Our first full cruise day started with a quite unique experience – a visit to the Blue Eye: a multi-sensory lounge located beneath the water line on their smaller, Explorer class, ships. It is quite lovely all blue light and visually exquisite designed to follow the lines of a whale. We saw a few fish swim by. It has a bar which is opened in the evening.
But we were there to go ashore and visit the monastery and apocalypse cave. Patmos Island, an island of quiet and tranquility, is where St John the Evangelist was banished during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian. And it was here that he is said to have received the visions of the Apocalypse which later became the Book of Revelation; we visited the cave where he was supposed to have had his visions and where he, or someone, wrote them down.
The monastery and cave are high on a hill but we were fortunate to have a bus to take us most of the way up from the port to the fortress-like Monastery of St. John, built in the C11th. Absolutely stunning with its iconography and frescos squeezed into a tiny space. Today only 15 monks reside in the monastery. We then traipsed down the hill a little ways to have a look at the cave, the Apocalypse cave, where St John wrote. Quite inspiring.
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| The museum at the monastery held many precious items |
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| Mysterious windows and doorways |
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| Heading down to the Apocalypse cave |
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| The first and last pages of the Books of Revelations |
Tonight we dined as the sun was sliding into sea as we set sail for Rhodes. Later we sat under a green sky with coffee and liqueur. Loving being at sea! As the sun slips slowly behind the mountains of Patmos …… what a day
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| The dancers on board put on a fabulous show |
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