Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/275

Rh I distinguished Samos, Fourmi, Nicaria, Naxos, Mykonos, Tenos (hardly visible), Levitha, Stampalia, Cos, Calymnos, Leros, Lepso.

Half-way down the hill is the Monastery of the Apocalypse, where St. John is supposed to have written the Revelations. Here is a natural cavern, in which a church has been built in two compartments. In one of these is a rent in the rock, where, according to the local tradition, the earthquake split it while St. John was praying. The voice which he heard in his vision is said to have issued from this rent. I was also shown the hole in the rock whence he hung during his prayer. At the east end was a rude picture representing the scene described at the beginning of the Revelations, with the printed text of the first chapter pasted at the side to explain the picture.

The monastery of Patmos was founded in the 11th century by a holy man named Christodulos, from Nicæa, in Bithynia.

The golden bull of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus, by which the island of Patmos is granted to Christodulos, is still preserved in the monastery, and bears date A.D. 1080.

It would appear from the legend of the saint, that he founded his monastery on the site of a temple of Artemis, whose statue he took care to destroy on his arrival. From an interesting but mutilated inscription at Patmos, published by Ross, we learn that this deity was the Scythian or Tauric Artemis. In the original bull, granted by Alexius Comnenus, no women were allowed to reside on the island; but Q