Day Five - Patmos

Happy Father's Day to all fathers, including my own! By today, many of us are realizing that the constant movement of the pilgrimage makes it hard to remember what day of the week it is. It took a while for us to remember that today is Sunday, as well as Father's Day in the US (although some of our Australian friends told us that Father's Day is not celebrated until September in their country). Today began with probably the earliest departure of the trip - breakfast was at 6:00 so that we could be ready to disembark the ship at 6:45 am for Patmost. We are going to two ports today, so the first port had to be early.

Patmos is a beautiful island on the far east of the Aegean Sea, near Turkey. It is most well known for us Christians as the place where St. John the Theologian wrote the Book of Revelation while exiled here. Today is a gorgeous day - like our other days in the Aegean - blue skies, a nice breeze off the water, but already this morning starting to get warm. We met our bus driver and tour guide, a native of Patmos, at the harbor and went first to the Grotto of the Apocalypse. Ancient tradition says that this cave is the very place where St. John received the vision from Christ and dictated the Book of Revelation to his assistant, Prochorus. Several chapels have been built around the cave, but we eventually made it to the cave itself. Since this is Sunday, a Greek Orthodox Mass was being celebrated in the cave when we arrived. Orthodox Masses include constant chanting throughout the service, so it was quite moving to have the chanting accompany our visit to the grotto. Because it is a small room, there are large numbers of pilgrims, and Mass was being celebrated, we had to move through fairly quickly, walking without stopping through the grotto. There was a definite air of sacredness throughout the visit - it seemed that no one from any of the many pilgrim groups spoke as we descended the 45 stairs to the grotto or while in the grotto itself. We later found out that the grotto has special significance to our tour guide because his daughter was baptized there. I think we have all agreed the great blessing of having native tour guides, and we have had very good ones.

After visiting the Grotto of the Apocalypse, we journeyed by bus higher on the main mountain of Patmos to visit the Monastery of St. John. More steps awaited us after leaving the bus before reaching the monastery courtyard. Founded in 1088, the monastery is still active and has 17 monks today. Most of the buildings date from the 11th century, and the icons and frescoes of the chapels date from teh 12th-18th centuries. Our guide led us through the monastery chapels and then the museum, which contains some of the oldest and most important Greek icons still in existance. In addition, we were able to see pages from a 5th century manuscript of the Gospel according to Mark. The pages of this manuscript are scattered in museums all over the world - from the Vatican to the British Museum - but more pages are here on Patmost than anywhere else. It is one of the oldest existing manuscripts of any portion of the New Testament. Following our tour of the museum, we had a little time to look in the shops that line the walk from the monastery back to the bus, and then we proceeded back to the harbor and the cruise ship. We just finished lunch and now are sailing along the coast of Turkey to reach Kusadasi, the port town for the ancient city of Ephesus. From there, we will have a guided tour to the House of the Virgin Mary and the ruins of Ephesus. From this point of the pilgrimage on, we will be following more precisely in the footsteps of St. Paul, beginning in the city he lived in for two years and to which he addressed one of his letters.