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Modern Description: At Kipos (37.5km or 11.5km avoiding the above loop) is the island's oldest and most interesting church. The Panaghia tou Kipou (‘Virgin of the Garden'—which refers to the patch of fertility which a small spring sustains here) is an Early Christian site dating from the 5th century. A new church was built in 1911 on the site of the original basilica, remains of which can be seen to its south. Propped against the west wall of its interior are the large marble slabs of the sanctuary screen from the Early Christian church; these are originally pagan sarcophagus slabs or pieces of trabeation, decorated in the ?4th century BC with a beautiful running egg-and-dart motif and then later carved with equally beautiful Early Christian crosses and six-leaf ‘rosette' designs in the 5th century AD. The greatest surprise lies in the apse of church, however, where the tiny cruciform 5th century baptismal pool has been preserved, constructed with local stone, coloured with manganese red and iron-oxide yellow. Stacked all around it are other marble fragments from the Early Christian building; some pieces still retain areas of painting on them. Outside are more oddments of carving from the original church. The origin of the church is explained a short distance to the west down some steps, where there is a spring of fresh water—slightly warm—in a small well-house. Milos is not well-endowed with fresh water springs, and in Antiquity this rarity would certainly have been marked by a pagan shrine; the shrine was later ‘Christianised' into a baptistery and basilica. The site was vulnerable, and the original church may have been destroyed in the Saracen raids of the 7th and 8th centuries. Today the spring waters a small pocket of fertile fields.
Wikidata ID: Q108612763

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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