July 20 size isn’t everything!

 A breakfast nook beside the miniature Church of Hagia Dynami (Holy Power). This unassuming dinky wee church has an impressive history. Although it is said to have been built in the C16th, some parts of the church are believed to have been built in the C11th. Layer upon layer of history. Going yet deeper in time, inscriptions found on the grounds suggest the little church was built on the site of an ancient temple dedicated to Heracles, the Greek demigod famous for his strength. Power indeed.

At some stage, not sure when, a 15m tunnel was discovered under the church connecting it to a large cave system that some say reaches to the Acropolis and further to the Kaisariani Monastery. 

A quirky bit of history not dissimilar to that of the Parthenon which was used by the Turks as a gunpowder store in the C17th, during the War of Independence in the early 1800s, Greek munitions experts were forced to make bullets for the Turks in the church. But the clever Greeks managed to also make large numbers of them for the Greek revolutionaries, smuggling them out through the garbage nightly.

The church bell sits outside beside the church

So tiny yet so beautiful

Today the church sits quietly under the huge Electra Metropolis hotel; there’s a whole story in that which I won’t go into.  It remains a humble, holy and quite special little church, a living testament to resistance. Holy Power indeed - ‘might’ does not always win out!  You’ve just got to love Athens!

Still indulging out need for food with a kick and lots of flavour, we dined at a Korean restaurant, Dosirak.