Patmos and the Monastery of St. John

[Sammy]

View of the harbor entrance from the monastery

We set sail for Patmos in the morning; it has the monastery where St. John had his vision of the Apocalypse and wrote the Book of Revelations. Once again we were besieged by light winds, so the engine got another workout. We arrived in the small harbor and anchored in the middle, where we would be out of the way of the ferry.
We looked into the hours for the monastery and found out that it was only open in the morning, which gave us a little over an hour to get there and visit this historic site. Arrangements were quickly made for two rental cars, since they are very small and we couldn’t fit into one. It was a mad dash up the winding roads, with Dan leading the way, but we arrived in good time. There is a bit of a climb to the monastery itself, which we managed without any problems; they have a dress code and photos are not allowed in some areas.



One of the 30 monks that live in the monastery

The monastery was large and built like a fortress, many halls and stairways leading here and there. We looked at some of the artifacts on display, including the skulls of St. Thomas and a couple other Saints I don’t remember.






Scenes from inside the monastery

Once in the church, I stood before the alter and said some prayers; one of the curators must have seen me because he pulled us aside and gave us a private tour of a couple rooms off to the side. It was nice; there were old paintings and murals on the walls, all with religious significance depicting scenes from the bible and religious folklore.

Afterwards we had lunch at one of the restaurants nearby, overlooking the harbor and channel into town. Since we had the cars we did an impromptu island tour, however all the signs are in Greek and the map we had wasn’t very detailed; at one point we ended up driving down a narrow alleyway, which then became more of a sidewalk; the shop owners looked at us in disbelief as we made our way past the racks of goods for sale before having to back out when it became too narrow even for our small Fiat.



The original plan was to sail to Mykenos and all started out well, motoring into light winds; however once the sun set the winds picked up quite a bit and we had one heck of a bumpy ride. Pete and I were scheduled for the 3:00 am to 6:00 watch so I tried to get some sleep while being jostled around in my bunk. At one point the boat tacked and the motion quieted down, once I got up for watch I found out the reason; we had made a course change during the night since everyone on board, except Dan, Em and myself were seasick.



About 4:30 am we entered the bay at the island of Amorgos and slowly made our way to a suitable anchorage with Em on lookout from the bow with the boats spotlight. Since during the worst of it, the dorade vent started leaking water onto my bunk, I convinced Dan that I was certainly due a ration of grog, and then him and I finished up the last of the whisky while enjoying the tranquility of the bay.