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Modern Description: After passing through Pedinó (15.5 km), many of whose traditional houses were badly affected by an earthquake in 1968, the route joins the main Myrina/Airport road at Livadochóri (20 km). By crossing over the airport highway, and taking the road northeast along the east side of the army camp from the traffic lights just after the Gymnásio (school), you reach after 2 km the remarkable church of the Panaghia in Mitropolis (not signed). (The track drops down to some farm buildings in a hollow after the asphalt finishes; the church is inside the farm-yard, which is not kept closed.) The present chapel is a modern construction, but sits on and among a mass of spolia from an Early Christian basilica – possibly in turn built over the base of a pagan temple. Two monolithic columns of Proconnesian marble stand in the porch: another lies on the ground to the southwest, beside two enormous sarcophagi – one beautifully decorated with crosses and rosettes in roundels – now commandeered as water-troughs for animals. The confident quality of the carving suggests an early date, possibly 5th century AD, though some commentators (Hetherington: The Greek Islands – Byzantine and Mediaeval Buildings, 2001) have given the work an 11th century date. Over the entrance door of the church is a marble beam with an 11th century inscription and an immured Byzantine Ionic-style capital. The floor inside is laid with marble fragments of an Early Byzantine templon. In the centre of the apse is a simple, stone, episcopal throne. It is this seat of a bishop which explains the church's epithet ‘in Mitropolis'. It is hard to date the massive podium blocks underpinning the north side of the church which may have been adapted from a pre-existing pagan structure on the site to form the base of the Early Christian basilica.

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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