgical cycle and drawing pilgrims year round, most heavily around Easter. In 1999 UNESCO inscribed it as a single World Heritage Site together with the historic centre of Chora and the Cave of the Apocalypse.

Patmos has no airport, so everyone arrives by sea. Ferries and yachts come in at Skala, and the monastery is a steep half-hour walk or a short bus ride up the hill from the quay. A sheltered harbour with a site of this weight directly above it is an unusual combination, and it is what keeps the island on Dodecanese itineraries and makes it an easy stop to build in when chartering a gulet in Greece.