Monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa

Where it sits. The monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa is built into a vertical cliff on the south-eastern coast of Amorgos, about 300 metres above the sea and roughly two kilometres below the island's Chora. Seen from a boat it is a thin white line pasted onto grey-brown rock; seen from the path above it is a building that appears to have been poured into a fissure. The structure is eight storeys tall, some forty metres long and barely five metres deep at its widest point, because that is all the ledge allows. The rear wall of every room is the mountain itself. Nothing else on the coast interrupts the cliff for kilometres in either direction, which is what makes the sight so abrupt.

The story behind it. Tradition dates the foundation to 1017 and credits the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos with rebuilding and endowing it in 1088 — the same year he chartered the monastery of Saint John on Patmos — which makes it one of the oldest continuously inhabited monastic houses in Greece. The name comes from Chozeva, a monastic district in the Judaean desert near Jericho, and the founding legend has the icon of the Virgin arriving by sea unaided from Palestine, saving itself from iconoclast destruction, with a carpenter's adze and a nail found embedded in the rock marking the spot where building was to begin. The community was small then and is small now: a handful of monks maintain it, and the monastery has never held more than a few at a time.

The climb and the etiquette. A car park sits on the road below; from there a stone stairway of roughly 300 steps zigzags up the cliff, taking fifteen to twenty-five minutes depending on fitness and heat. There is no shade whatever on the way up. The dress code is enforced at the door — long trousers for men, skirts below the knee and covered shoulders for women, with wrap-around skirts lent to visitors at the entrance, and men in shorts are also handed one. Inside, the visit is a single narrow route: a ladder-steep internal staircase, a series of low vaulted rooms, the treasury with vestments and manuscripts, and at the top the church itself, dark, lamp-lit, with the silver-cased icon of the Virgin. By long custom the monks offer arrivals a glass of psimeni raki, a spoon of loukoumi and a cup of water in a small reception room with a window looking straight down to the sea. Photography is not allowed inside.

On screen. The monastery is one of the defining images of The Big Blue, Luc Besson's 1988 film of the freediving rivalry between Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari, most of which was shot on Amorgos. The white building on the cliff, and the chapel and rock platforms at Agia Anna on the shore directly below it, gave the film its Greek visual identity and sent a generation of French and Italian visitors to an island that had previously seen almost none. The monastery is a functioning religious house, not a set: it keeps its own hours, closes to visitors in the early afternoon, and shuts entirely on the major feasts when the community is at prayer. The feast of the Dormition on 21 November draws islanders from every village.

What you see from the ledge. The terrace outside the entrance is the point of the climb. The Aegean sits 300 metres below with nothing between, and on clear days the horizon carries Astypalaia to the east and the Lesser Cyclades to the west. The light is best in the morning, when the sun is over the water and the cliff face is lit; by afternoon the whole wall is in its own shadow and the building loses its definition. Immediately below, reached by a separate path from a second car park, Agia Anna is a set of stepped rocks and a tiny whitewashed chapel where islanders swim in deep, cold, extremely clear water. There is no sand and no facility of any kind, so bring water for both stops.

Getting there and timing. The monastery lies on the road between Chora and Aegiali, about four kilometres from Katapola port and two from the Chora; the island bus stops at the car park several times a day in season, and the walk down from the Chora on a marked path takes twenty minutes, uphill on the return. Opening is generally in the morning and again for a short spell in the late afternoon, but the hours change with the season and the size of the community, so check locally rather than relying on a printed schedule. April to June and September to October are the best months — bearable heat on the stairway, clear air and a full ferry timetable. In winter the road is quiet and the monastery still receives visitors, but access depends entirely on the weather crossing the exposed south-east coast.