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Patmos

The first settlers on Patmos were the Carians, followed by the Ionians. Ruined 4th. - century B.C. walls bear witness to the existence of a fortified town at the Kastelli site.
Preliminary excavations have revealed that Artemis and Apollo were worshipped there.

The temple of the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, is believed to have stood on the site where the great Monastery of Patmos was later built in the 11th century.

The temple of the God of music, Apollo, was near the port of Skala. In the first century B.C., Patmos, a dependency of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, boasted a large population and a remarkable civilization. Ancient temples, a gymnasium, games, and an association of lampadists (torch - racers) indicate its economic well being and high level of culture.

In 1981 the Greek Parliament passed a special law designating Patmos as a Sacred Island. It is part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which organised glorious celebrations in 1988 to commemorate the 900th. anniversary of the founding of the Monastery of St. John, and in 1995 to commemorate the 1900th. anniversary of the writing of the holy Book of Apocalypse.

The most important page in the island's history began to be written in 95 AD, when St. John the Evangelist was turned out of Ephesus and exiled to Patmos. During his stay on the island he wrote the divinely inspired Book of the Revelation.

"I .. was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the world of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ......" From that moment on, Patmos has been referred to as a holy place by all of Christendom.

In the 1088 the scholar monk St. Christodoulos Latrenus pettioned the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who granted him the whole island, where he founded a Monastery in honour of St. John.

This Monastery became the original cell, around which the island's whole social and economic fabric grew and flourished in the years that followed. In the nine consecutive centuries that the Monastery has remained in use, its times of prosperity and decline have swept the rest of the island along with them.

There were periods of intense intellectual and economic development in the 16th and 18th centuries.

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