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Modern Description: Both in the imagination and in reality, Patmos is so dominated by the great Monastery of St John that it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to this beautiful island—not least, its beautiful and architecturally interesting Chora. Though chic and well-organised today, the island appeared sufficiently windswept and remote to the Roman Imperial authorities for them to consider it a suitable place of banishment for the elderly patriarch of Ephesus, St John the Divine. Then, almost exactly 1,000 years later, an energetic and clear-sighted monk came here on his own spiritual exile, fleeing the noise and distraction that disturbed the brotherhood he had created in the mountains of Kos and intent on building a remoter monastery on Patmos in honour of St John. So great was Christódoulos's desire for peace and spiritual integrity that he insisted on his builders and their families keeping to a separate area in the northern tip of the island, safely away from proximity to the new monastery. ‘The loneliness of the island made me leap for joy: I delighted in its tranquillity, rejoiced that it was untrodden. Its remoteness and dreariness were to me a treasure of cheerfulness', he wrote. But it is the perennial conundrum of great hermits and great monasteries that in time they become focuses of pressing crowds who come to look, either with the eyes of faith or, more recently, the gaze of a blanker sort of tourism. The Monastery of St John is a tiny and intimate space that can ill accommodate the pressing throngs of visitors today.
Only scattered evidence of prehistoric (Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age) settlement has been encountered on Patmos, mostly in the areas of Kastelli, Kalikatsoú and Kambos. In historic times, the island was inhabited by Dorians, and later by Ionian colonists from Miletus. Patmos is briefly mentioned by Thucydides (Hist. III. 33.3) (in connection with the Athenian pursuit of the Spartan fleet in 428 BC), by Strabo (Geog. X.5.13), and by Pliny (Nat. Hist. IV 70), but never with any significant detail. There appears to have been a sizeable city to the east of the acropolis of Kastelli in Hellenistic times, and a temple to Artemis Patnia on the summit where the monastery now stands. The island was a small Roman outpost when St John the Divine was exiled here from Ephesus in 95 AD, at the end of the reign of Domitian. By his own testimony, he received the vision of the Revelation, which is now the last book of the New Testament, during his 18 month sojourn on the island.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the island, ravaged by Saracen incursions, became depopulated, and we hear almost no mention of it until the moment when its history was to change for ever with the arrival in 1088 of the Blessed Christódoulos—a learned and resourceful abbot from Asia Minor who had obtained the blessing and support of the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I Comnenus, to establish a monastery on the island in honour of St John. Only three years after beginning the enterprise, Seljuk Turkish attacks forced the monks and the founder to flee the island: Christódoulos died in Euboea in 1093, but his followers returned to complete the monastery according to the instructions he had laid down. Under Venetian occupation after 1207, under the protection of Pope Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) after 1461, and finally under Ottoman dominion after 1523, the monastery's integrity and independence, bestowed on it originally by the Byzantine Emperor, was respected and preserved, sometimes in exchange for appropriate tribute. Refugees arrived on the island from Constantinople in 1453, and from Candia on Crete in 1669, enriching and embellishing the island's cultural and architectural heritage, although the year 1659 saw the Chora plundered by the Venetian admiral, Francesco Morosini. An influential and long-lived Theological School was first established in 1713; and in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, a growing mercantile class, based on shipping and trade, brought prosperity to the island and developed the port area of Skala. Independence came in 1821, only for Turkish control to be re-imposed according to the terms of the London Protocol of 1830. The Italian occupation after 1912 gave rise to the only instance of coercion to change language and liturgy which the monastery faced in its long history. The island joined the Greek State together with the other Dodecanese Islands in 1948.
Two hundred and fifty metres north of the main harbour mole, just as the shore-line road curves to the left, the exiguous remains of a Roman construction (now protected by iron railings), to the left of the road, are claimed by local tradition to be the remains of a ‘baptismal font used by St John'. The only substantial ancient remains on the island are in fact on the hill-top directly above here to the west at Kastelli, where the ruins of a fortified acropolis of the 4th century BC still stand. (The first road turning inland from the south end of the beach, curves round to the left; a flight of steps to the right then brings you to a path, which skirts the east side of the hill, leading up to a saddle with low stone walls and wide views. From here the previously hidden church of Aghios Konstantinos comes into view on the top of the rise: the ancient area stretches south along the ridge from above the church.) The imposing position overlooks three bays: Skala (east), Chochlakas (southwest) and Merikas (north). Both along the top and on the eastern slopes, there are quantities of broken pottery in the surface of the ground. Analysis of this has shown continuous occupation from prehistoric times, through Classical and Hellenistic, and into Roman times. The surviving parts of the enceinte of walls and towers are visible on the climb up, the best preserved being the north and northeast sections, whose compact isodomic masonry is intact to some height: the northeast tower stands to 3.5m. The stone is volcanic and prone to erosion which has softened the exactly fitting cuts and drafted corners. Just above the church of Aghios Konstantinos is the northwest tower where a flight of six stairs within the tower's structure is visible. Given the extent of these remains, it would appear that Patmos was not as deserted as is customarily imagined when John was exiled here at the end of the 1st century AD.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patmos
Wikidata ID: Q190053
Trismegistos Geo: 11321

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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