According to mythology, Patmos island was a present from Zeus to his daughter Artemis, goddess of hunting and young women. She was worshipped here in antiquity, and the monastery of St. John was built on her temple.
The island has probably been inhabited since prehistoric times, and it went through the same changes as the rest of the Dodecannese. It paid tribute to Athens in the 5th century BC, belonged to the Macedonians in the 4th century BC, and was taken by the Romans in the 2nd century BC.
The Romans used Patmos island as a place for exiles, and that's how St. John ended up here. He was ostracized from Miletus by the Roman governor for preaching the Christian faith in AD95, and stayed here for two years. The island was practically deserted during Byzantine years and was given to a monk named Christodoulos in 1088, and he started planning the monastery.
In the 11th century the work on the monastery started, and its power was to extend over the island's borders, to such a degree that the island was never occupied by neither Turks nor Venetians. The only attacks came from pirates now and again.
In 1912 the island was invaded by Italian forces, and liberated in 1948.
The first settlers on Patmos island were the Carians, followed by the Ionians.
Ruined 4th - century BC walls bear witness to the existence of a fortified town at the Kastelli site.
Preliminary excavations have revealed that Artemis and Apollo were worshipped there.
The temple of the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, is believed to have stood on the site where the great Monastery of Patmos island was later built in the 11th century.
The temple of the god of music, Apollo, was near the port of Skala.
In the first century BC, Patmos island, a dependency of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, boasted a large population and a remarkable civilization.
Ancient temples, a gymnasium, games, and an association of lampadists (torch - racers) indicate its economic well being and high level of culture.
In 1981 the Greek Parliament passed a special law designating Patmos island as a Sacred Island.
It is part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which organised glorious celebrations in 1988 to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the founding of the Monastery of St. John, and in 1995 to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the writing of the holy Book of Apocalypse.
The most important page in the island's history began to be written in AD 95, when St. John the Evangelist was turned out of Ephesus and exiled to Patmos island.
During his stay on the island he wrote the divinely inspired Book of the Revelation.
From that moment on, Patmos island has been revered as a holy place by all of Christendom.
In the 1088 the scholar monk St. Christodoulos Latrenus pettioned the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who granted him the whole island, where he founded a Monastery in honour of St. John.
This Monastery became the original cell, around which the island's whole social and economic fabric grew and flourished in the years that followed.
In the nine consecutive centuries that the Monastery has remained in use, its times of prosperity and decline have swept the rest of the island along with them.
There were periods of intense intellectual and economic development in the 16th and 18th centuries.