Church of St. Demetrios of Karyda

On Patmos, in the Dodecanese, the Church of St. Demetrios of Karyda carries the island's Byzantine heritage into the present. Dating to around 1001, it rose in a landscape already steeped in early Christian significance, close to the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse. Its stones stand as a protected building in Greece, and the ground beneath and around it holds layers of archaic, classical, Hellenistic, late antique, medieval Byzantine, and modern life. To visit is to meet a thousand years of continuous devotion in one small, enduring sanctuary.