The Virgin Mary of the Akathist Hymn Church

This guide to the Virgin Mary of the Akathist Hymn Church in Santorini starts behind its blue dome, with a building barely sixty years old, built after the ground itself gave way. For over a century the real church of Panagia stood inside Oia's Venetian castle, until the ninth of July nineteen fifty-six, when a magnitude seven point seven earthquake, the strongest to hit Greece that century, destroyed it along with more than a third of the island's houses. Construction of its replacement ran until nineteen sixty-five, thick whitewashed masonry raised on a square where the rock underneath actually holds.