Hozoviotissa monastery
Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας
Interesting facts
- The monastery library holds about a hundred manuscript codices, written between the 10th and the 18th centuries.
- Its most precious manuscript is an 11th-century Gospel book decorated with six illuminated miniatures.
- Every Easter the miraculous icon of the Virgin is carried in procession through the villages of Amorgos.
- Among its treasures is a 15th-century icon of the Virgin attributed to the Cretan school of painting.
- Since 2007 icons, vestments, carved wooden crosses and liturgical silver have been shown in vaulted rooms of the sacristy beside the entrance.
- The sacristy exhibition was created under the supervision of the archaeologist Lila Marangou.
- The 1975 rockfall also cracked the outer walls and brought down part of the roof parapet, and the refectory roof was rebuilt in reinforced concrete.
- The monastery belongs to the Metropolis of Thira, Amorgos and the Islands, the Orthodox diocese seated on Santorini.
Why it is worth it
A white wall pressed into a sheer cliff, some 300 metres above the Aegean, the monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa looks less built than wedged into the rock of Amorgos. Seen from the sea or from the path below, it is a single long whitewashed facade, around 40 metres in length and nowhere more than about 5 metres deep, with the mountain rising straight up behind it and dropping straight down in front.
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. The documented history begins in 1088, when the emperor Alexios I Komnenos issued a golden bull granting the monastery stauropegic status, placing it directly under the Patriarch; a silver liturgical fan kept in the monastery records that he also renewed the building.
Inside, the narrow structure is stacked over eight levels, linked by stairways that are partly built and partly cut into the living rock. Pointed and Byzantine arches of porous stone brought from Milos carry the floors. Packed into this sliver of space are monks' cells, a refectory, kitchens, storerooms, wine presses, cisterns and wells. The church itself is a single barrel-vaulted chamber holding two inscribed icons of the Virgin and, by tradition, the iron chisel of the master builder. The doorway sits about 10 metres above the ground and was once reached only by a hanging ladder. On New Year's Day 1975 a rockfall from the cliff above smashed through the refectory roof, and two boulders punched down through several floors, one of them reaching the ground level.
Amorgos is the easternmost of the Cyclades, a long, mountainous island with fewer than two thousand inhabitants, whose rugged coast featured in Luc Besson's 1988 film The Big Blue. The Virgin of Hozoviotissa is the island's patron, and her feast is kept on 20 and 21 November.
Getting there
The monastery stands on the south coast of Amorgos, below and to the north-east of Chora, the island's main village, and is reached on foot by a long flight of steps from the road. Amorgos has no airport and is reached only by sea; ferries call at the ports of Katapola and Aigiali. The nearest airport is Santorini (JTR), about 62 km away across the sea.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Panagia Hozoviotissa Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery on the island of Amorgos. It is built on the steep south coast of the island, at an altitude of 300 meters.
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