Monastery of Agios Ioannis in Chora

The Monastery of Saint John the Theologian is an Orthodox monastery founded in 1088 in Patmos. In 1999 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. It was built on the spot where it is believed by both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church that the apostle John wrote the Gospel and the Apocalypse, near the cave where he had the visions of the Apocalypse.
In 1088, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos granted the island of Patmos to the monk Christodoulos. The largest part of the monastery was completed by Christodoulos three years later, who fortified its exterior due to threats from pirates and the Seljuk Turks, on a hill higher than the cave of the Apocalypse right on the ancient altar of the Goddess Artemis.
The walled Monastery in question was built in the form of a medieval castle with ramparts and retaining walls with a catholicon in its center, small, but brilliant in art as well as other surrounding buildings and cells as well as tanks. In addition to monks, secular people with their families began to settle around the Monastery, erecting houses and having the Monastery, which was already fortified in a castle, as an asylum in case of a pirate attack. Thus the Monastery was connected to the history and development of the island.