The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Greece
12 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Greece are Parthenon, Hilandar and Hozoviotissa monastery. The list covers 12 sacred places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Greece holds two great sacred traditions in one landscape. Classical Athens built temples of marble refined to the limit of proportion, and Byzantine Christianity later sent monks to the most inaccessible places it could find: sea cliffs, sandstone pillars and the slopes of the Holy Mountain, where monasteries cling to rock in search of silence.
The Parthenon, built on the Acropolis in the 5th century BC and dedicated to Athena, is the defining temple of the classical world. On Amorgos, the white Panagia Hozoviotissa Monastery is wedged into a sheer cliff high above the Aegean. Simonopetra on Mount Athos rises several storeys straight from a rock spur, its balconies hanging over the sea. Hosios Loukas in Boeotia preserves some of the finest 11th-century mosaics in Greece, and Varlaam, founded in the 16th century, sits on top of one of the sandstone pillars of Meteora.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Parthenon | Ruins | ✓ |
| 2 | Hilandar | Monastery | |
| 3 | Hozoviotissa monastery | Monastery | |
| 4 | Daphni Monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 5 | Nea Moni of Chios | Monastery | ✓ |
| 6 | Simonopetra Monastery | Monastery | |
| 7 | Iviron Monastery | Monastery | |
| 8 | Great Lavra | Monastery | |
| 9 | Monastery of Saint John the Theologian | Monastery | ✓ |
| 10 | Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae | Ruins | ✓ |
| 11 | Hosios Loukas | Monastery | ✓ |
| 12 | Varlaam monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
01 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay Whatever the explanation, the speed of construction is not in dispute: the temple went up in about fifteen years, from 447 to 432 BCE, under the architects Ictinus and Callicrates with the sculptor Phidias overseeing the decorative program, during the same burst of Athenian building under Pericles that reshaped the whole Acropolis.
Did you know? The name comes from the Greek parthenos, maiden, a reference to the virgin goddess Athena.
02 Hilandar
Greece40.340° N 24.121° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The story begins with a royal abdication. Stefan Nemanja, Grand Prince of Serbia, gave up his throne in 1196, became the monk Simeon and joined his youngest son Rastko, who had already fled to Athos and taken the name Sava. In 1198 the Byzantine emperor Alexios III granted them the ruins of an older Greek monastery, laid waste by pirates, to be rebuilt as a house for Serbian monks.
Did you know? A fire on the night of 3–4 March 2004 destroyed more than half of the walled complex, but the main church survived.
03 Hozoviotissa monastery
Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας
Greece36.835° N 25.910° E
Apenauta at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain Its name is a traveller's name. It derives from Hozeva, or Koziva, the old toponym of the gorge now known as Wadi Qelt in Palestine, where the Orthodox monastery of Saint George of Choziba stands. Local tradition holds that during the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm an icon of the Virgin came ashore by sea in the bay of Agia Anna, just below the cliff, and that the first monastery was raised here in the 9th century to shelter it.
Did you know? Since 2007 icons, vestments, carved wooden crosses and liturgical silver have been shown in vaulted rooms of the sacristy beside the entrance.
04 Daphni Monastery
Μονή Δαφνίου
Greece · 9 km from Piraeus38.013° N 23.636° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sp!ros · CC BY-SA 4.0 A first monastery was founded here in the late 6th century, but the church visitors see today dates from the late 11th century, a period of renewed prosperity. After the Fourth Crusade, Frankish lords handed Daphni to Cistercian monks, who added a Gothic cloister and pointed arches to the facade; the monastery became a favoured burial place for crusader knights. The Cistercians left in 1458, soon after the Ottoman conquest.
05 Nea Moni of Chios
Νέα Μονή Χίου
Greece · 7 km from Chios38.374° N 26.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
RomkeHoekstra · CC BY-SA 4.0 Imperial privileges made the monastery rich. By around 1300 its estates covered a third of the island and hundreds of monks belonged to it, and it kept considerable autonomy under the Genoese and Ottomans. The disaster came in April 1822, during the Greek War of Independence, when Ottoman forces sacked Chios: some 2,000 people sheltered in the monastery, the troops stormed it, killed many of them and set fire to the church.
