Patmos
Overview
Patmos has a reputation as a quiet, almost monastic island, and that is half the truth. Through August, yachts crowd Skala harbour and the religious music festival at the monastery brings audiences from Athens. The island has two moods. Come in October for the silence and in August for the festival calendar; each season shows Patmos at its best in its own way.
In 95 AD, John the Theologian was exiled here under the emperor Domitian. According to tradition, he received the visions that became the Book of Revelation in a small cave above what is now the harbour town. The cave, the Sacred Grotto of the Apocalypse, is kept inside a modest chapel cut into the rock. Visitors are shown three cracks in its ceiling as the channel through which the voice is said to have spoken. The cave is UNESCO-listed, and so is the monastery built 900 years later on the hill above it.
Christodoulos, a Byzantine monk, founded the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian in 1088, after the emperor Alexios I Komnenos granted him the island. Its fortified walls give Patmos its outline. The library inside is one of the most important in the Orthodox world. Skala, at the foot of the hill, is the working port where the ferries arrive. Above it is the Chora, the old hilltop town, where most guests prefer to stay. It is a tight white maze of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions on a steep marble grid.
Two practical notes. The Religious Music Festival in late August, held in the courtyards of the monastery, is the most concentrated cultural event on the island; book early. Grikos Bay, 20 minutes south, has the gentlest swimming and the best of the island’s small luxury hotels. Three nights is enough. Eat dinner up in the Chora rather than down at the port.
House Notes
Arrival
Patmos has no airport. Helistar flies private helicopters from Athens to the municipal heliport at Skala in about 60 minutes, on the AS365 Dauphin or the H135; the alternative is a 60-minute domestic flight to Kos, then the Dodekanisos Seaways catamaran from Kos to Patmos, around two and a half hours. Either way, the island is entered at Skala, and the Chora is the climb above it.
The address
The Petra at Grikos Bay was opened in 1989 by Petra and Kostas Stergiou and is now run by their son Christos: 11 rooms set into the hill above the fishing village. The family owns and staffs it, with a swimming pool above the bay and a contemporary art collection through the rooms. It is the pedigree address on the island.
The Treasury
The monastery museum holds 330 manuscripts, 267 of them on parchment and 82 of the New Testament. Its principal piece is Codex 67: 33 leaves of the sixth-century Codex Purpureus Petropolitanus, written in silver ink on purple-dyed vellum in the imperial scriptorium of Constantinople, whose other 182 leaves are in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Photography is forbidden, knees and shoulders must be covered, and the library itself opens only by special permission.
The Cave
The Sacred Grotto lies halfway down the road from Chora to Skala, inside the chapel complex of Saint Anne. Three fissures in the rock above the niche where John laid his head are read as the channel of the voice and as a figure of the Trinity, and the lectern of Prochorus the scribe is shown to one side. The 17th-century chapel was built around the cave, its rare icons date from the 1600s, and photography is not permitted.
The Monastery
The Monastery of Saint John the Theologian, founded in 1088 by Saint Christodoulos on the island Alexios I Komnenos had given him, is a fortress before it is a church: a polygonal wall 15 metres high, twin entrance towers and a murder-hole over the north gate. The Katholikon, the main church, stands where a temple of Artemis once stood; Cretan masters made its woodwork and icons between 1550 and 1700, among them Andreas Ritzos’s Massacre of the Innocents. Knees and shoulders must be covered.
The Nikolaidis Mansion
The Nikolaidis Mansion is a Chora house of the 17th and 18th centuries, a measured example of Patmian town architecture, now held by the Ephorate of Antiquities. Its permanent exhibition of archaeological finds and photographic archives follows the island from the Prehistoric period to modern times. It is the quieter counterpart to the family-kept Simantiri mansion a few lanes away, and the one to ask for when the queue for the Treasury at the monastery is long.
Benetos
Benetos is the address for dinner at Sapsila, a quiet inlet ten minutes by road from Skala. Benetos Matthaiou, who winters in Miami, opened it in 1997 with his American wife Susan, and they grow the herbs and vegetables in the garden in front of the tables. The few seats are all on the veranda over the water, the cooking is Mediterranean with Asian touches, and it serves dinner only from June to September, closed on Mondays.
Tarsanas
Patmos Marine is a working shipyard at Diakofti, founded by the carpenter Lefteris Kamitsis in 1985 and now run by his sons Peros and Sozos with around 20 Patmian craftsmen, who still build wooden boats by hand through the winter. The brothers set the restaurant on the deck of a traditional caique hauled out inside the carnagio, the boatyard. It serves goat from Levetha and fish bought from the harbour fishermen.
Arxontiko Simantiri
Arxontiko Simantiri is a Chora mansion built in 1625 by Anatolian craftsmen from Smyrna and still in the Simantiris family, now in its 14th generation under Stefanos. Inside are Russian icons of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries from Odessa, Venetian-style furniture, painted ceilings and inlaid mosaic floors of the 18th century, and a foot-driven dentist’s wheel brought back from New York. The family gives tours in person daily, from 9am to 2pm and from 6.30pm to 9pm.
Kallikatsou
Kallikatsou is a volcanic monolith 10 metres tall at the mouth of Petra Bay, 3 kilometres south of Chora and within walking distance of Grikos. Stone tools and surface ceramics carry the site back to the Late Bronze Age, around 1100 BC, and carved cisterns, niches for offerings and small artificial caves on the rock are read as an open-air sanctuary, perhaps to Aphrodite, in continuous use to the 4th century AD. The medieval monks added the cut steps.
Anchorage Notes
Skala
Skala is the island’s only port, administered by the Municipal Port Fund of Patmos, the public body based here whose remit, since the Dodecanese fund was broken up, covers the harbours of Patmos and Lipsi and no others. Not all of the waterfront is open to a visiting vessel. Each season, by written application, the Fund reserves the stretch from opposite the Apollon Travel agency to the entrance of the Skala hotel for professional craft, among them the scheduled ferries and the day boats.
The cruise anchorage
No pier on Patmos takes a cruise ship, so cruise ships lie at anchor off Aspri, more than 1 kilometre out from Skala, and the launches of the Boatmen’s Association of Patmos carry their passengers in to the quay. The island has argued for years about the harbour works that would end the practice and has built none of them. A yacht in that water on a summer morning lies in their company.
Grikos
Grikos lies on a bay 4.5 kilometres south of Skala. The uninhabited islet of Tragonisi, with the ruins of an ancient temple on it, stands across the mouth of the bay. A yacht lies off the village, with the tavernas and the sand a tender’s ride away and the island’s quietest houses behind them.
Lampi
Lampi, at the north end of the island, is a beach of rare multicoloured pebbles; its name means “shining”, for what the sun makes of the stones and the water. Caiques leave Skala for it at about 10am and take an hour, though they do not run every day. The stones are best left where they are, as enough of them have already gone home in pockets.
Meloi
Meloi is the nearest water to the port that is not the port itself: a 2-kilometre sandy bay north of Skala, with tamarisks along the back, 30 minutes on foot from the quay and 5 minutes by car. Taxi boats run out from Skala. It is near enough for an afternoon, with the tender back at the quay before dinner in the Chora.