Patmos
Overview
Patmos has a reputation as a quiet, almost monastic island, and that is half the truth. The other half is that yachts cluster in Skala harbour through August and the religious music festival at the monastery brings audiences in from Athens. The island runs in two registers. Come in October for the silence, come in August for the calendar; each is the right Patmos in its own way.
In 95 AD, John the Theologian was exiled here under the emperor Domitian and, according to tradition, 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 preserved within a modest chapel cut into the rock; three fissures in the ceiling are pointed out as the channel through which the voice is said to have spoken. The site is UNESCO-listed and so is the monastery built nine hundred years later on the hill above it.
The Monastery of Saint John the Theologian was founded in 1088 by Christodoulos, a Byzantine monk granted the island by the emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Its fortified ramparts give Patmos its silhouette. The library inside is one of the most important in the Orthodox world. Skala, at the foot of the hill, is the working port and ferry gateway. Above it, the Chora is where most guests prefer to stay: 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, in the courtyards of the monastery, is the most concentrated cultural event on the island and deserves an early booking. Grikos Bay, twenty minutes south, has the gentlest swimming and the best of the island's small luxury hotels. Three nights is enough, and eat dinner up in the Chora rather than down at the port.
House Notes
Arrival
No airport on Patmos. The route is a private helicopter from Athens — Helistar runs Athens to the Skala municipal heliport in approximately 60 minutes on the AS365 Dauphin or H135. The civilian alternative is a 60-minute domestic flight to Kos, then the Dodekanisos Seaways catamaran from Kos to Patmos, around two and a half hours. Whichever way, the island is entered at Skala and the Chora is the climb above it.
The address
The Petra at Grikos Bay — opened in 1989 by Petra and Kostas Stergiou, eleven rooms set into the hill above the fishing village, now run by their son Christos. Family-held, family-staffed, with a swimming pool above the bay and a contemporary art collection through the rooms. 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. The 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; a further 182 leaves sit in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Photography forbidden. Knees and shoulders covered. The library proper opens only by special permission.
The Cave
The Sacred Grotto sits 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. The lectern of Prochorus the scribe is shown to one side. The 17th-century chapel was built around the cave, and the rare icons inside it date from the 1600s. Photography is not permitted.
The Monastery
Founded in 1088 by Saint Christodoulos on the island Alexios I Komnenos had given him, the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian is a fortress before it is a church — a polygonal wall fifteen metres high, twin entrance towers, a murder-hole over the north gate. The Katholikon stands where a temple of Artemis once did; Cretan masters cut its woodwork and icons between 1550 and 1700, among them Andreas Ritzos’s Massacre of the Innocents. Knees and shoulders covered.
The Nikolaidis Mansion
A Chora house of the 17th and 18th centuries, a measured example of Patmian urban architecture, now held by the Ephorate of Antiquities. Inside, a permanent exhibition of archaeological finds and photographic archives carries the island from the Prehistoric period to modern times — the quieter counterpart to the family-kept Simantiri mansion a few lanes off, and the one to ask for when the Treasury queue at the monastery is long.
Benetos
The address for dinner at Sapsila — a quiet inlet ten minutes from Skala by road. Opened in 1997 by Benetos Matthaiou, who winters in Miami, and his American wife Susan; they grow the herbs and vegetables in the garden in front of the tables. Few seats, all on the veranda over the water, Mediterranean cooking with Asian inflections, dinner only from June through September, closed Mondays. Booking is by telephone between noon and 18:00.
Tarsanas
A working shipyard at Diakofti — Patmos Marine, founded by the carpenter Lefteris Kamitsis in 1985, now run with his sons Peros and Sozos and around twenty Patmian craftsmen who still build wooden boats by hand through the winter. The restaurant occupies the deck of a hauled traditional caique inside the carnagio. Goat from Levetha, fish bought from the harbour fishermen, the kitchen run by Sozon Kamitsis, who also runs the yard.
Arxontiko Simantiri
A Chora mansion built in 1625 by Anatolian craftsmen from Smyrna, still in the Simantiris family, now in its fourteenth generation under Stefanos. The interiors carry 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 wheel brought back from New York. Tours by the family in person, daily 09:00 to 14:00 and 18:30 to 21:00.
Kallikatsou
A volcanic monolith ten metres tall at the mouth of Petra Bay, three kilometres south of Chora and within walking distance of Grikos. Stone tools and surface ceramics carry the site to the Late Bronze Age, c.1100 BC; carved cisterns, niches for offerings and small artificial caves on the rock are read as an open-air sanctuary, perhaps to Aphrodite, that ran continuously through to the 4th century AD. The medieval monks added the cut steps.
Anchorage Notes
Skala
Skala is the island’s only port, and the Municipal Port Fund of Patmos administers it — the public body seated here whose remit, since the Dodecanese fund was broken up, runs to the harbours of Patmos and Lipsi and no further. The quay a vessel wants is not the whole waterfront: the Fund reserves the stretch from opposite the Apollon Travel agency to the entrance of the Skala hotel for professional craft, the scheduled ferries and the day-boats among them, by written application each season.
The cruise anchorage
No pier on Patmos takes a cruise ship. They lie at anchor off Aspri, better than a 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. It is the company a yacht keeps in that water on a summer morning.
Grikos
Grikos holds a bay four and a half kilometres south of Skala, the uninhabited islet of Tragonisi standing across its mouth with the ruins of an ancient temple on it. A yacht lies off the village; the tavernas and the sand are a tender’s reach away, and the island’s quietest houses stand behind them. It is where Patmos goes when it wants the water without the port.
Lampi
Lampi keeps the north end of the island, a beach of rare multicoloured pebbles — the name means shining, for what the sun makes of the stones and the water. Caiques leave Skala for it at about ten in the morning and take an hour, though they do not run every day. Take the stones as they are. Enough of them have gone home in pockets already.
Meloi
Meloi is the nearest water to the port that is not the port: a two-kilometre sand bay north of Skala, tamarisks along the back of it, thirty minutes on foot from the quay and five by car. Taxi-boats run out from Skala. It is an afternoon’s water — near enough that the tender is back at the quay before dinner in the Chora.