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Panayia Ekatontapyliani Review

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Panayia Ekatontapyliani

Address: 750 ft east of dock, Paros Town
Phone: 22840/21243

Hundred Doors Church

Category: Religious Sites
Location: Paros

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Fodor's Review:

The splendid square above the port, to the northwest, was built to celebrate the church's 1,700th anniversary. From there you will see a white gate, the front of the former monastic quarters that surround the magnificent Panayia Ekatontapyliani (Hundred Doors Church), the earliest remaining Byzantine church in Greece. According to legend, 99 doors have been found in the church and the 100th will be discovered only after Constantinople is Greek again. Inside, the subdued light mixes with the dun, reddish, and green tufa (porous volcanic rock). The columns are classical and their capitals Byzantine. At the corners of the dome are two fading Byzantine frescoes depicting six-winged seraphim. The 6th-century iconostasis (with ornate later additions) is divided into five frames by marble columns. One panel contains the 14th-century icon of the Virgin, with a silver covering from 1777. The Virgin is carried in procession on the church's crowded feast day, August 15, the Dormition. The adjacent Baptistery, nearly unique in Greece, also built from the 4th to the 6th century, has a marble font and bits of mosaic floor.

In 326, St. Helen—the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great—took a ship for the Holy Land to find the True Cross. Stopping on Paros, she had a vision of success and vowed to build a church there. She founded it but died before it was built. Her son built the church in 328 as a wooden-roof basilica. Two centuries later Justinian the Great, who ruled the Byzantine Empire in 527-65, had it splendidly rebuilt with a dome. He appointed Isidorus, one of the two architects of Constantinople's famed Ayia Sophia, to design it; Isidorus decided to send an apprentice, Ignatius, to Paros. Folk legends say that, upon its completion, Isidorus arrived in Paros for an inspection and discovered the dome to be so magnificent that, consumed by jealousy, he pushed the young apprentice off the roof. Ignatius grasped his master's foot as he fell, and the two tumbled to their death together. Two folk sculptures near the toilets at the sanctuary's baroque left portal portray them as two fat men, one pulling his beard with remorse and the other holding his cracked head. The church museum, at right, contains post-Byzantine icons.

Cost: EUR 1.50
Open: Daily 8 AM-10 PM

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