Descendants of the Sun | Panagia Skopiotissa — A Watchtower They Called a Camp

The church on Mount Skopos is a small stone box on a 496-metre ridge. The rest of the monastery is wall and rubble. From the east rock you can see Zakynthos Town, Laganas Bay, the Vasilikos peninsula, and, on a clear day, the Peloponnese. A watchtower first. A ruin second.

Descendants of the Sun dressed this ridge as an emergency camp in Uruk. The 15th-century katholikon stood in for a building that had survived a war the island never fought. The crew shot here in the same Zakynthos window as Navagio, autumn 2015. Pilgrims now walk the four-kilometre path up from Argassi, or drive as far as the track allows and finish on foot through sage and limestone.

The monastery was rebuilt in the 1720s on older fabric, itself said to sit on a temple to Artemis. Earthquakes have taken the cells. The church remains. There is no ticket booth on the summit. There is wind.

Stand on the eastern rock after the last walker has gone down. The island arranges itself in layers of bay and ridge. That is the ordinary fact the drama used: a broken holy place high enough to look like a command post and quiet enough to let two people speak without a city answering.

Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons