Ossios Loukás, Holy Luke

As we drove from Delfi toward Athens, we saw signs pointing toward a monastery, Ossios Loukás (Holy Luke), a few miles off the highway. It was a nice drive through little villages scattered on a nice hilly countryside, and Ossios Loukás was beautiful. By hindsight, it was one of the nicest sights of its type we saw in all of Greece. We don’t know just how old the building is, but this monastery was founded by a hermit, Luke the Styriot, who died in 953. The monastery was occupied by someone in the 1200’s, damaged by earthquakes in the 1500’s and 1600’s, damaged in the war in 1943, and finally restored in the 1960’s. And what a nice job they did.

While the outside looks rather neat and new, the inside and its contents, are very old, mostly from the 1000’s. There’s a skeleton in a casket, lighted with candles. The sign said women in trousers cannot enter, but we were about the only people there, Emmy wore slacks, and no one complained.

The monasteries and churches of the Greek Orthodox Church have a distinctive architecture. Built of brick, layers of stonework, with horizontal lines of different color brick, are laid in established patterns. The domes are distinctive, and the radius, or curve, are all similar, but the shape of the dome is different from the style and shape of domes on churches in other countries.