Monastery of St. John the Evangelist (Patmos)

The monastery was founded in 1088 by the Monk Christodoulos , who arrived in Patmos from the island of Kos . Permission for the construction of the monastery was obtained from the Byzantine emperor Alexei I Komnin , who on April 11, 1088 issued a golden bullion to Christodoulos, who transferred the island of Patmos to the ownership of the monastery, exempted from all taxes and denied access to the island to any government officials ^[1] . Thanks to this, Patmos, according to F. Chalandon , became a small religious, almost independent republic, where only monks could live.

The site with the construction of the monastery was chosen a hill with the ruins of the temple of Artemis . One of the blocks of her temple was used as a throne for the monastery catholicon in the name of the apostle John, decorated with frescoes (the earliest dated to the XII century ). Christodoulos became the first abbot of the monastery he founded and began its construction, which lasted 19 years. The monastery was built as a fortress with bastions and towers. Over the years, a small village with pastures has formed around it, which laid the foundation for the city of Chora . The monastery was regularly subjected to pirate raids. Christodoulus left him and returned to Kos, where he died around 1111. Despite this, the monastery continued to exist, later the relics of Christodoulos, stored in the chapel of his name, were transferred to it. During its dawn, the monastery had possessions outside Patmos - in Crete , Kos , Naxos , in Smyrna , on Zakynthos . In the XIII century, the island of Patmos came under the rule of the Nicene Empire , but the emperors Theodore II Laskaris and Michael VIII Paleolog confirmed all the property rights of the monastery to Patmos (he painted Michael VIII in the monastery library ^[2] ).

After 1453, Patmos, like other Greek islands, fell under the control of the Turks and paid tribute to the Turkish Sultan. During this period, the monastery continued to operate. In 1647, the monks visited Russia and presented to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich “a marvelous and wonderful stone with the image of the Virgin , which fell out of the hands of an angel at a time when the Evangelist John was writing his Gospel .” This relic, along with a particle of the relics of St. Lazarus, was placed in the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin . In the years 1770 - 1774, the island of Patmos was occupied by the Russian fleet under the leadership of Admirals Alexei and Fedor Orlov. The dagger of one of them is kept in the monastery museum.

Currently, about 40 monks live in the monastery, worship is performed once a day from 3 to 6 in the morning.

Near the monastery there is a cave, revered as the place where the apostle John the Theologian received his " Revelation ", recorded by his disciple Prokhor, about 67 years old . A number of traces on its walls are associated with the apostle's presence in it: a hollow where he laid his head, Prokhor wrote behind a stone lectern , etc. In the cave there is a church with two chapels : one is the cave of the Revelation, and the second is a spacious chapel in the name of the saint Anne . The cave, like the monastery, is included in the list of World Heritage sites.

The monastery library has an extensive collection of manuscript and early printed books. The first of them appeared in the monastery under the abbess Christodoulos. In the inventory of the library of the beginning of the XII century, 330 manuscripts were listed (of which 267 on parchment and 63 on paper). The library was actively replenished: already in the 1335 inventory , in addition to theological works, books on history and philosophy (works by Xenophon , Sophocles , Diodorus of Sicily , Plato , etc.) are indicated. The earliest manuscripts in this inventory date back to the 5th century . In the middle, a more complete catalog was compiled by John Sakkelion , who indicated many works that until then were completely unknown to historians or were considered lost ^{[3] [4]} .

The library is currently one of the largest Christian libraries. It stores more than a thousand manuscript books (194 of them belong to the Byzantine period), 11 incunabula , about 1,200 printed books of the XVI-XVIII centuries and several thousand modern ones. The monastery’s archive contains unique documents on its history, starting from Khrisovul Alexei Komnin, who laid the foundation for the monastery.

• Myths and were Patmos

• Kirlezhev A. 900th anniversary of the monastery of St. John the Theologian on the island of Patmos // Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. - 1989. - No. 8 . - S. 53-54 .
• Ionina N.A. Orthodox shrines . - M .: OLMA Media Group, 2002 .-- S. 240-243. - ISBN 5948497429 .
• Menshikov A.V. Monastery of St. Apostle John the Theologian on Patmos Island, its library and archive // Bulletin of the Archivist. - 2008. - No. 4 .