06 Simonopetra Monastery
Ιερά Μονή Σίμωνος Πέτρας
Greece40.190° N 24.247° E
Original uploader was Michalis Famelis at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Tradition holds that the monastery was founded in the thirteenth century by the hermit Simon the Athonite, who saw a vision of the Mother of God on the rock on the night of the Nativity and named the place New Bethlehem; the monastery is still dedicated to the Nativity of Christ. In 1364 the Serbian ruler Jovan Uglješa paid for a major renewal, and later princes, including Michael the Brave of Wallachia, helped after disasters.
Did you know? In 1368 the Serbian despot Jovan Uglješa issued a chrysobull, a golden-sealed charter, in the monastery's favour.
07 Iviron Monastery
Greece40.246° N 24.285° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The monastery was founded between 980 and 983 by two Georgians, John the Iberian and John Tornike, a nobleman and former general who had given up military life for the cloister. Generously endowed by Georgian kings, it became a centre of scholarship where monks such as Euthymius and George the Hagiorite rendered Greek theology into Georgian.
Did you know? Local tradition holds that the Portaitissa icon arrived by sea and that the monk Gabriel walked across the water to retrieve it.
08 Great Lavra
Greece40.171° N 24.383° E
Dimboukas at en.wikipedia · Public domain That founder was the monk Athanasius, later venerated as Athanasius the Athonite, a friend of the general who became Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas. The emperor paid for the first buildings and had promised to retire here as a monk, a plan cut short by his murder in 969; his successor John Tzimiskes doubled the imperial grant. Work began with the defensive wall and moved on to the church and the cells.
Did you know? The frescoes of the main church were painted in 1535 by Theophanes the Cretan.
09 Monastery of Saint John the Theologian
Μονή του Αγίου Ιωάννου του Θεολόγου
Greece37.309° N 26.548° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Valeria Casali · CC BY-SA 3.0 The monastery is dedicated to John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, who according to the text received his visions while living on the island. Pilgrims have been coming for more than nine hundred years, and the monastery remains a working community of monks where Orthodox services of great age are still celebrated.
10 Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae
Ναός Επικούριου Απόλλωνα
Greece37.430° N 21.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean Housen · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple was raised by the people of nearby Phigalia in the second half of the 5th century BC and dedicated to Apollo Epikourios, Apollo the Helper. The traveller Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, tied the title to the god's help against a plague during the Peloponnesian War and named the architect as Iktinos, the designer of the Parthenon.
Did you know? Its marble interior frieze of Amazons and Centaurs has been in the British Museum since 1815.
11 Hosios Loukas
Μονή Οσίου Λουκά Βοιωτίας
Greece38.395° N 22.746° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Panosmyr · CC BY-SA 4.0 Two churches sit side by side. The smaller Church of the Theotokos, probably built in the 960s, is the oldest surviving cross-in-square church in mainland Greece, its walls a patterned mix of stone, brick and marble with decorative pseudo-Kufic motifs.
Did you know? Pilgrims sometimes stayed up to six days by the saint's tomb, hoping that lamp oil, moisture from the tomb or healing dreams would cure them.
12 Varlaam monastery
Μονή Βαρλαάμ
Greece39.725° N 21.630° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by MichelleCoppiens from Pixabay The main church was completed in the 1540s, and its interior is the reason Varlaam is a highlight of any visit to Meteora. In 1548 the painter Frangos Katelanos of Thebes, one of the leading masters of post-Byzantine art, covered it with frescoes, including a vast Last Judgement; the narthex was painted in 1566 by two brothers, also from Thebes. The colour and detail have survived remarkably well.
Did you know? A smaller chapel in the complex is dedicated to the Three Hierarchs: Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful sacred places in Greece?
- On our list, Parthenon ranks first, followed by Hilandar and Hozoviotissa monastery.
- Who was the Parthenon dedicated to?
- To Athena Parthenos, the patron goddess of Athens. It was built between 447 and 432 BC under Pericles, with the sculptor Phidias overseeing its decoration.
- Why are the Meteora monasteries built on rock pillars?
- Hermits sought the isolation of the pillars from around the 11th century, and monasteries followed in the 14th–16th centuries as refuges in unsettled times. Monks and supplies were long hauled up by ropes, nets and ladders.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Greece?
- The list covers 12 sacred places.